I just wondered how we made these sorts of things when everything on Earth works together and naturally decomposes.
In: 6571
Quick and sweet, “polymerization”.
That’s like using purified chemicals mixed with purified plastics, in an extremely controlled temperature and pressure chamber that produces the desired results. Not possible without modern science. Read: “a new process”.
Counter question: how do we burn so much fossil fuel, make nuclear power plants, have animal farming on a world scale like never seen before, and *not* think the planet would get fucked?
Edit, just reread your question.
No, not everything just “works together” and “decomposes” or whatever, especially man made things that were not able to be produced even 100 years ago. That shit sticks around, because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. Even many natural materials don’t do that, they are remnants from supernovae from millions of years ago and just sit there waiting for someone to scoop them up. Like if you threw a (man made) gold ring somewhere, nothing would happen to it for millions of years unless someone found it.
Imagine if you were the factory owner of a water bottle company, and all of a sudden, a pallet just sort of started leaking. That’d be bad. That’s why: use hard plastics for the bottles, that specifically *will not decompose*.
I’m not saying I’m for it, just saying why.
Because if you’re designing a new plastic thing, you’re more worried about being blamed for it breaking earlier than expected than you are about it lasting longer than you need it to. In the first case, the blame can come back to you personally, in the second case you’ll share the blame with every other person who ever made a plastic thing that didn’t degrade.
The plastics used to make products don’t exist in nature, and were designed to have special properties. Those plastics are lighter weight and easier to manufacture items out of than natural materials.
The earth made trees… which for thousands of years didn’t fully break down as the organisms to break them down didn’t evolve yet. Plastics is just one evolution higher, and there are even discovered bacteria that do consume it.
During the Carboniferous Period, plants with real wood and bark first appeared. Nothing on the planet at the time could digest them (lignin and suberin) at the time, so they didn’t rot. Huge amounts were buried and formed coal beds. Much of the rest burned in continent-wide wildfires. It took the appearance of fungi to change the process. So this is not the first time an indigestible organic material has showed up.
The assumption that because something is natural, it must be good and in balance is where things break down. I would argue that is a common misconception in layman environmentalism.
Nature is full of things that come about naturally whilst being devastating for both humans and the eco system.
Volcanic lakes can suddenly release huge amounts of CO2, suffocating (as in lethally) the fauna (incl. humans) in whole areas, as happened at Lake Nyos. Oil deposits can have natural leaks contaminating areas without any human intervention. There are (presumably rare) [naturally occurring nuclear reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DA_fossil_natural_nuclear_fission%2Cdaughter_nuclides_of%29_fission_products) in unusually highly concentrated uranium deposits. There are even naturally occurring coal fires. [Mount Wingen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain), for example, has burned for an estimated 6000 years. (A coal plant would at least have had filters in the chimneys.)
Or for a more controversial example, there are [naturally occurring molds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin) infesting crops and releasing carcinogenic toxins into our food. Which is a source of debate with regards to artificial pesticides, as you might imagine.
If anything the thing that sets humans apart is our ability to find something we like and scale it up as much as we can. That has a way of throwing off the balance of anything, organic or not, given the efficacy of human determination. đŸ˜…
This in no way should make you feel less urgency about climate change or humans impact on the environment. It should however highlight the problems with associating “natural” with “balanced” or “good for nature”.
Same way a bad chef can make something completely inedible out of food.
The incorrect application of chemistry and heat.
It’s technically not bad for the planet and everything decomposes. It’s just not on the timeline that’s human/life friendly. When we say it’s bad for earth what we really mean is it will be harmful to humans and our current way of life.
Oh it will decompose. In millions of years. The next race will be astounded at the amount of oil from plastic they find in our previous landfills.
Because we did things to natural compounds that nature didn’t do to natural compounds, so nature isn’t equipped to deal with it.
First: You have to understand that not everything **IS** biodegradable. Metal and stone are not. OR they are, but the process can take millions of years.
Second, things are only biodegradable if something else exists that can degrade it. After trees first evolved, they did not rot because no fungi had evolved to eat wood. So they just piled up. That is where coal comes from.
Even though things like oil and coal came from living things, the heat and pressure of being trapped underground for millions of years have converted the chemicals in them into other chemicals, that nothing has yet evolved to digest. Then, we modify that oil and coal even further to make stuff out of
Some bacteria are starting to evolve to digest plastic, but… They can’t keep up. We are taking oil that took millions of years to develop and using it up in just over a hundred years (maybe a couple hundred, if we don’t kill ourselves first). Almost no natural process could keep up with that, even if it already existed.
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