We all know plastics aren’t biodegradable and that’s bad, so why can’t we just use chemical science to break them down ourselves?

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We all know plastics aren’t biodegradable and that’s bad, so why can’t we just use chemical science to break them down ourselves?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

We can, Renewone is breaking down plastics into liquid fuel; diesel, kerosene, and natural gas.

http://renewone.co/

Anonymous 0 Comments

Or incorporate them into other stuff, but it again comes down to cost a lot of the time. Now you have extra steps to make the same product that hopefully but may not be just as good.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hey OP, you might find this interesting… tress are made of a type of plastic… they polluted the entire planet and caused massive global cooling that destroyed massive amounts of life.

After a while a bacteria evolved that could actually eat the bioplastic called lignin and then the issue was resolved.

The same thing is true for our plastics, as soon as we develop a bacteria that can eat the plastic we should solve the problem then, so long as the bacteria produces waste that can balance off against carbon in the air

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are fungi that are adapting to eat plastics. Oyster mushrooms from the grocery store are ok at it. Not very efficient. Other kinds are better in lab conditions with certain plastic types.

There are also machines that “melt” the plastics down to its base form to reuse as fuel. A new-er technology and therefore crazy expensive, but they’ve been popping up in Japanese shipyards, so people can trade their plastic for boat fuel.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What are plastics made out of?

Anonymous 0 Comments

We can, literally this study just came out this week: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z

Anonymous 0 Comments

1. There are actually biodegradable plastics, they’re just less cheap and available, because other plastics are made from byproducts from fossil fuel processing. There’s a lot of THAT, so we have to do SOMETHING with it. It isn’t useful for much *except* plastic, which is why plastic is so cheap to produce. So as we scale back on fossil fuel consumption, you will see a natural shift to biodegradable plastics like PLA, as the waste material from corn starch will eventually become cheaper than the plastics from fossil fuels.

2. We can and we’re working on it, but to do so in a way that concerts all of the chemicals into stable and safe forms to have in the atmosphere in concentration is the problem. It always breaks down into *something* and we don’t want that something to be noxious fumes, or to poison the water supply. So whether we’re using chemicals or microorganisms to break it down, we will need to make sure it’s done in a safe way. Plus, consider the extra stuff that’s hidden away in the plastic goods. Like the little batteries in a child’s watch, or foil on the inside of a package. How will those things interact with the breakdown process? What would happen if the chemical or microorganism were to leak from the plastic eating zone, does that hurt the local environment too?

Lots of things to consider. It’s by no means an easy problem to solve, which is why there are so many smart people working and thinking on it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Instead of breaking plastics down into an inertbiodegradable form. Some people are trying to reuse the materials.

Plastic construction bricks (not Legos)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kenya-environment-recycling/kenyan-recycles-plastic-waste-into-bricks-stronger-than-concrete-idUSKBN2A211N

Plastic recycled into clothing
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56404803

Plastic into paper
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/printable-paper-from-plastic-waste/

Now, I have no idea how these secondary products impact the environment (either in production or as waste) but it *is* an alternative to burn or bury.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because we don’t have laws in place that make manufacturers think about the whole product lifecycle from resource extraction to end of use. Force a plastic company to create a plastic and the chemical that breaks it back down for reuse and we might see a whole shift it materials sciences.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We can turn just about anything into just about anything else, given enough time and energy. The problem is that those things cost a lot of money.

Pretty much all of our environmental problems are not caused by a lack of good alternatives, they are happening because all of the other options are more expensive. Whenever you can push the costs off onto “someone else,” there is no incentive to do things like make sure the waste from the products you produce or consume doesn’t stick around in the environment doing damage for thousands of years.

This is why you absolutely _need_ good regulations. If you don’t have them, then anyone who makes or sells anything will find a way to do it such that they get the maximum possible profit, and everyone else bears the maximum costs. To give a simple example, if you have some gold on your property, the cheapest way to extract it is to grind up the gold ore, mix it with water and cyanide, and then filter out the liquid and sprinkle zinc dust on it to make the gold precipitate out. What do you do with all the leftover cyanide? Well, you don’t want to dump it on your own property, so the cheapest thing to do is dump it on your neighbor’s property, or in the closest river. Obviously that’s bad for everyone else, but if you have no conscience and nobody stops you from doing it, it’s the most economical way. Of course, that’s only true because you are ignoring the _externalized cost_ – the cost someone else pays (your neighbor, or whoever else needs that river water, or future generations).

This is the problem for all environmental issues – people who make money off of some product or service find ways to push as many costs as possible onto other people. The less organized and weaker those people are, the better this works. If the local oil refinery dumps chemicals onto the ground in a poor neighborhood, how hard is it going to be for the people living there to stop them, or to be compensated for the damage? If the people show up and start dumping their trash on the oil refinery’s property, how likely are they to get away with it? Those power imbalances create situations where it becomes extremely easy for companies to externalize costs and spread them out to everyone else, while making billions for themselves.

CO2 in the atmosphere is another great example. The oil industry makes hundreds of billion of dollars per year in profits, but they can only do that because the hundreds of _trillions_ of dollars that dealing with the effects of climate change will cost are going to be paid by everyone else. If they had to pay that cost to produce gasoline or coal (for example), they’d never do it.

With plastics, we don’t really know the long-term externalized costs. We know that the plastic doesn’t ever disappear, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. We know those particles are everywhere now – in you, in unborn babies, in all the food we eat, in our water, even in the air. We have no idea what kind of harm that is going to cause, or how to deal with it.

The plastics industry became very wealthy selling these products, and we enjoyed using them, and it all seemed like a great idea because _someone else_ is going to pay the true costs.

We could replace just about all of these plastics with biodegradable ones. It might cost twice as much, so now that $1 toy you bought at the dollar store would cost $2. Would it be worth it? I think it would be. But if you put a regular person in the store and show them two of the same item, one costs $1 and one costs $2, most people will go for the cheaper one. Maybe if you educate them and teach them how bad those non-biodegradable plastics are, some people would go for the more expensive option, but in general the cheaper one wins.

An easy way to fix it is to tax single-use and non-biodegradable plastics. Make them cost as much or more than the biodegradable options, and suddenly those externalized costs are put back on the producer and the consumer, and they’ll make the environmentally responsible choice out of their own self-interest.