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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I think the best answer is that we are using chemistry and biology to find the solution, but “plastics” aren’t just one chemical and there are lots of things that go on with chemistry that make it difficult to target one set of compounds without also targeting similar but useful (often even necessary) similar chemicals. And, of course, that we like plastics so much for that reason that they don’t easily break down (it is a selling point for using them), so finding a way to cause them to destruct naturally is precisely the opposite of why we make them in the first place.
Some plastics are biodegradable, and some plastics can be targeted by biological modifications that create things that will biodegrade when they do not yet exist. It takes time, money, and work to find an answer to the problem of how to make something which will destroy this stuff out in the wild world that won’t also cause even bigger problems and/or destroy it where we don’t want it to happen.
There is no “Poof, look at the simple answer to this really complicated problem”. We wish, but it isn’t no matter how much we want.
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