All atoms in the biosphere cycle regularly aside from some very longstanding ones.
If you identify the chemical makeup of the monomer (corroded plastic, micro plastic, whatever you want to call it), there’s nothing stopping you from hypothetically finding or creating enzymes which can digest it. The only reason it hasn’t happened naturally yet is due to a lack of evolutionary pressure to digest the weird compounds we’ve been making up until now.
Set up farms of modified mycelium or bacteria to scrub the plastics, and stop using many or set up required end of life treatment for plastic manufacturers, and you’ll very rapidly make a dent in plastic spread.
Further, modify wild biota, such as mushrooms, bacteria, etc to have the ability to produce the same enzymes for assisting in cleanup.
Big project, yes, but technically feasible. We’ve done more extreme things.
Nice yeah. Not surprising, different mushrooms have different capacities to digest plastics as well, since mushrooms just kind if have all sorts of crazy stuff going on to let them do that.
I’d just point out that these microorganisms will definitely escape into the wild at some point and then durabilty for plastics will be similar (maybe?) to that for wood (there was also a period in time when trees evolved when microorganisms had to catch up to degrade it, presumably it was full of wood everywhere that just wasn’t rotting).
Imagine a future where your PC screen or mobile phone has an expiry date and it’s not due to planned obsolescence. Maybe that’s not so bad after all, now that I think about it.
Honestly, my mind went first to the transport industry. Cars, busses, trucks, hell even trains and bikes (ebikes would have more plastic than the classic sort though). There’s plastic in everything. For things like wiring insulation, seats, circuit boards. Maintanance on big transport rigs is sometimes spotty as it is, would love to see what happens when there’s more things that can degrade them.
I honestly like the idea, but I wonder how many things that we take for granted because of plastic would go away?
I really dislike the fact that every single thing from the food isle comes packaged in at least one layer of plastic.
But I like that I can take a vinyl pressed 40 years ago and play it.
I agree with wood, it’s a very nice material, but indoors where you have a nice controlled environment or outdoors if treated. Coming to a hardware store near you - treated plastic?
In a practical sense there are lots of things here that run in the face of this. Plastics aren’t necessarily a good source of energy, for example, so whether plastivore bacteria could ever practically decay plastics in the way you’re imagining self sufficiently is dubious. The main purpose of the wild modifications is to provide a means to digest, but that comes at the cost of energy in the enzymes being produced to do that. We see an overall economic benefit, but it may mutate out rapidly if it’s not actually providing a singular benefit to the organism.
Plastic generally already corrodes outdoors very readily. That’s the primary source of micro plastic is that exact corrosion. Those that don’t would be equivalently hard to digest.
I mean sure, if you’re talking just manipulating some cell mechanisms to produce the enzymes required for digestion like we manipulate yeasts and e. coli to make drugs - the bugs don’t actually use those for anything and they’d lose the trait out in the wild or just keep it as a vestigial mechanism in limited populations.
But I was thinking more in a sense of what happened to lignin digestion. In the end, it’s still a source of carbon that can be used as a building block and the chemical bonds can be broken up for energy, so there’s no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they’re there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from ‘professional use’ to ‘personal use’ by the bugs.
Case in point - mushrooms eating fallen logs and strains of S. cerevisiae producing amylase. At some point it made ‘sense’ to just keep those and that gave them an evolutionary edge, so the trait remained. And now we have another pest on our hands - S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus, a pox on non-belgian breweries everywhere. And critters that eat improperly treated wood beams and cause unpleasantness in wood framed houses.
there’s no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they’re there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from ‘professional use’ to ‘personal use’ by the bugs.
I directly address this evolutionary pressure and why there are, in fact, reasons to think it won’t behave like lignin digestion in the very comment youre responding to friend.
Lignin digestion is at the end of the day just a random set of mutations that stuck because they were useful. If they weren’t useful, to an individual organisms survival, they likely wouldn’t stick around, as might be the case with plastic digestion, and would be different fur every single plastic.
The same exact method would be used for adding enzymes to their genome in yeasts as you mention or in various organisms for plastic digestion.
It’s a fair view that something forcefully introduced by us would be more of an appendix than a fully integrated digestion-feeding system, I’ll agree to that. I guess I’m being overly optimistic in my assessment regarding the integration of such a mutation in stable populations and the link from digestion to feeding.
Practically, we would try to predict this for each enzyme we introduce, and wed get it wrong sometimes and right other times, some plastics might prove to be very tasty others might not. But in general I’d lean towards most plastic probably not getting natural decomposers, personally, but maybe!
All atoms in the biosphere cycle regularly aside from some very longstanding ones.
If you identify the chemical makeup of the monomer (corroded plastic, micro plastic, whatever you want to call it), there’s nothing stopping you from hypothetically finding or creating enzymes which can digest it. The only reason it hasn’t happened naturally yet is due to a lack of evolutionary pressure to digest the weird compounds we’ve been making up until now.
Set up farms of modified mycelium or bacteria to scrub the plastics, and stop using many or set up required end of life treatment for plastic manufacturers, and you’ll very rapidly make a dent in plastic spread.
Further, modify wild biota, such as mushrooms, bacteria, etc to have the ability to produce the same enzymes for assisting in cleanup.
Big project, yes, but technically feasible. We’ve done more extreme things.
Thanks! So at least there is some hope.
I think there are some naturally evolved bacteria, that digest plastics. Pretty sure I’ve read an article mentioning something like that.
Here it is: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230123083443.htm
Nice yeah. Not surprising, different mushrooms have different capacities to digest plastics as well, since mushrooms just kind if have all sorts of crazy stuff going on to let them do that.
I’d just point out that these microorganisms will definitely escape into the wild at some point and then durabilty for plastics will be similar (maybe?) to that for wood (there was also a period in time when trees evolved when microorganisms had to catch up to degrade it, presumably it was full of wood everywhere that just wasn’t rotting).
Imagine a future where your PC screen or mobile phone has an expiry date and it’s not due to planned obsolescence. Maybe that’s not so bad after all, now that I think about it.
Well I recommended modification of wild biota anyway so yeah, that’s the idea.
I live in a 70 year old wood framed house with a 20 year old wooden desk, walk on 30 year old wooden floors, have 15 year old wooden doors…
Meanwhile I’d easily wager 80% or more of plastics have a dwell time once deployed of a few days.
In reality, without being in relatively harsh conditions, it’s unlikely for plastics to degrade very quickly even with highly effective digestion.
Honestly, my mind went first to the transport industry. Cars, busses, trucks, hell even trains and bikes (ebikes would have more plastic than the classic sort though). There’s plastic in everything. For things like wiring insulation, seats, circuit boards. Maintanance on big transport rigs is sometimes spotty as it is, would love to see what happens when there’s more things that can degrade them.
I honestly like the idea, but I wonder how many things that we take for granted because of plastic would go away?
I really dislike the fact that every single thing from the food isle comes packaged in at least one layer of plastic.
But I like that I can take a vinyl pressed 40 years ago and play it.
I agree with wood, it’s a very nice material, but indoors where you have a nice controlled environment or outdoors if treated. Coming to a hardware store near you - treated plastic?
In a practical sense there are lots of things here that run in the face of this. Plastics aren’t necessarily a good source of energy, for example, so whether plastivore bacteria could ever practically decay plastics in the way you’re imagining self sufficiently is dubious. The main purpose of the wild modifications is to provide a means to digest, but that comes at the cost of energy in the enzymes being produced to do that. We see an overall economic benefit, but it may mutate out rapidly if it’s not actually providing a singular benefit to the organism.
Plastic generally already corrodes outdoors very readily. That’s the primary source of micro plastic is that exact corrosion. Those that don’t would be equivalently hard to digest.
I mean sure, if you’re talking just manipulating some cell mechanisms to produce the enzymes required for digestion like we manipulate yeasts and e. coli to make drugs - the bugs don’t actually use those for anything and they’d lose the trait out in the wild or just keep it as a vestigial mechanism in limited populations.
But I was thinking more in a sense of what happened to lignin digestion. In the end, it’s still a source of carbon that can be used as a building block and the chemical bonds can be broken up for energy, so there’s no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they’re there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from ‘professional use’ to ‘personal use’ by the bugs.
Case in point - mushrooms eating fallen logs and strains of S. cerevisiae producing amylase. At some point it made ‘sense’ to just keep those and that gave them an evolutionary edge, so the trait remained. And now we have another pest on our hands - S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus, a pox on non-belgian breweries everywhere. And critters that eat improperly treated wood beams and cause unpleasantness in wood framed houses.
I directly address this evolutionary pressure and why there are, in fact, reasons to think it won’t behave like lignin digestion in the very comment youre responding to friend.
Lignin digestion is at the end of the day just a random set of mutations that stuck because they were useful. If they weren’t useful, to an individual organisms survival, they likely wouldn’t stick around, as might be the case with plastic digestion, and would be different fur every single plastic. The same exact method would be used for adding enzymes to their genome in yeasts as you mention or in various organisms for plastic digestion.
It’s a fair view that something forcefully introduced by us would be more of an appendix than a fully integrated digestion-feeding system, I’ll agree to that. I guess I’m being overly optimistic in my assessment regarding the integration of such a mutation in stable populations and the link from digestion to feeding.
Practically, we would try to predict this for each enzyme we introduce, and wed get it wrong sometimes and right other times, some plastics might prove to be very tasty others might not. But in general I’d lean towards most plastic probably not getting natural decomposers, personally, but maybe!