• LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Nooo fuck this is stupid!

    Plastic in landfills is sequestered carbon! Why release it into the atmosphere?

    Breeding bacteria to eat plastic will make plastic less useful as a material. Plastic is awesome because it DOESN’T rot. If we do release plastic eating microorganisms that might change. Whatever environmentalist think, we use plastics for a reason.

    What we need is:

    1. Create plastics without oil and from sustainable energy
    2. Recycle plastics (invent better plastics and recycling processes)
    3. Stop throwing plastic in the oceans
    4. bury plastic in landfill to sequester carbon

    What exactly is solved by introducing plastic eating microorganisms into the ecosystem? If microplastics don’t deteriorate, they’ll eventually become like sand and all the other shit. I swear to God this is the stupidest thing since solar fricking roadways.

    PS: If you absolutely don’t want to recycle or bury plastic you can also burn it in the right circumstances. Instead of feeding it to mushrooms and releasing CO2 and methane into the air you get heat and can capture the CO2.

    PPS: Microplastics is a qustion of regulation. And garbage dumping into rivers (like most of the plastic in the oceans comes from a few rivers) is a problem of economic idiocy. Neoliberal Ideology is produced in the US and exported into developing countries. Loans and shit demand privatization of all sorts of services. Including garbage removal. The result? People dump trash in the rivers because muh socialism is bad. Plastic in the ocean is a problem with very simple non-technical solutions.

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      Would be great if mushrooms don’t burn the carbon and turned it into some other compound using energy(maybe something like fossil fuels)

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I did see something about new methods through chemical processes to turn more plastics back into the feedstock. Search “plastic feedstock” or “circular feedstock” or something. It probably requires some chemicals and heat and pressure or something, but that could be powered by solar or wind. It’s just a question of economics (money), investments, and most likely planning.

        But really, burning plastic isn’t “nice” but fundamentally there isn’t a big difference between some mineral rock buried below the earth or plastic. And with carbon sequestration it’s a net positive - at least once we stop using fossil fuels and switch to a circular economy.