Plastics recycling with microbes and worms is further away than we think (2018)

https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Plastics-recycling-microbes-worms-further/96/i25

by EL_Loco • 7 years ago

137 77 7 years ago

cen.acs.org

scythe• 7 years ago

Trash incineration with district heating is highly underrated. Not only does it save space and prevent methane emissions from landfills, it also lowers the urban cost of living. Unlike an enzyme, oxygen will destroy almost any kind of plastic.

https://stateofgreen.com/en/sectors/district-energy/district...

forgotmyhnacc• 7 years ago

Apologies if this is off topic, but I've never read such a well researched science article, citing many primary resources and papers. Well done.

pen2l• 7 years ago

One should hope so, if it’s on ACS website. And their journals are also pretty reputable and have pretty high impact factors. :)

carapace• 7 years ago

Two promising technologies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Heat and pressure turn plastic back into oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_oxidation

Oxidize plastic in a molten salt bath, exothermic reaction, produces synthesis gas. "... destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt."

konschubert• 7 years ago

Should we maybe not try to recycle plastics, but just try to contain them in landfills?

Our atmosphere is polluted with CO2, wouldn't recycling or incinerating plastics release even more of that?

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

Creating microbes for eating plastics seems like a recipe for a lot of goo....turning all our insulation, computer gear, and a billion other things in our homes into microbe food seems to me poorly thought out.

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Indeed. Imagine termites, but at a far bigger scale...

Don't forget all the very important medical applications of plastics where their inertness matters --- if organisms exist that can start eating away at those, and proliferate, it could cause even more damage to human life.

Retric4• 7 years ago

Wood lasts for hundreds of years in the right environments. Similarly most plastic is not in any real risk from this.

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Buried plastics may become the oil of future generations.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

The total energy buried and density of it isn't interesting compared to oil, coal, and probably even timber.

hutzlibu• 7 years ago

Hey childrens children: we left you a present, huge piles of plastic garbage, isn't that awesome?

wiz21c• 7 years ago

In the same vein : why not produce/use less plastics ?

JulianMorrison4• 7 years ago

The long term answer has to be, produce almost no plastic at all, except those cases where it's a genuine necessity such as medical uses.

TaylorAlexander• 7 years ago

Reducing consumption is the most impactful thing we aren’t doing.

fastball• 7 years ago

That is the plan.

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is the mantra, after all.

meruru3• 7 years ago

That's easy to suggest and hard do. How are you going to change the behavior of entire populations? We are already trying education.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

Our atmosphere is polluted with CO2

"Polluted" isn't the best word to describe it when CO2 levels are 2x historical (for a very long definition of history) levels. They're likely high enough to cause significant climate change, but "polluted" is a funny way of putting it.

recycling

If you look at where oil goes, most of it is energy and transportation, not plastics. We're also talking about recycling and not incinerating.

But I vote for incinerating for energy. Plastics are too incredible of a technology to not use, but at least now, too hard to feasibly recycle, so I'd rather we burn them and offset the emissions.

lostlogin4• 7 years ago

A key part of this has to be reduced usage. There is an awful lot of plastic made and used that isn’t necessary.

jimmaswell2• 7 years ago

Polluted is perfectly fine.

adjective

contaminated with harmful or poisonous substances.

The quantity of the substance is harmful.

JulianMorrison4• 7 years ago

The risk is microplastic, which can escape cheap containment several ways (wind, water, etc).

Yes, turning every planet-wide scrap of plastic into combustion byproducts would release a lot of CO2. It's likely it would pale in comparison to fuel though, since the most it can release is the oil embodied in the plastic, plus the energy used in reprocessing.

jdietrich• 7 years ago

We can burn the waste and capture the carbon. We don't need new technology, it's purely economic - capturing carbon is still relatively expensive and carbon emissions are underpriced.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b03283

leeoniya• 7 years ago

what about feeding cows seaweed?

https://foodtank.com/news/2017/06/seaweed-reduce-cow-methane...

telotortium• 7 years ago

Interesting in its own right, but has nothing to do with this article.

astazangasta• 7 years ago

As the article indicates, the problem is not necessarily technological but economic; trying to find a market-based solution to a notable market failure might be a sign of a pathology of our times.

zukzuk• 7 years ago

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take...

Great book on this very topic!

WalterBright5• 7 years ago

The solution to "internalizing the externalities", which is the economic jargon for such, is to tax it.

If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less, tax it. Governments are good at taxing things.

Taxing it aligns the economic incentives to produce the desired outcome, rather than banning it which leads to all sorts of distorted outcomes.

onemoresoop• 7 years ago

More and more countries are banning certain uses of plastics such as plastic bags and one time use plastics. Do you think that’s gonna have a distorted economic outcome? I think we could step out of the economic bubble sometimes and do things that are good for the environment - without which there would be no economic activity possible.

dmclamb• 7 years ago

This. How about a "plastics management" tax every company must pay based on the amount of plastic each of their products uses, including manufacturing, shipping, etc. That, or ship all plastic waste back to the company who made it to manage.

When I walk into a store these days, I can't help but think almost everything there will end up in a landfill or the bottom of the ocean.

the8472• 7 years ago

Note that the article only covers PET. Some polymers are much more difficult to decompose, e.g. PTFE.

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

But their mass is orders of magnitude less than PET. We just don't use that much teflon relatively speaking.

hammock• 7 years ago

PET is by far the most common plastic, and it's not the most dangerous (to humans or the environment).

a2tech• 7 years ago

Is it really? I've just assumed all along that it won't be during my life time (outside of small scale demonstrations and special plastics).

I think most recycling (outside of obviously simple wins like aluminum and steel cans) is a joke, designed to keep people busy and distracted while real polluters (like aluminum manufacturers who use gigantic amounts of electrical power mainly derived from coal plants and over the road truckers who are still fighting implementing 30 year old emissions standards) go about their business. We train children that recycling paper and yogurt boxes is going to save the planet when in reality consumer recycling is a drop in the bucket and amounts to basically nothing.

southerndrift• 7 years ago

What could possibly go wrong if those microbes inevitably get into the wild? This should recreate the situation with cellulose. At first, trees didn't decompose but nowadays, you have to prepare wood if you want to use it long-term.

Plastic is used because it doesn't decompose. What good would plastics be if they wouldn't be stable anymore?

Plastics recycling with microbes and worms is further away than we think (2018)

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