Fungus breaks down ocean plastic

https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/fungus-breaks-down-ocean-plastic

by gmays • 2 years ago

273 227 2 years ago

dilawar• 2 years ago

Imagine bacteria and fungi breaking down all the plastic into CO2. Don't know which is lesser evil: plastic as it remaining in the environment or more CO2 but less plastic?

Ma8ee• 2 years ago

Compared to the amount of CO2 we add to the atmosphere continuously (still!), I’m quite sure that the CO2 from all the plastic in the ocean is insignificant.

edit: just to make sure that my guess wasn't too far off, I looked up some numbers: we relase about 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean every year. Burning 1 units of plastic produces 3 units of CO2, giving 24 million tons of CO2 if all that plastic were broken down by fungus (or incinerated). We release around 35 billion tons of CO2 every year from burning fossil fuel.

webprofusion• 2 years ago

So don't release it directly to the atmosphere, it has industrial uses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

swagasaurus-rex• 2 years ago

breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 per cent per day

At what rate does all the plastic in the world start to soften and crumble?

sage92• 2 years ago

```

total_plastic = 8.3e9 # total plastic in tons degradation_rate = 0.05 # degradation rate per day in percentage

# Calculation of daily degradation in tons daily_degradation = total_plastic * degradation_rate / 100

# Estimation of time taken to degrade all plastic in days total_days = total_plastic / daily_degradation

# Conversion of total days to years total_years = total_days / 365

# Print the result print(f"It would take approximately {total_years:.2f} years to degrade all the plastic.")

```

It would take approximately 5.48 years to degrade all the plastic.

akie• 2 years ago

That’s… wrong? The amount of plastic would decrease every day (assuming no new production), so 0.05% of that amount would not be a constant number. Your daily_degradation is incorrect.

lanternfish• 2 years ago

Review exponential functions.

tredigi2• 2 years ago

I hope you don't estimate the earnings from your investments that way.

But +1 on f-string use.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

PE is a very-long-chain saturated hydrocarbon, so it would not be surprising if this fungus will also be able to "burn" other petroleum products too.

Finding plastic-degrading organisms is urgent.

Is it?

gitaarik3• 2 years ago

Do you have any other genius ideas on how to deal with an exponentially growing waste product that doesn't seem to easily break down naturally and gets shredded into smaller pieces eventually ending up in the environment as micro particles and get into our food and bodies and affect our and our environment's health?

userbinator3• 2 years ago

and affect our and our environment's health?

Zero concrete evidence. Lots of vague handwaving and paranoia.

ImPostingOnHN2• 2 years ago

It seems like only a matter of time before this spreads uncontrollably, consuming all plastic in the world.

max-ibel2• 2 years ago

That would make a great sci-fi thriller, if it doesn't already exist:)

pfdietz6• 2 years ago

Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater

p1mrx• 2 years ago

That happens in The Andromeda Strain, but they don't really explore the implications.

Melatonic2• 2 years ago

This is what I'm afraid of - it's all great when the fungus is only in a landfill or the ocean but what happens if it gets inside my car ? Etc etc

ssijak• 2 years ago

Why dont they grow them st land fills

can16358p• 2 years ago

While it's a great discovery, I'm concerned that this will be abused by plastic manufacturers as an excuse to produce more plastics and talk about "how harmless" plastics are as "they break down organically by fungi" anyway.

MOARDONGZPLZ• 2 years ago

Do you get the sense that the plastic manufacturers are limiting production in any whatsoever now?

StimDeck• 2 years ago

Exactly. If anything, they have every plan to increase production already.

garbagewoman• 2 years ago

The demand is affected by consumer preferences. The manufacturers are behind recycling initiatives, so they understand that

Swizec2• 2 years ago

Do you get the sense that the plastic manufacturers are limiting production in any whatsoever now?

More and more stuff I buy, especially from higher end brands, comes packaged in purely cardboard packaging with no plastic. Not even tape or plastic bits to hold it together. They even brag about this in some of their marketing.

Paper is nice because you can put the packaging in either recycling or compost depending which bin has more space that week.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

I'm more concerned with whether it may start spreading beyond the ocean and causing pandemic-scale damage, although fortunately it seems slow. There is already dystopian sci-fi about similar themes.

bdamm• 2 years ago

Nanoplastic and microplastics are basically everywhere now. So there's no need to wait, your concern is already realized.

radarsat12• 2 years ago

As long as it's not an efficient process then you have a point. But, let's say some very efficient way to clean up and break down plastic was discovered. Then, wouldn't the manufacturers actually have a point? In that case it indeed would be harmless and we could enjoy the conveniences of it while being relatively certain we can then dispose of it safely. So you wouldn't call it an "abuse" in this case.

cess11• 2 years ago

So, like, how do you imagine fungi could turn the plastic back into oil and down into the crust? Is your line of inquiry possibly, actually worthwhile?

tredigi2• 2 years ago

Just because a fungus eventually breaks it down doesn't imply that it's "harmless". It can (and does) still accumulate in organisms and has many undesirable effects, including the human body. It can s easily end up in the food chain as long as it's not broken down, including areas where the fungus is not effective, which are plenty.

The only difference such a fungus can make is that it could break down in certain pockets in nature in the long run.

theK• 2 years ago

The article talks about how this one fungus found in the depths of the sea can break down PE (polyethylene) plastics. The biggest problem with combating ocean plastic is deployment of any solution. The seas are vast and trash, while a huge problem, is still relatively sparse within them.

It would be great to see if this fungus can be deployed on land at large enough scale to take care of, say, a whole regions PEs. That way we could get somewhere.

timeon2• 2 years ago

Green-washing is not about real scenario. It only needs the perceived story.

throwaway484766• 2 years ago

I'm more worried about the longterm. As organisms get better at breaking down plastic manufacturers will start putting nasty chemicals in plastics to prevent premature breakdown.

hinkley6• 2 years ago

And things that kill fungi tend to also kill us. Fungicides quite often cause liver damage.

therobots92712• 2 years ago

That’s why we need increased government oversight of corporate behavior in general. Fingers crossed this becomes politically feasible as younger generations enter a greater position of power. I have hope that these externalities can be solved as long as the root cause of unregulated money chasing is addressed.

poopcat• 2 years ago

Considering how plastic manufacturers turned recycling into the ultimate false hope, I agree with you. I try to be mindful about my plastic consumption but it is everywhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...

gooseyman• 2 years ago

Jervons Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

thesnide• 2 years ago

Life finds a way.

mlsu4• 2 years ago

Plastics are a store of energy. They could be used to sustain life, once evolution catches up. That's why I don't feel particularly bad about throwing plastic into the landfill. I'm taking an energy loan out against evolution; eventually, evolution will recoup it.

vlovich123• 2 years ago

No guarantee that the evolution that takes care of plastics results in a more livable world for humans though (not to mention plastics that we don’t want crumbling suddenly having issues)

selcuka• 2 years ago

What is so special about humans? I, for one, welcome our plastic eating overlords.

mlsu4• 2 years ago

Yes, certainly. The value of plastics is incalculable. (Personally, if there were a plastic-eating bacteria introduced tomorrow, I would be dead within the week, rather than dead within a month or two like most people).

I don't really feel bad about plastics, mostly I feel bad about the egregious stuff -- car tires, fishing gear -- stuff that does not end up in the landfill most of all, because it cannot be segregated from the environment.

n0n0n4t0r• 2 years ago

That's funny: do you know why there is petroleum at all? When plants evolved to have line, they where able to become trees.

Sadly, no bacteria was able to decompose linine. It took a looooot of time (I don't remember how much, but a whole lot). So trees wouldn't decompose when falling down, so they would grow on top of each other, burying the oldest one more and more. And the end, you have wood very deep, under a lot of pressure and I'm a hot environment: it created the petroleum.

So what you're expecting can take millions of year and it would be ironic if petroleum had to be twice in such a cycle.

ackfoobar• 2 years ago

I guess the speech-to-text failed. Do you mean "lignin"?

mlsu4• 2 years ago

Yes, indeed. It took a while, but not that long in the grand scheme. A few million years; plastic is more concentrated and more delicious, energy-wise.

I forgot to mention my theory, which is that we will be the ones who dig up the plastic to either recycle it or use it for its energy -- it will have been conveniently concentrated in landfills after all :)

Melatonic2• 2 years ago

Fungi always doing the hard work !

CHsurfer• 2 years ago

Is this process generating the microplastics? If so then maybe it’s not such a great way to post process our litter.

riffraff• 2 years ago

The article says carbon contained in the plastic is released so it seems it's a molecular level breakdown. It'd be like rust on an old nail, eating it's way from the outside.

localfirst• 2 years ago

i remember plastic bags would also disintegrate over long period of time

anukin• 2 years ago

I have heard these kind of news for a while now. Fungus breaks plastic. Worms eat plastic. Nothing ever seems to happen to plastic though. Why?

anon123987456• 2 years ago

Because then another question arises: what breaks down the fungus?

Edit:

This question is serious. If this fungus would eat all that plastic, this would introduce a huge amount of new life in the ocean with unknown effects to the ecosystem. We would replace one problem with another.

zoky• 2 years ago

Quis funguset ipsos funguses?

HenryBemis• 2 years ago

I had the EXACT same thought. If the fungi eats plastic, what eats the fungi? I find this a veri legitimate question.

I assume/hope that it doesn't turn/get converted to a plasticofungi that cannot be eaten by fish/etc. This would only reshape the pollution, not eliminate it.

I didn't find an answer to this in this specific article; I hope it will be covered somewhere else.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

Plastic-eating whatever evolves in environments of extremely high concentration of plastic and unavailability of anything else. As soon as anything else is available, the plastic-eating thing evolves back to eating something else.

If you had nothing to eat you'd also give plastic a try, and you could miraculously be the chosen one who can break down plastic, but you'd switch back to normal food as soon as possible.

wwilim• 2 years ago

That is oddly reassuring, otherwise I would be very worried about the fungus getting out of the sea and onto land

mattkrause2• 2 years ago

Many of the plastic-eating microbes require very specific conditions: finely shredded material, high temperatures (55C or more), carefully-controlled pH, etc.

These generally won’t occur outside of a bioreactor, so you’re not going to see them attacking random plastics in your house.

jcynix2• 2 years ago

OK, this fungus breaks down polyethylene, which might even find a second use as fuel in combined heat and power stations.

But a large part of microplastics found in aquatic environments is abraison from car tires. So we need more and different fungi ...

[sciencenews](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/car-tires-and-brake-pads...)

[theconversation](https://theconversation.com/how-your-car-sheds-microplastics...)

[springeropen](https://microplastics.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s43...)

hinkley6• 2 years ago

And polyester from clothing.

I don’t know what the fuck Patagonia thinks they’re doing switching to recycled polyester to make their clothing more environmental.

shoulderfake• 2 years ago

Its cheaper.

bombela• 2 years ago

Money. They are making money. That's what it is, and you know it.

teachrdan• 2 years ago

Am I missing something? If the polyester is recycled, then it was going to be disposed of -- and ultimately break down -- anyway.

Using recycled materials of any sort reduces the consumption of new materials. This is a net positive for the environment, absent any extremes in the use of recycled materials. (i.e. extreme energy consumption or harmful chemicals used in the recycling process)

Cotton is what most people think of as a natural fiber, and even its use can entail a high environmental cost.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-023-00476-z

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

Let’s say you have a fishing net that is end-of-life. It can be discarded, in which case it will break down over time into microplastics etc., in the ocean or a landfill.

Or it can be recycled, in which case most of the plastic in the net is fixed into a new physical object.

The second one seems better to me than the first one. Do you disagree? Or is your objection to the continued use of plastics in clothing at all?

bsza4• 2 years ago

... or stop using cars for personal transportation where other options are available.

7speter2• 2 years ago

Trains have brakes, too. And horses... well, I guess we can handle cholera these days.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

Not feasible outside the metro areas of only the biggest cities in the US. I can tell you're from one of those cities because you act as if most people have a choice. We don't.

raisedbyninjas• 2 years ago

The scale of tire tread that just gets washed down into waterways seems staggering. It's probably no more egregious than other pollution sources though.

Anyway, the napkin math is 20 million tons of tires manufactured per year. If 1% of that is lost as worn down tread (or sidewalls depending on the driver), then that is 200,000 tons of tire compound particles dispersed into the environment per year.

jmb99• 2 years ago

That… actually doesn’t seem as bad as I thought it would be. Obviously it’s not going to be evenly spread across the globe, but that’s about (napkin math) 350μg/m^2/year. Even over a century that’s barely a light dusting (to be fair, of toxic/carcinogenic/etc microplastics that are likely much more highly concentrated around major highways and population centres, and their waterways).

I always assumed it was orders of magnitude more than that. But that seems like an amount that, if it were to exist, some sort of bacteria/fungus/algae could actually probably handle.

lynguist2• 2 years ago

The car tires thing is proportionally an absurdly huge part!

In Switzerland, tire wear accounts for an estimated 90 percent of the microplastics released into the environment.

https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...

90% (!) of microplastics in Switzerland’s environment are from tire abrasion.

If we hypothetically radically banned cars, we would not only reduce landscape fragmentation, space requirements in public spaces, accidents and risks, damages to humans and animals, costs that are borne by the public, noise pollution and particulate matter air pollution, but also we would cut down microplastic emissions by 10:1!

jdthedisciple• 2 years ago

I have increasingly found myself thinking lately that perhaps it is fungi of anything in fact, that are able to provide the ultimate solutions to many of the World's biggest issues but even to treating certain diseases ...

lynguist2• 2 years ago

It’s not necessarily only good news.

The golden age of plastic that we live in allows for food packaging that cannot be penetrated by microorganisms, which in turn increases shelf life of some produce from like half a week to multiple weeks.

Once there are more such microorganisms in the next one hundred years we might have problems packaging our food.

And plastic is in essence a multi-step “life process” of crude oil: Instead of incinerating heating oil for our houses, plastic lives a first life as packaging, and then gets incinerated and provides heat over communal heating – ideally.

Of course, the problem is when it ends up in the water instead of being burned.

mibsl• 2 years ago

There is still glass (and silicone?).

xxs• 2 years ago

glass is a lot heavier and way more expensive (glass is made out of silicon).

There are a lot of different types of plastics the common ones use in packaging are LE-PE (light density polyethylene) and PP (polypropylene). They are both thermoplastic, they melt then heated. Silicone is also a form of plastic, it's thermoset (it chars effectively and it doesn't melt) - and it's awfully expensive. There are other plastic, e.g. nylon (PA6) that are still expensive but much cheaper than silicone.

mrob2• 2 years ago

Silicone rubber has high gas permeability. This makes it good for contact lenses, but bad for food packaging.

konschubert2• 2 years ago

the problem is when it ends up in the water instead of being burned

And that is entirely a question of waste management.

The plastic straw that the EU just outlawed would never have ended up in the ocean. Meanwhile, plastic gets dumped into rivers by the truckloads - outside the EU.

scrollaway2• 2 years ago

I swear the “plastic straw” argument is the absolute literal straw man argument.

The EU didn’t outlaw “plastic straws”, it outlawed a range of things, one of which is the plastic straw. But then why do plastic straws always come up? Because this is also in response to a video of a turtle in pain with a plastic straw up its nose (so yes it did end up in the ocean).

And creating less single use products is a step of waste management by the way. Now I’m not particularly in favour of paper straws, but bamboo straws have taken off as a replacement and that’s a rather good thing I would say.

But again this is only about straws because you made it about straws. The same applies to many other single use plastics.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

The plastic straw that the EU just outlawed would never have ended up in the ocean.

A significant amount of plastic straws and bottle caps actually did up at least in the rivers - a single look at how the Isar in Munich looks after a party summer night is enough evidence - and what enters the Isar, Danube or any other river will eventually end up in the ocean or get stuck in a major lake where it degrades, gets eaten by fish and then ends up in humans when we eat the fish.

Metal bottle caps can at least be fished out by magnets and recycled, but there's no way to capture plastic particles yet.

And that does not take into account all the plastics trash that gets shipped overseas to some piss poor Asian or African country, where it gets sorted, and all the refuse just gets dumped on some landfill where it eventually gets washed into the ocean by rainfall, or it gets incinerated where it creates absurdly toxic combustion products.

bell-cot3• 2 years ago

Unless your kitchen is flooded, plastic food packaging generally doesn't face the sort of warm, wet environments needed for most fungi and microorganisms to grow. (The sterilized and/or nutrient-deficient insides of food packaging doesn't count.)

Marine uses of plastic (fishing nets, ropes, swimwear, buoys, etc.) seem likely to be impacted first. Along with infrastructure (sump pumps, farm irrigation equipment, ...). Then general outdoor uses.

sva_2• 2 years ago

What if you live in a humid, warm, tropical environment?

jerf2• 2 years ago

You can see a real-world of this in a very common building material, "wood". There's entire sub-ecosystems dedicated to breaking this material down... yet you can safely use it to build structures that can stand for a long time, dozens or even hundreds of times longer than the breakdown time of the material in the wild, without the wood breaking down, as long as you maintain the structure, which mostly involves keeping the wood dry. These entire subecosystems for breaking down wood have fundamental chemical and energetic prerequisites in order to do their work, they are not just ambiently and actively roaming the Earth seeking out that which they may devour and actively creating the circumstances they can do it in.

So I'm not worried about bacteria learning how to break plastic down in the middle of the ocean getting released into the grocery store one day and in mere hours the entire store is spoiled and destroyed. It would really just become another engineering consideration for materials that already have a lot of such considerations.

kennethwolters• 2 years ago

IMO petroleum scattering around earth as CO2 damages earth less than petroleum scattering around earth as a petroleum-based solid. Both is bad tho - can't mix layers that are not meant to meet.

quonn2• 2 years ago

gets incinerated and provides heat over communal heating – ideally.

How is it ideal to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere even further?

bsza4• 2 years ago

So does any microorganism that can break down plastic, but without heating your home.

adwn• 2 years ago

Presumably OP meant that if plastics are incinerated anyway, it's better to get some additional use out of that.

zo12• 2 years ago

If it's a controlled incineration with the appropriate filters and capture mechanisms, I doubt it's that bad.

mrguyorama4• 2 years ago

Only 6% of the world's petrochemical usage is to make plastic. If we decarbonize everything else but merely burn every gram of plastic we produce, that's a win, both from a climate change perspective and from a plastic waste perspective.

Proper incineration is probably the most reliable, most effective way to deal with human waste.

Well made and managed landfills are also perfectly capable of dealing with human waste, but they are a long term project, and there's a lot of time for a dumb management or politician to decide you don't need to fund it as well and now a hundred years of hard work to protect the environment goes down the drain when your now improperly managed landfill is basically a superfund site.

There's less chance for one idiot to do long term damage with incineration.

Gravityloss• 2 years ago

We can then make the packaging out of nanodiamond film. Eat that, fungus!

100 years later the last organism on the planet dies, suffocating under nanodiamond film...

iamgopal• 2 years ago

aluminium is the best choice for packaging, for most food products.

pif• 2 years ago

I can't wait for the Australian border to patrol the oceans in order to block this new "microorganism that could pose a serious risk to their ecosystem and blah blah blah..."

slifin• 2 years ago

Feel like I hear this story a lot

Starting to think it's being over reported because it could be poorly interpted as an excuse to keep producing ocean plastic

karaterobot• 2 years ago

Do you also hear about legislation or community efforts related to reducing ocean plastic being halted as a result of this news? I have not.

ogou• 2 years ago

Chemotrophs (specifically chemolithotrophs) are bacteria that thrive near super heated deep sea vents. They can consume (oxidise) iron, sulfur, and a whole range of other elements and compounds we consider toxic or immutable. In return they produce a kind of sugar that tube worms consume. I hope that future plastic bio-mitigation research focusses on energy transformation and production like this. Instead of thinking of an impossible zero sum end result (destroy it), it's more future oriented to use plastic transformed into something new and consumable as an energy source.

Think like a tube worm to solve this problem.

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

exe342• 2 years ago

If it exists for more than 2 seconds, there's going to be a fungus that will eat it.

andy_ppp3• 2 years ago

Oh no, my headphones/camera/polyester clothes have caught Ocean Plastic Eating Fungus and are melting… seriously though is this a real concern?

0x1ceb00da• 2 years ago

George Carlin was right. The planet will integrate plastics into its ecosystem.

palijer• 2 years ago

There have been scientists with far more accreditation in this field than a comedian who've been researching this exact thing for decades.

pfdietz6• 2 years ago

Microplastic accumulation in the body makes me wonder if natural biopolymers could have the same problem. We cannot break down cellulose; what happens to micro-cellulose in the body? Or lignin, which is even more refractory to decomposition?

Do plant microfibers accumulate in the body over time, like plastic or asbestos fibers? Do we end up loaded with this stuff in old age?

One of the most lethal professions of old was baker, because of all the flour dust inhaled.

The breakdown of lignin by fungi shows the lengths organisms have to go to decompose refractory organic materials. A whole suite of enzymes and associated compounds are released into the extracellular environment by these fungi, including hydrogen peroxide, some of which is decomposed to highly oxidizing hydroxyl radicals. This also shows why it should not be surprising fungi are capable of attacking plastics, at least to some extent: they are already blasting biopolymers with a barrage of non-specific highly reactive oxidants.

therobots92712• 2 years ago

I wonder if there’s a type of fungus humans could eat that would break down unwanted fibers and microplastics?

pfdietz6• 2 years ago

I don't think I'd want my internals exposed to the stuff fungi have to excrete to break down the fibers. Fenton chemistry is used to clean lab glassware, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenton%27s_reagent

Review article on fungal degradation of lignin:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180040/

troyvit3• 2 years ago

Macrophages are cells that take care of stuff like eating splinters that you can't get out.

What if there was something we could eat that basically super-powered our macrophages to to it for us? They already eat the microplastics but they just sit inside them.[1] Digesting them might be poisonous I guess ...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

7speter2• 2 years ago

Do we really want broken down petroleum flowing through us and getting filtered by our kidneys and liver?

throwup238• 2 years ago

Microplastic accumulation in the body makes me wonder if natural biopolymers could have the same problem. We cannot break down cellulose; what happens to micro-cellulose in the body? Or lignin, which is even more refractory to decomposition?

We have a lot of defenses to make sure large molecules don't make it into the bloodstream so if those polymers start making it through, we'd have much bigger problems. Microplastics are a special case because they're very chemically inert, but they're still filtered out by the kidneys. Any cellulose or lignin would be too.

To be honest, after reading some of these microplastics papers I'm starting to suspect most of them are bullshit. Plastics are everywhere in a modern lab and rarely do these papers have proper controls, which I suspect would show that there is a baseline level of microplastic contamination in labs that is unavoidable. Petri dishes, pipettes, microplates, EVERYTHING is plastic, packaged in plastic, and cleaned using plastic tools, all by people wearing tons of synthetic fibers.

We went through this same nonsense when genetic sequencers first became available until people got it into their heads that DNA contamination was everywhere and that we had to be really careful with sample collection and statistical methods.

One of the most lethal professions of old was baker, because of all the flour dust inhaled.

Pretty much anything that is small enough to irritate the lungs will cause the same effect, especially at professional exposure levels (or worse, like silicosis). Pre-industrial agricultural workers and miners frequently suffered from pneumoconiosis from dust inhalation too, for example.

pfdietz6• 2 years ago

All good points. I was engaging in a reasoned form of whataboutism. "Neither is actually a problem" would be a resolution to the question.

techdragon• 2 years ago

Yeah, I’ve started to get a bit cautious about the quality control in these papers too… not because I doubt there’s a problem, but that I suspect it’s all too easy to ignore the quality control necessary to ensure lack of contamination when the researchers go in looking for a positive result… it’s a “cheap win” and I don’t like it…

I’d like to see some reproduction research on the more wild microplastics results akin to the level of diligence put in when Clair Cameron Patterson was developing Uranium Lead dating and discovered that due to lead added to petroleum based fuels the whole fucking planet was tainted with a level of background lead … he had to go a long way, basically building a clean room before such rooms were considered a normal part of precision research… to get a clean environment with no contamination and get accurate results.

It doesn’t have to be quite that bad for a modern researcher, but I’d like to see a lot more of these microplastics papers where they document that they used no or as close to no plastic at any point in sample handling… if a liquid sample has gone from a plastic sample jar and a plastic lid to a plastic pippet to a plastic ampoule with a plastic lid into a machine that agitated it and so on… well of course there’s a damn chance the sample has more plastic in it! I’m not even going to suggest that all the plastic came from the containers that would be stupid… but when I start seeing results like microplastic found in human testicular tissue… I want to know how careful they were with sample contamination because it’s important that we know how bad the problem is getting, is it “1000” or “1002” on whatever scale is being used may not seem like much when the error bars might be +/- 10… but it does matter when this result gets aggregated into meta analysis and other modern “re-processing” that helps us understand the world at the larger scale where studies of aggregate data are the only practical way to approach the problems.

NegativeLatency2• 2 years ago

Wood dust can cause fibrosis: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pulmonary-fib...

asdasdsddd• 2 years ago

that's breathing not eating

SubiculumCode• 2 years ago

Microplastic concentration is highest in the lungs, but can also be found in the blood. As far as I know, we do not know how long they persist in the lung, blood, or body more generally.

Given their ubiquity, and their endocrine disrupting properties, I highly suspect that the rise in autism prevalence may in part be attributed to the prenatal exposures to microplastics, during which timing and dose effects of androgens exposures have set-up long lasting programs of development.

Re bakers, I did not know about that. Very interesting.

pfdietz6• 2 years ago

Specifically, Victorian-era bakers.

philipov• 2 years ago

Do you think we could cool our overheating oceans by blocking the sun with a thick layer of fungus? Because this sounds like a plan for covering the oceans in a thick layer of fungus.

joshuamcginnis• 2 years ago

I've actually isolated and sequenced the subject fungus (Parengyodontium album) from terrestrial sources. If you'd like to check out the photos (and DNA), check out:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147456216

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/150149352

methuselah_in• 2 years ago

But what they will push out? Anything living eats whatever gives waste on which other depends as nutrition one way or other except human.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

One concern not mentioned would be the proliferation of the fungi if they are exposed to a new endlessly abundant source of food, and which then upsets the current ecosystem balance.

jrockway• 2 years ago

No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the fungus.

P_I_Staker• 2 years ago

If find the fungus on my feetzeez does NOT break down.

Fungus breaks down ocean plastic

Related Stories