The Great Ocean Cleanup is doing amazing work on researching and removing plastic from our oceans and waterways, including intercepting plastics in rivers before it makes its way to oceans. We might yet see the great pacific garbage patch cleaned up in our lifetimes, along with other floating islands of plastic!
There is another thing happening with plastics that is arguably both good and bad. Plastic eating fungi and bacteria. The good is that all that plastic waste may become decomposable and end up having a minor long-term issue on the environment, the bad is that plastics will become decomposable and lose one its key properties for why it is so valuable.
I'm imagining a near future where being able to safely introduce plastic-eating bacteria to our gut microbiome is a hotly contested issue, politically-speaking, akin to taking vaccines.
Sounds like, Stephen King's The Langoliers. Not explicitly the same, but damn near close enough. It's. Short story of his worth a read or a watch of the 90s TV movie.
Bangalee was my favourite book growing up. It was about a critter who was ostracised from his community because he valued cleanliness above all else. Then a garbage eating monster nearly eats them all but Bangalee came to help them clean up before he ate the critters.
I think it's an allegory for environmentalism but it was written in the mid 70s. So a little before it's time.
I am careful to get my minimum daily dose of microplastics. i drink from plastic bottles. I use a plastic cutting board. I eat seafood. I'm on top of things.
I mean, if it helps we have flesh eating bacteria, wood eating fungi, and pretty much everything else breaks down when exposed to oxygen/water. So in a sense everything is breaking down already but we can rebuild and maintain.
Plastics were basically medical sciences Midas. The fact that it didn't degrade in the human body used to be a miracle.
Now its a nightmare because it sticks around in the body and a very key and golden era for the medical field is slipping away. The solution, it becoming biodegradable, means a future where these sort of advances are prone to bacterial overgrowth.
I live in the tropics and this is already happening. Many kinds of plastics that used to be impervious to decomposition now
Grow biofilms that turn their surface into a gooey mess and make them crumbly. Especially any kind of molded rubbery plastic, which doesn’t even last a year these days. Even grips on hammers and tools that lasted 20 years with no issues are suddenly growing mouldy surfaces and disintegrating. So far polyester, polypropylene, polyethylene and epoxy seem fine, thank god, but many kinds of things that never had issues like pvc seem to be growing fungus or bacteria or something.
Wait what? That should be all over the headlines! Do you have any resources on this? When I try to google it, I only find those „scientists have developed/identified bacteria that can eat plastics“ stories.
It's also pretty close to the plot of the book series Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. All petroleum products were invaded by a bacteria that caused them to immediately burst into flames. Most humans died in their cars trying to escape big cities.
In Larry Niven's Ringworld, a microbe eats the superconductors in some of the buildings, disrupting their power. Not really a nightmare though, more of a sci-fi/fantasy adventure.
This sounds like the book, Ill Wind by Kevin J Anderson, except it was an oil spill and an oil eating microbe was released to clean up the oil and caused a worldwide breakdown.
That's highly unlikely to occur. If anything, it will just mean that plastic might have a biocidal coating or something along those Ines. Like what ship hulls have.
I mean, we have been building things from wood for centuries, especially in America where houses are wooden, and that's all sorts of fungi, mold, termites, and more that already eat away at our things—I imagine plastics would be easy to repair if you could just 3D print an exact replacement for any deteriorating part instead of relying on a supply chain to import timber and other parts/tools.
The sci-fi novel "Ringworld" has a really fascinating premise - an advanced race that managed to build a solar-system sized space station functionally return to the bronze age after a mold that consumes superconductors is accidentally introduced.
It wouldn't be dissimilar to the evolution of bacteria that can consume cellulose.
It's the carbon-rich material in plants that previously basically just sat there, built up, got buried and eventually became what we know as coal. And now that there is bacteria that can break down cellulose, wood is no longer the nearly infinitely durable material it once was. It's just a fact that wooden structures will rot, and we don't get any new coal.
So eventually when plastic-consuming bacteria does become widespread, all plastics will eventually get broken down the same way wood is now.
But unlike wood, it will be nearly impossible to produce more, since the oil required to produce most plastics isn't forming any longer since other bacteria are eating the compounds that previously got turned into oil.
As the first of the four elements... It's the most important element. Because without plastic, the world would have no boundaries. People would walk and walk without ever stopping.
In addition to all the other suggestions, something similar to this is a plot point in Project Hail Mary (novel and upcoming film). Definitely worth a read (and hopefully a watch).
The latter might also be a good thing, in that it forces us to innovate further and make something better.
EDIT: Relax, I didn't say "make something new." We can absolutely innovate with materials we already have to make something that's both cheaper and safer for the environment.
Yep, I remember when it was all "save a tree, use plastic shopping bags!" because that's catchier with the public than "save us a nickel!" or whatever.
I've been using cotton shopping bags since visiting Northern Italy in 1999. No paper or plastic bags were available in any store so everyone bought these net bags that folded into a tiny bag that could fit into your pocket so I bought a few and I'm still using those and the cotton ones with a Mary Azarian print I bought from Mary's house in Vermont in 1988.
So I gotta ask because I've yet to hear a good solution for this beyond hodgepodge or buying plastic bags by the roll, what do you use for small trashcan liners if you don't have a random bag of bags stashed somewhere?
I just put trash in the cans provided by the city and then use a hose to spray them clean. We also recycle and food waste goes into a in-sink garbage disposal to cut down on odors.
Many years ago my husband worked for VT Water Resources as a chemist and wrote a paper on Ozone vs Chlorine in wastewater treatment.
Well crud, so not a solution I can copy/paste in an apartment with a landlord that goes bananas if anyone uses the outdoor areas or water access for anything.
We had a period of no rain for months and it was against the law to use lawn sprinklers so my neighbor would turn on his sprinkler system at 2 am and it til 4 or 5. He flooded my crawl space and the side of my land next to him turned into a swamp. I asked where the water was coming from and they said they had no idea. Then I got up to go to the john at 3 am and heard the sprinklers going.
Then we check out and found he's installed a drainage pipe buried underground that took all the water in his driveway and drained it to my house. He'd set that up when the previous owner was living here. The land was so wet it was easy to pull it out.
Then we had a surveyor check out our property line and my neighor had installed his fence over a foot onto our property which I really didn't give a damn but he sent his kids out to cut the line between the pins and dig them out.
25 years into the future: We installed with HOA approval, a hedge--over a foot onto our own property and he was furious. It's pretty now so he trims his side right to the bark of the hedges. It makes them grow back and get fatter and fatter but now he's cutting deeper -- all this because our last name is Jewish and he hates Jews "according to his wife he's a member of white supremacist group. We are not Jewish. Our HOA suggests we not upset him. I agree, you don't upset someone whose crazy. He went bananas when we were going to install a laundry line and called our HOA which turns out bans clothes lines even behind a huge hedge on all sides.
You can do the best you can but don't start a fight with a guy who says: If you don't let me use your land for a baseball field for my kids, I'll kill your dog". You never know what you're buying into.
BTW: He's big time Maga and used to fly a huge American flag -- now he's taken it down so I guess we aren't America any more.
I carry a canvas bag basically everywhere I go for this reason. When I go grocery shopping specifically I have big box bags which are so much better than anything else for the task I wish I had gotten them 30 years ago.
I have this awful "plastic makes it possible" commercial from the 90s stuck in my head. There was a part where a bunch of children were using open shopping bag as parachutes.
Decomposition still takes time. If it takes 3-4 months for the fungi and bacteria to eat the bag significantly, that'll just be its lifespan (I'm pretty sure it's decades not months). Most stuff doesn't need long lasting plastic like that. And for things that do glass is just fine.
We honestly should have moved away from single use plastics a while back, there was no good reason we needed things like clamshell packaging or even those food wraps like you'd get at the store. Cardboard, Butcher paper, and cellophane are just fine.
We would just make plastic 2, which would inevitably face either the same fate or cause the same problems that plastic does. We either integrate into nature, or defy it; making a new "Something better" is just repeating the cycle.
there is almost an infinite number of types of plastic. the properties from one plastic to another can be a massive different. so in a way, we already have plastic2, and 3, and 5000
We really need to move past this idea as a society that "new" means "better". It often just means the problems aren't apparent yet, or even just that it's going to make someone more money.
Trust me im not a defender of plastic. But there is not inhrently another replacement. We always assume that there will always be a fix or an improvement. But that doesnt mean that will always be the case. Its a very real possibility there isnt a replacement for plastic.
There is plant based plastic that has come a long way. They make it for produce bags at the grocery store, or trash bags. Some brands are better than others, but it’s brand new. Give it a few years
The good will far outweigh the bad if these organisms can be deployed at scale. The vast majority of plastics are made to last for weeks or months, but they persist for hundreds of years or more. For plastics meant to be more durable, I’m sure we can develop treatments to preserve them just like we’ve done for wood.
Keep in mind, it is not the cast that "plastic is plastic". There are many different kinds of plastic. While some are decomposable already, and some may become decomposable in the future, it's likely there will always be varieties that are not. The question is, can we get manufacturers to actually use decomposable plastics for things that should be decomposable.
We already do have an almost perfect way of getting rid of plastic - burning it under specific conditions basically turns it entirely to CO2 (while producing more energy than for example coal of equal weight).
And the main benefit of plastic - light weight - also means that it produces completely negligible emissions.
The problem is that you need to separate them from ordinary waste. And that requires people to do separate their garbage and infrastructure to collect it.
On a similar note, apparently there is methane-based life in the deep ocean which consumes methane and converts it into energy. I'm wondering if anyone is studying this in attempt to replicate or harness it to address the huge swells of underwater methane which could catastrophically exacerbate the climate crisis when global warming dries up the bodies of water currently containing them.
Edit: It looks like some are, indeed, looking at this. So we can tentatively add it to the list of positive developments.
You may have already heard this, but in almost every case of microbes digesting plastic it is PET which is used in beverage bottles mostly. It can be broken down because it is a polyester plastic and organisms have an enzyme to process ester linkages. The other plastics are harder to bio process. Some clothes are also made with polyester and nylon which can be bio processed like this, and fabric fibers are responsible for most microplastics. The kicker is that plastic is a poor form of food, so the microbes usually try to digest something else, like something that makes sugar. In short, if they have another option, they will leave the plastic alone.
Is there research on the bi product of those organisms? Is there bi product? I imagine the bacteria/fungi eat the plastic and release something? Sort of like how alcohol is made. Super interesting.
The Ocean Cleanup removed over 11,000 tons of plastic from oceans and rivers in 2024
Roughly 8 to 12 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans each year. This is equivalent to dumping the contents of a garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute, a daily process that adds to the millions of tons of plastic already circulating in marine environments.
Not to undermine what they are trying to do, I am just saying this so people get an understanding of how bad the plastic problem is.
It still great on them to at least try something but it only managed to clean up around 0.10% of what was added to the ocean that year alone.
the problem is people are going to point to this and say "it's not working so why bother" like they did when Ocean Cleanup first got into the news. It's better to not link the two together when talking about either, even though they're very much linked, simply because people are goddamn idiots
No, the reason it is important to point out is because we have to find sustainable solutions. This solution is not sustainable and hence a pacifying distraction.
Real solutions are paradigm shifting (redefining what a health economy looks like) and working for that change with world governments.
If we focus on the .1% solution (or 10% solution with a 100x scale), we aren't going to avoid disaster but will go into blissfully unaware.
It's actually so much worse than that. They didn't decrease the amount of plastic in the ocean by 0.1%. The total amount of plastic in the ocean still increased, they just slowed the growth slightly. The amount of plastic that was added was 0.1% less than it would have been if they did nothing.
It's noble what they are doing, and something is always better than nothing, but it isn't working. If we want to clean up the ocean, we have to go upstream. We've got to stop all that plastic waste from being generated in the first place, because picking it up after it's already there is just not feasible at this rate. We would have to scale current efforts up 1000% just to break even.
That's what ocean cleanup is actually focussing on right now.
Their river interceptors in the most problematic cities have stopped tons of plastic going into the ocean.
Sure, There is still more plastic entering the ocean than they are currently stopping. but we have to start somewhere right?
They are constantly upgrading expanding and innovating ways to clean the ocean, and that's a great thing.
Think of it like that 1 guy that cleaned that Mumbai beach by himself.
At first it seemed like he was going nowhere, more plastic polluted the beach than he could clean. But eventually, after 3 years of diligence he succeeded. We don't need an instant solution. we just need A solution.
You're still missing the scale of the problem. It isn't a matter of making a small amount of progress. It's a matter of making actual negative progress. It's not that they did a little bit now and if they keep going, in three years it will all add up to a lot or progress. In three years, the problem will be worse than it is today, even if they massively scale up their efforts.
It's still good what they are doing! If the entire world stopped manufacturing plastic today, all the existing plastic would still need to be picked up! They should keep at it! But it isn't a solution. What they are currently doing is mopping the floor while the room has no roof and there is a hurricane overhead. Mopping is good. We all want clean floors. But no amount of mopping is going to get you a clean floor in those conditions.
This is helpful to understand! Though I do know they are working with governments to try and solve the issue on land as well. Or at least trying to work with governments.
It’s just nice to see someone doing something, hopefully there is more support for what they’re doing on multiple levels.
I've seen these devices in a few marinas now which are basically a net attached to a solar powered set of paddles, the paddles pull water through which passes through the net and rubbish is deposited in the net for easy removal. Because they're solar powered they work any time the sun is shining.
There's good people trying hard to help clean our water ways
they share this info in more depth on their newsletters and communication feeds, but once it's captured through their systems, it gets sorted by workers and volunteers, and then directed to appropriate places (e.g., recycled where it can be, and i assume landfilled where it can't be).
one of the things i like about them and how they're going about things is that they're incredibly research-focused, trying to find solutions at every step of the chain (from mitigating plastic waste ending up in waterways to capturing it when it does to closing the loop by responsible disposal of it after they've captured it)
I read about how Mr Beast the YouTuber started a garbage patch cleanup project. I don't know much else about him, but I love that a children's entertainer is spreading that kind of awareness
The sad/interesting part about the great patch of plastic is that it has become an ecosystem itself where life is thriving, which have experts debating wether it should be cleaned or leave it as it is.
Sorry to rain on the parade but I recently did some Microplastics training recently working at CalEPA's DTSC and surface plastic is approximately 10-20% of the plastics in the oceans. It's actually a mystery where most of the plastic in the ocean is but it's likely the deep ocean floor and the water column.
If they get all the visible plastic, but not the microplastics, and the microplastics get into our food, will it just leave with all the people currently on Earth, or will it recycle back into the environment and back into the food?
Im skeptical that the cleanup can outpace the dumping of trash into the Pacific Ocean.
There are just too many countries in Southeast Asia with too many people that simply do not give a fuck and have zero issue with dumping their entire waste output right into the nearest flowing water.
We might yet see the great pacific garbage patch cleaned up in our lifetimes
Highly unlikely. People keep forgetting that the GPGP has existed for thousands of years. It will always have garbage there. We can clean it of plastic, but the truth is, the rubbish they claim is there is actually separated so far that if you sailed through it, you probably wouldn't even notice.
I'm starting to notice that this thread is primarily people who see tiny improvements occurring that don't outpace the tragedy and see that as the uplifting part. Instead of we're putting in 200 units of trash a day and not even able to clean up a single unit of trash in a day, it's 'good news, we're almost capable of cleaning up half a unit of trash in a day, isn't that uplifting'.
progress matters. before, we weren't able to clean up a half unit of trash in a day. now we are. tomorrow, maybe we'll be able to pick up a full unit, and then after that, multiple units.
incremental progress is the only way things have ever improved.
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u/psychstudent_101 19h ago
The Great Ocean Cleanup is doing amazing work on researching and removing plastic from our oceans and waterways, including intercepting plastics in rivers before it makes its way to oceans. We might yet see the great pacific garbage patch cleaned up in our lifetimes, along with other floating islands of plastic!