6 comments

  • spockz 41 minutes ago
    Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
    • ch4s3 7 minutes ago
      Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.
    • piloto_ciego 31 minutes ago
      There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
  • mbil 15 minutes ago
    If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludge
  • ninalanyon 45 minutes ago
    There was a Doomwatch episode on his subject with airliners falling out of the sky bcause all the plastic had been eaten away.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomwatch#Series_One

  • waschl 46 minutes ago
    Is there any of this ”bacteria converting plastic to fuel/food/neutral stuff“ actually applied anywhere at scale under economically reasonably conditions?
  • hkt 8 minutes ago
    Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
  • itsrobreally 17 minutes ago
    And here I thought we were going to be fed insects when we hit final-stage capitalism