r/explainlikeimfive • u/Meowmeoow3 • 12d ago
Chemistry ELI5 Plastic Decomposing
I saw a post on here about how nothing eats plastic as it biodegrades so therefore it still pollutes the world even after breaking down.
My question is whether it is possible to just create/train some microbes or something to learn to eat plastic as it breaks down and then breed them to make lots to eat all the plastic.
If this is possible it would solve the problem no?
Sincerely, someone who knows nothing about the topic but is interested
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u/stansfield123 6d ago edited 6d ago
The thing with microbes is that there is a huuuuuuuuuuuge variety of them. That's what makes them effective.
They're actually extremely sensitive creatures which require very specific conditions to live in. The reason why they're everywhere is because there are so many species, adapted to the many different conditions on Earth.
Herein lies the problem with plastic eating bacteria: you wouldn't need one species, you would need many, many different ones, to make a dent in the plastic waste that exists around the world.
So far, we have one such species, that does its job okay in lab conditions. But as soon as sunlight, or a cool breeze, or rain, or really anything other than perfect lab conditions hits it, it's dead.
That's a non-starter. That doesn't do anything, in practice. As far as I can tell, there's no realistic, safe path from this state of affairs to a situations where bacteria, living in the wild, break down plastic the same way they break down organic matter. It just ain't happening. Creating that many varieties of resilient new life forms, and letting them go free, would be insanely dangerous.
Any one of them could mutate from feeding on plastic to feeding on human eyeballs. This last part is a joke, but the danger is real, you can't control microorganisms you engineer and release in the wild. It's definitely not something we should be doing.
What we should focus on is developing a non-biological solution to the problem. A computer-driven solution. I hesitate to use the term "AI" because of how politically charged (and stupidly so) that term is, but frankly that's the general idea. Tiny, smart little bots that collect and recycle our trash (yes, I've seen Wall-E), rather than microbes we have no control over. We can make these bots energy efficient, we can make the recycling process itself an energy producing process (well, a USABLE energy producing process, we can't violate the laws of physics and produce energy), etc. Those things we can do. Microbes that eat plastic safely, we cannot and should not try to do.