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Interesting, but I wonder what they break it down to. Is it completely broken down or do they shit nanoplastics?
At a quick glance they break it down into carbon dioxide at about a 50% consumption rate. The rest is excreted as biomass and degraded fragments (which I gather means shorter polymer chains and oxidation). Sounds really good if it’s true.
I agree this is probably overall a good thing, but I worry if this bacteria thrives due to the amount of plastic around what that would mean for the amount of CO2 produced.
It’s funny, for years I’ve been downvoted or thought to be joking when I point out that putting non-biodegradable plastic into landfills is carbon sequestration. I seriously think it’s a good idea, though. If people are concerned about carbon in the atmosphere then that’s a good way to get it out for the long term.
That only works if the carbon in the plastic originally came from the atmosphere, but we use oil to make plastics. So increased demand for plastic = increased demand for oil, and that oil was already sequestered to begin with.
Yeah the oil was carbon sequestration we are just releasing it
Kind of, but frankly I think that’s a self-defeating hair to split.
What ultimately matters in the end is simply “is more carbon going into the atmosphere, or less?” It doesn’t matter where the carbon is coming from, all that matters is that less carbon ends up in the atmosphere.
If I have a plastic object and I send it for recycling or whatever, some of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Possibly all of it if it ends up being incinerated, since a lot of plastic “recycling” is not really recycling as you’d expect. If I put it in the landfill, on the other hand, the carbon is locked away effectively indefinitely.
It doesn’t matter where that plastic object came from, I’m just faced with a choice of what to do with it.
…bacteria?
Whoops 😅
They turn into 3-D printers.
Wow just realised i’m technically a 3D printer. Aaand that’s enough internet for today.
And how much of the plastic remains in the food chain when animals eat the worms? This likely isn’t the good news that it appears to be on the surface. I know an old lady who swallowed a fly….
This is one of those stories that pops up every year and nothing is ever done with it.
Yep. This.
Same thing with reddit “hey there’s a cure for cancer and these ragtag students discovered this which will change the world!”
5 years later
“…”
Mostly because it was found not to be effective in trials, or it had some side effect that made it a bad idea. See thalidomide for an example of what happens when you don’t test properly.
Instead of releasing a huge number of these insects into trash sites (which isn’t practical)
Try it anyway!
Hmmm… How to create an invasive species in 3…2…1…
Finally, a clothes moth that can eat polyester
Goodbye built human world !
About time!
The kind of funny thing is that if this happened for real, the next big plastic product would just be pesticide impregnated plastics. And then we’d have pesticide microplastics everywhere!
Back to building with stone, metal, and wood.
As if housing wasn’t expensive enough already.
Something eats these insects and then we in turn eat those somethings.
This is not a way to save us from microplastics. Centuries from now that shit will still be in dirt particles all over the world.
The best thing to be done is go back in time 100 years and stop people from making millions of tons of plastic bullshit.
The second best thing is to stop making millions of tons of plastic bullshit.
That entirely depends if the insect or bacteria or fungi turn it into a different chemical.
We’re all plastic eating insects.
And here I’ve been eating plastic insects this whole time like a fool
It’ll be exterminated for being “woke” and “caring about climate change”
That’s Kentucky not Kenya
While the ability to counteract styrofoam pollution is of course good, sadly this doesn’t apply to other plastics in general. Some plastics are physically hard or chemically much harder to break than polystyrene (PP, PVC, ABS, anything that it fiber reinforced) .
So, while the worms are nice, one should not hope they can help with other plastics.
On the plus side, this does show that all the plastic we have put into the environment has been a niche energy source just waiting to be exploited.
Now think about all the plastic surface area in the oceans and stuff, I bet there are other things, bacteria and microfauna, which are actively adapting to consume it.
I have had it with these motherfcking mealworm larvae that are capable of consuming polystyrene on this motherfcking plane!
