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Comment by lynguist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

Do things which old-fashioned fungi can break down, given time and water - physical books, wood furniture, natural fiber clothing - need any special treatments to survive in your environment?

Figure that these plastic-rotting fungi won't be all that much different from the ones you're familiar with. This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.

> This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.

Not yet.

"Life Finds a Way, Inc." has had a planet-sized laboratory, running its Natural Mutation Engine 24x7x365, for a billion-ish years now. But no Gray Goo has actually evolved, and taken over the Earth.

Perhaps, "Gray Goo" is just another cool-sounding trope, and not a real-world possibility?

Grey Goo has evolved in many incarnations. First was "unicellular life" edition. Most recently the planet has been taken over by "humans".

Part of the Grey Goo memeset is that the goo is an unstoppable apex predator that doesn't just tweak the ecological balance a bit in a conventional ecological relationship, but permanently establishes an ecological balance of 100% Grey Goo.

This has not happened, not even "humans".

Not yet, but the the human population has more than doubled since 1970, while the number of other vertebrates has halved. It's like biomass is conserved, and human growth (both in number and in waistlines) is us systematically converting biomass into ourselves.

In 100 more years when the only vertebrates that aren't extinct or endangered are humans and our livestock and pets, will that be Grey Goo-like enough for you? Or does it only count if we manage to exterminate the insects and lower-order species too?

Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat!

https://xkcd.com/1338/

>Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat!

Grey Goo doesn't consume for energy but for mass; energy needs are plot devices.

I'd argue the majority of human food consumption is for energy not mass so we can't approach the 100% mass of a grey goo event.

We are the grey goo! Excellent idea.

Generally “Grey Goo” science fiction ignores the lack of metals in the environment thus preventing the grey in Grey Goo as well as energy constraints etc.

However, simply outcompeting organic life using the same atomic building blocks would be a real problem for existing life forms like humans.

Cyanobacteria might be the closest we’ve come.

Your example was a little too over my head and I started Googling for this simulator I might not have played with.

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.

> 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.

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.

If you left his plastic straw alone, he wouldn't have to make it about straws, would he? Now all he has is a soggy paper straw that he got from a plastic wrapping.

> so yes it did end up in the ocean

It was a European plastic straw? Was there an address on it, or how can you tell?

The point the person you responded to was making wasn't about plastic straws, but rather about the fact that European trash almost never lands in the ocean: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

It’s not a strawman because the EU actually did rule out plastic straws.

And as a parent, I can assure you that I get reminded of this on a weekly basis.

As a parent in EU, I bought the reusable silicone straws, those are available and kids don't mind.

Plastic straws come because the replacements tend to be bad (even if I assume they have gotten better over time).

The way to make their replacements even better over time is to discourage use of plastic. So this seems like a pretty good policy, even if there is a tiny bit of (the world’s most minor amount of) pain during the transition. We should ban more single-use plastic.

In order to not go soggy so quickly many paper straws are pfas coated. Then this ends up in the environment.

"We should ban more single-use plastic."

We should ban more single-use non biodegradable plastic.

I like the single use biodegradable plastic bag for example, where I can have the organic compost inside, so less mess everywhere.

Those should be standard. But currently they are way more expensive. Standard plastic from oil is cheap.

Wait, a _standard plastic bag_ for compost?

Why not, you know, paper?

Because paper leaks?

And this type of plastic does not. After some months it will, but that is the idea.

I just buy a bunch of these biodegradable PLA straws instead. They work well https://amzn.eu/d/dKIyKxE.

Not missed the old plastic straws apart from when at a burger joint that gives you the useless paper ones. The bagasse and PLA straws do not disintegrate as quickly and work as well as the old ones.

Whether they are actually more environmentally friendly is another discussion.

> it did end up in the ocean

How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast this morning?

I order to not go soggy so quickly many paper straws are pfas coated. Then this ends up in the environment.

Ffs please tell me you are joking

Because plastic straws are something that people run into frequently so when they are gone it’s very noticeable to everyone

I don't think its a straw man so much as the alternatives to plastic straws are worse. One of those short-sighted policies that ends up being worse.

No-straw alternative is not worse.

That is not what happened though so its a fairy tale outcome.

Paper straws are some of the worst "greenwashing" I've ever seen. I most frequently encounter them for McDonalds drinks, where the cup and lid are solid plastic, but the straw whose weight (in plastic) would have been maybe 2-3% of the whole assembly has been replaced with something that invariably goes soggy before the drink is finished. Meanwhile at the grocery store I see boxes of... straws. As in, actual straw, the original material. Haven't encountered those in actual use yet, though.

> 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.

> gets incinerated and provides heat over communal heating – ideally.

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

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

They usually do not extract the oil from deep underground, like we do.

The argument is between burning already existing plastic vs letting it rot.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

There is still glass (and silicone?).

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.

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

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

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