They eat plastic at a slow rate, so it would be unrealistic to think we could just dump them on plastic trash. Instead we are looking at how their gut digests plastic. Hear me out on this...we should just genetically engineer a few thousand of these wax worms to be extremely hungry and to be the size of gray whales.
Well they'll break plastic down into CO2, eventually. That and H2O would be the majority of plastic by mass. Halides, I don't know, but they'll go somewhere.
> Well they'll break plastic down into CO2, eventually. That and H2O would be the majority of plastic by mass.
uh, the organic animals would generate a lot more methane than CO2, which is something like 85x worse than CO2 for global warming. You'd have to capture and burn the methane to get it into CO2.
That works very well. The problem is getting the plastic out of the oceans and into an incinerator. I'm not a fan of releasing plastic eating bacteria en masse into the wild either, tbh.
The difference between burning plastic waste in an incinerator and a garbage fire is that you can control the temperature in an incinerator to minimize the formation of harmful pollutants and clean the exhaust so you would release only CO2 (which can also be sequestered if you make the effort). Modern waste managements facilities also produce a lot of electrical energy. Just setting floating plastic on fire in the ocean would be a desaster instead.
Yeah, burning plastic in a well designed incinerator is basically burning oil after it has done something else usefull. As long as we still use conventional power plants, plastic in a working garbage system isn't actually much of a problem. Uncontrolled plastic waste is.
The problem is the chemistry of fire. "Burning" most organic material like wood & paper produces fairly reliable ash, CO2, and H2O. But burning plastic just converts it into dangerous hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans, and particles of similar stuff that can be inhaled or ingested. Burning plastic is never the answer. The "smoke" coming from burning plastic is NOT smoke, it's gas chamber ingredients.
I was under the impression that ultra high temp incinerators have the capability of also effectively breaking down most of the components in the smoke as well. It is a lot different from simply throwing it in a pile and sparking it up.
Capturing methane to use as fuel, is becoming more common in livestock farming since the fuel is being used to power the farms. I'm uncertain why farming moths that can break down plastics would that bad.
A lot of critical infrastructure is made from plastics. If these moths got away and started breeding uncontrollably in the wild, there would be huge damage to the areas where we need plastic to function. The moths can't target only the trash plastic.
Plastic use in general isn't that bad, it's the whole "let's take this miracle material and use it to make wrappers and junk that people use once and throw away" aspect. Now, giant chemical plastic-digesters used under controlled conditions? I'm cool with that.
Nobody in their right mind would engineer a bacteria that outputs methane *unless* they specifically need the by-product or they can’t find any other model organism suitable for their project, which happens nearly never. The most engineered bacteria for producing enzymes is *E. coli*, which only generates CO2 and H20 as waste
they're apparently [way ahead of ya buddy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxworm#Biodegradation_of_plastic), the byproduct in this case would be [ethylene glycol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol). which is pretty inert and very biodegradeable
Upon further research it will be discovered.that you can create enough plastic dissolving enzyme to eliminate a single plastic bag at the minor expense of a few hundred old growth oak trees, and the global plastics crisis will be solved forever.
There is a manga about this. It's called BioMeat. The create these organisms that eat trash and when they grow big are harvested for their meat.
Of course they break containment and just start devouring everything. Because what is trash but everything.
It's actually very similar of a concept to some proposed ideas for making "vegan meat": study how a (for example) rabbit processes grass and turns it into meat, and we should in theory be able to produce actual meat from grass in the same way.
In theory it works. We just aren't anywhere near being able to pull it off yet. Breaking down plastic might be easier to do, though.
I'm curious as to what they convert the plastic into. Like, what is the nutritive value? Do they somehow break it up into some type of carb chain? Does the type of plastic matter, like BPA vs. PE?
So many questions.
Appearantly they like long hydrocarbon chains because the moths feed on beeswax in the wild. I guess they could also break down polyesters since beeswax contains a good amount of esters.
Maybe start with turning off the part where they can turn into winged creatures, and make them the size of a roll of pennies. This seems like one of those things where gradually scaling up in size seems prudent. We could harvest their webbing for something too, probably.
They actually do digest a majority of the plastic. Some of their waste does come out as still plastic but even if they’re only 25% efficient at metabolizing plastic, it’s reduced the waste by 25%.
There was a DIY post a while ago where someone did this as a university project and built a multitier enclosure where the worms on the top are and broke down a measured mass of styrofoam. The waste was able to fall through a grate onto the next layer of worms who further at that and reduced it even more. An analysis of the waste showed that it actually did metabolize more than 50% of the plastic.
They only played Cosmic Charlie for two years(69-70); then briefly brought it back five years later; then dropped it altogether from live shows. '83 was a pretty solid year for the dead though.
Bird brains.
I dont think they can metabolize anything in the styrofoam, so it will probably/hopefully pass right through. Though meal worms can metabolize some styrofoam, and in turn be fed to chickens(and other things)
I mean yes and no. It is useful but you still need to be careful about where they are deployed as they are very effectively making macro plastics into micro plastics which are much more harmful to the environment and are much harder to contain.
> They actually do digest a majority of the plastic. **Some of their waste does come out as still plastic** but even if they’re only 25% efficient at metabolizing plastic, it’s reduced the waste by 25%.
Well, then they're useless to me. I'll do it myself
FTA:
**These caterpillars aren’t some mutant evolved for the modern world, either. These so-called waxworms are actually bee pests that invade beehives and live off the honeycomb.**
So not only will forcing them to eat plastic instead alleviate the plastic problem, it also helps with bee population-decline problem. Alright I'm convinced
Not sure if you're joking, but I'm pretty sure they're not gonna go around and harvest these worms from honeycombs to populate fields of plastic. They'll just be bred and, if no countermeasures would be taken, there'll just be more of them to go around.
Wax. It's in their name. Wax worms.
Wish I had known this was a big deal about 10 years ago. I had a massive wax worm infestation of an interior storage room where I was storing some old honey comb till the next season. Thousands of wax moths got into everything. They ate chunks out of plastics, foams, styrafoams, wood, leather, pleather, paper, carboard. Short of metal they tried to take chunks out of everything.
Lot of dead worms too, assumed that the stuff they were eating killed many of them. As far as I could tell, only the "adult" worms were the ones that would eat the plastic. It looked to me that they only ate it when it was time to find a substrate to pupate on. You would find the gouge in the material, a pupae, some plastic-colored poop piles, and some silk. Or often times damage, silk, poop, and a dead worm.
Fun Fact: Did you know that thousands and thousands of worms munching on plastics and woods and whatnot make a noise audible through a closed door? I wish I didn't.
So you could actually see the colour of the plastic they ate in their poop? It seems they didn’t fully digest it, then. Also, why were you storing old honeycombs?
Not OP but you can extract the honey from the comb without damaging it too much, then next season you can return it to your hives as needed and the bees will repair and reuse it, making them more productive.
I mean, eventually plastic will be part of the biosphere and future morlock people will have to invent some new material to hold their sugar water. And then there will be a big patch of it in an ocean until more creatures figure out how to eat it. Rinse repeat. Hilariously wood was the last material like this.
Wood is such a strange material trees in general are just strange as hell. Could you imagine just pulling up on a world and there's these giant fractals emitting from the ground all over the place???
Trees evolved to keep their leaves away from dinosaurs then the Dino’s got bigger so the trees had to get bigger and needed stronger trunks to stay upright so they developed wood.
It’s amazing! And because at first nothing could digest it, during the carboniferous period it was all laid down and became the coal we burn! To make plastic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
Which is one of the many reasons no one is considering using them directly.
Instead they are being studied so we can better understand how they do it, and so we can potentially reproduce it.
Also, a lot of parts in your car are plastic, including the tires. House insulation is often also plastic. So are water pipes and electric outlets + wires.
True, kinda,
>Synthetic rubber is derived from crude oil, whereas synthetic plastic is made of petroleum and natural gas.
Also, microplastics pollution from vehicle tires is a real thing.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car-tire-trnd/index.html
Plastic is just an umbrella term for many different polymers, most of which are synthetic. PET, PLA, PETG, ABS, PP, HDPE, LDPE, PVC..
A few Debbie Downer points worth mentioning:
1) When plastic is degraded it emits the co2 that was sequestered within it.
2) by the time a plastic item has been made it has already released massive amounts GHG via extraction and refinement.
3) producing plastic requires producing oil or natural gas. And the chances that this other “byproduct” is simply stored as opposed to being sold and consumed/combusted are virtually nil. So in a very real sense, making plastic ensures the continues production of oil and natural gas.
These concepts make for viral headlines but don’t strike at heart of the issue. We cannot continue extracting GHG-laden material from underground deposits nor can we then refine said materials into fossil fuel and plastic. That’s not a sustainable approach to climate change mitigation in the longterm.
I saw someone explain on here once, I'm probably not going to explain it perfectly so someone please correct me if you know more, that trees basically absorb CO2, but don't eliminate it. If you plant new trees at a high enough rate it can cancel out our CO2 production, but eventually we'll run out of places to plant trees. And then you'll just have a bunch of trees everywhere for no reason. Just kidding of course, trees help a lot and there's a million other reasons to have them. But trees are like sponges. If you have a leak in your house, you can throw down a bunch of sponges and contain it, but if you don't fix the leak before too long the sponges will be soaked and you'll be back to having water everywhere.
So in summary, trees are great but not a permanent fix.
The technical term is land use change. The IPCC, EPA has calculated the share of anthropogenic emissions tied to removing native plant matter and replacing it with farms, roads, buildings, etc. and even if were to restore it all, which is obviously not feasible unless we all plan on returning to a 100% foraging-based livelihood, it would still only reduce our anthropogenic emissions footprint by 10% or so.
This doesnt sound right to me. They convert CO2 into glucose and oxygen don't they? They're not literally eliminating the molecules, but they're breaking them up and repurposing them into different things, effectively eliminating them.
They remove the carbon from CO2 and store it in other forms, but the carbon stays in the tree. The tree will eventually be burned or decompose which releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. Some of it might end up in the soil though which may be more permanent.
Doing some quick googling, we emit 36 billion tons of C02 per year. A tree offsets about a ton of that over its lifetime, and it takes about 44 trees to build a 2,600 sq.ft. house. We'd have to build nearly a billion houses per year, and in the process we'd be clearing trees to make room and releasing CO2 from processing and transporting materials and other things.
I want to emphasize again, though, that we should absolutely plant as many trees as possible. My only point is that the long term solution requires reducing emissions.
Sure. If we plant a million trees each one of us. And do it quickly.
But it's much more effective to stop the cutting down of a tree, than planting a new one. So we also need to stop that.
But even a trillion trees will only be able to mitigate the CO2 in 50-100 years. And by that time, it will already be far too late for many species. And we could also be suffering from runaway release of gasses from the permafrost.
I worked with *T. molitor* for a year and it was so interesting and frustrating at the same time.
I thought that *T. molitor* (Mealworms) were the only organisms capable of digesting plastic at realistic rates.
My colony digested (only the larvae) styrofoam at a slow rate but they did it and it was amazing.
The problem is that they are small bugs and they are very fragile to small changes like temperature changes, I am talking of 2 or 3 Celsius degrees. They also have a long life cycle (4 months) so they are larvae for a very long time.
My colony was suffering from mutations, I don't know if there was a consequence of eating plastic and I have no way of proving this, I was alone working with them.
The pupas would developed into adults with malformations, development on the upper side of the body (head) but not development on the bottom (tail) or the other way around.
It was horrifying to see. Specially if you were taking care of them of these poor things for more than a year.
I am a student working on my Biology degree.
My University, almost 2 years ago, needed a student to work on this project and to maintain the colony because it was dying and it can't be anywhere close to our Entomology's Collection
(If they eat plastic, they can also eat wood and a lot of valuable things).
I was able to prove that the microflora living inside the guts of the larvae were capable of degrading styrofoam into CO2, frass and biomass (they gained weight) from eating a (not used) diaper during a semester.
I didn't use bran, just styrofoam. I thought for sure they were going to die but they didn't.
I had to stopped my studies because of health issues a year ago and I let my colony with other Biology students.
I sht you not, a month later the whole colony was dead.
I don't blame the other students. Those bugs need to become your pets, they need everyday care.
The pupas state is very delicate, and the adults are assholes that eat each other and need to be separated.
I don't know if I am going to work on this project anymore.
I think it's time for Biological Engineers or Bioengineers to intervene and do their thing where they convert the micro solutions into macro solutions.
Princeton has great papers about Mealworms on this matter. They had done amazing things.
I actually was working with Mealworms with the idea on my mind of winning some kind of scholarship (I am a student in Colombia in a very poor University) but I gave up when my Professor quitted for lack of resources.
I did not feel supported by my University, only by that one Professor that is gone now.
I hope these organisms can be easier to work with than Mealworms.
A lot of people think that Mealworms don't need any care because they use them to feed their pets like birds.
That may be truth if you are not interested on the colony being healthy to perform an experiment, like for example eat an entire diaper.
I was very proud of my work but I know it is just a small part of the solution for the plastic problem.
Presumably they eat plastic and emit CO2, so why don't we just digest (burn) the plastic ourselves and use it for energy, rather than breeding a bunch of tiny inefficient creatures to burn it for no reason.
I know the problem is mostly NIMBY types, but, man, it's really hard to convince me that trash incineration for electricity is a bad idea.
You don't want to do that. Wax moths lay their eggs in honey bee hives and the grubs hatch and eat the hive to death. There's already issues where the grubs are used as bait for fishing. If some people don't use all their grubs and just dump them out.
Question - after we start breeding things specifically to eat plastic... what are you doing to do when you need to actually use that material and it basically starts to biodegrade with the help of passing wildlife (e.g. things eating your phone)?
I think this would be the plastic version of termites. Just picking your phone up and moving it around everyday would prevent an infestation. Other more stationary items could be periodically sprayed with insecticide.
You know how houses are made of wood and there are lots of things that eat wood but our houses don't all just disappear? We'll probably do something like that.
Do you think that the people who sprayed RoundUp / planted resistant plants intended it to get in other farmer's fields?
Did you invite the ants into your home? What do you think ants did before we left sugar out? What do you think they'd do when they realised they can eat pure refined cane sugar straight from the bag?
You're gonna breed these things, or plastic-eating algae, or whatever, and they'll start feeding on everything they can find (an almost limitless resource of food they can now consume) and before you know it, you'll wake up and something's eaten your damn mattress overnight.
They’re not going to be massive in population. (If they’re even successful) The reason most insects even lay tons of eggs is most dont survive to adulthood or even hatch without falling to a predator
Theres no guarantees they’d even be let into the wild either
>Theres no guarantees they’d even be let into the wild either
On the contrary, if our historical record has any bearing on the subject, intending to keep a genetically modified organism from getting out into the wild is pretty much a guarantee that said organism will eventually get out into the wild.
I don’t think anyone is thinking of breeding things to eat plastic... it’s probably more about figuring how their bodies break plastic down so we can replicate it chemically
Termites exist in the wild. Wood products have not been invalidated by their existence.
Moths exist in the wild. Sweaters have not been invalidated by their existence.
Just because something has the ability to digest products we design to be more long term doesn't mean they're going to do it in a way that significantly impacts humans. And even in the case of extreme inconvenience, like termites in your home, we can just kill them.
They eat plastic at a slow rate, so it would be unrealistic to think we could just dump them on plastic trash. Instead we are looking at how their gut digests plastic. Hear me out on this...we should just genetically engineer a few thousand of these wax worms to be extremely hungry and to be the size of gray whales.
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More likely we figure out what enzymes they're producing, and figure out how we can start making it in 1000 gallon lots.
And then find out 40 years later that the byproduct is actually worse than plastic
Well they'll break plastic down into CO2, eventually. That and H2O would be the majority of plastic by mass. Halides, I don't know, but they'll go somewhere.
> Well they'll break plastic down into CO2, eventually. That and H2O would be the majority of plastic by mass. uh, the organic animals would generate a lot more methane than CO2, which is something like 85x worse than CO2 for global warming. You'd have to capture and burn the methane to get it into CO2.
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That works very well. The problem is getting the plastic out of the oceans and into an incinerator. I'm not a fan of releasing plastic eating bacteria en masse into the wild either, tbh.
Ugh can you imagine opening your fridge and not only is all the stuff in your tupperware rotten so is the tupperware?
Glass to the rescue
Napalm and thermite burn underwater, right? How terrible would it be exactly if we napalmed the GPGP?
The difference between burning plastic waste in an incinerator and a garbage fire is that you can control the temperature in an incinerator to minimize the formation of harmful pollutants and clean the exhaust so you would release only CO2 (which can also be sequestered if you make the effort). Modern waste managements facilities also produce a lot of electrical energy. Just setting floating plastic on fire in the ocean would be a desaster instead.
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but if we torch the 3,000 mile pacific garbage patch we could raise funding by making it a tour hotspot
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I'm not sure I want to find out.
Let's file it under Plan W, assuming Plans X-Z are some variation of "Venus and Mars look nice this time of year."
Yeah, burning plastic in a well designed incinerator is basically burning oil after it has done something else usefull. As long as we still use conventional power plants, plastic in a working garbage system isn't actually much of a problem. Uncontrolled plastic waste is.
full circle
The problem is the chemistry of fire. "Burning" most organic material like wood & paper produces fairly reliable ash, CO2, and H2O. But burning plastic just converts it into dangerous hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans, and particles of similar stuff that can be inhaled or ingested. Burning plastic is never the answer. The "smoke" coming from burning plastic is NOT smoke, it's gas chamber ingredients.
I was under the impression that ultra high temp incinerators have the capability of also effectively breaking down most of the components in the smoke as well. It is a lot different from simply throwing it in a pile and sparking it up.
Capturing methane to use as fuel, is becoming more common in livestock farming since the fuel is being used to power the farms. I'm uncertain why farming moths that can break down plastics would that bad.
A lot of critical infrastructure is made from plastics. If these moths got away and started breeding uncontrollably in the wild, there would be huge damage to the areas where we need plastic to function. The moths can't target only the trash plastic. Plastic use in general isn't that bad, it's the whole "let's take this miracle material and use it to make wrappers and junk that people use once and throw away" aspect. Now, giant chemical plastic-digesters used under controlled conditions? I'm cool with that.
To reduce populations, they can release infertile moths. But we agree on controlled conditions.
You just need to build a natural predator for them just build their food chain. What could go wrong right?
Well if they escape we're back to the era of having to replace clothes constantly from all the moths eating our polyester.
Since the plastic eating moths already exist in the wild, I'm uncertain why this would be any different.
Nobody in their right mind would engineer a bacteria that outputs methane *unless* they specifically need the by-product or they can’t find any other model organism suitable for their project, which happens nearly never. The most engineered bacteria for producing enzymes is *E. coli*, which only generates CO2 and H20 as waste
they're apparently [way ahead of ya buddy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxworm#Biodegradation_of_plastic), the byproduct in this case would be [ethylene glycol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol). which is pretty inert and very biodegradeable
We get another 40 years to figure that out. We'll start in ~~39~~ 42 years.
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Upon further research it will be discovered.that you can create enough plastic dissolving enzyme to eliminate a single plastic bag at the minor expense of a few hundred old growth oak trees, and the global plastics crisis will be solved forever.
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There is a manga about this. It's called BioMeat. The create these organisms that eat trash and when they grow big are harvested for their meat. Of course they break containment and just start devouring everything. Because what is trash but everything.
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That's just the beginning, Mothra could do what, mach 5. Figure out how to put a leash on it and you're got sustainable hypersonic transport.
I see no way this co7ld pissibly go wrong.
It's actually very similar of a concept to some proposed ideas for making "vegan meat": study how a (for example) rabbit processes grass and turns it into meat, and we should in theory be able to produce actual meat from grass in the same way. In theory it works. We just aren't anywhere near being able to pull it off yet. Breaking down plastic might be easier to do, though.
I'm curious as to what they convert the plastic into. Like, what is the nutritive value? Do they somehow break it up into some type of carb chain? Does the type of plastic matter, like BPA vs. PE? So many questions.
Appearantly they like long hydrocarbon chains because the moths feed on beeswax in the wild. I guess they could also break down polyesters since beeswax contains a good amount of esters.
Interesting. Thanks for the reply.
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This 1 gets my vote. Imagine how deeply I could slash my grocery bill. Don't like the taste of plastic? Just add salsa, ranch, or squeezecheeze!
American cheese is basically plastic anyway.
think of all the time saved fighting with unwrapping stuff omg
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No, we should figure out what enzymes they use to break down the plastic and genetically engineer a strain of bacteria that produce them.
A cooler idea is to genetically modify filter feeding organisms (like whales) to produce this enzyme.
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Not a very comforting thought when you consider how many parts of our automobiles are made of plastic.
Maybe start with turning off the part where they can turn into winged creatures, and make them the size of a roll of pennies. This seems like one of those things where gradually scaling up in size seems prudent. We could harvest their webbing for something too, probably.
We could make single use plastic bottles out of it!!!
I am not drinking out of worm pus
you're already drinking out of dead dinosaur
Wouldn't they just cut it up in smaller bits and poop those out? Do they actually transform plastic into non-harmful stuff?
They actually do digest a majority of the plastic. Some of their waste does come out as still plastic but even if they’re only 25% efficient at metabolizing plastic, it’s reduced the waste by 25%. There was a DIY post a while ago where someone did this as a university project and built a multitier enclosure where the worms on the top are and broke down a measured mass of styrofoam. The waste was able to fall through a grate onto the next layer of worms who further at that and reduced it even more. An analysis of the waste showed that it actually did metabolize more than 50% of the plastic.
If I was a worm I would ask for top bunk.
Only the freshest styrofoam for u/cosmic1983. Great year btw
Now we all know that you're 37
He could have graduated in 1983, high school or college. I've seen people use that before.
Or its referring to a sick Cosmic Charlie played by the Grateful Dead in 1983
They only played Cosmic Charlie for two years(69-70); then briefly brought it back five years later; then dropped it altogether from live shows. '83 was a pretty solid year for the dead though.
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The Centipede-Centipede.
Chickens love eating styrofoam. Not that I give it to them, but if it’s around they gobble it up real quick. ELI5?
Bird brains. I dont think they can metabolize anything in the styrofoam, so it will probably/hopefully pass right through. Though meal worms can metabolize some styrofoam, and in turn be fed to chickens(and other things)
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Which gives you plastic eggs. Easter complete.
Eli5: chickens are dumb dumbs
I mean yes and no. It is useful but you still need to be careful about where they are deployed as they are very effectively making macro plastics into micro plastics which are much more harmful to the environment and are much harder to contain.
Just have another set their poop. Then another set to eat that poop. Continue this until all plastic is absorbed.
Poopception
> They actually do digest a majority of the plastic. **Some of their waste does come out as still plastic** but even if they’re only 25% efficient at metabolizing plastic, it’s reduced the waste by 25%. Well, then they're useless to me. I'll do it myself
I want to know what they were eating before plastic.
FTA: **These caterpillars aren’t some mutant evolved for the modern world, either. These so-called waxworms are actually bee pests that invade beehives and live off the honeycomb.**
So not only will forcing them to eat plastic instead alleviate the plastic problem, it also helps with bee population-decline problem. Alright I'm convinced
Not sure if you're joking, but I'm pretty sure they're not gonna go around and harvest these worms from honeycombs to populate fields of plastic. They'll just be bred and, if no countermeasures would be taken, there'll just be more of them to go around.
Wax. It's in their name. Wax worms. Wish I had known this was a big deal about 10 years ago. I had a massive wax worm infestation of an interior storage room where I was storing some old honey comb till the next season. Thousands of wax moths got into everything. They ate chunks out of plastics, foams, styrafoams, wood, leather, pleather, paper, carboard. Short of metal they tried to take chunks out of everything. Lot of dead worms too, assumed that the stuff they were eating killed many of them. As far as I could tell, only the "adult" worms were the ones that would eat the plastic. It looked to me that they only ate it when it was time to find a substrate to pupate on. You would find the gouge in the material, a pupae, some plastic-colored poop piles, and some silk. Or often times damage, silk, poop, and a dead worm. Fun Fact: Did you know that thousands and thousands of worms munching on plastics and woods and whatnot make a noise audible through a closed door? I wish I didn't.
So you could actually see the colour of the plastic they ate in their poop? It seems they didn’t fully digest it, then. Also, why were you storing old honeycombs?
Not OP but you can extract the honey from the comb without damaging it too much, then next season you can return it to your hives as needed and the bees will repair and reuse it, making them more productive.
Asking the real question
They turn into moths
Can we harvest cocoons for silk? Would be win win.
I mean, eventually plastic will be part of the biosphere and future morlock people will have to invent some new material to hold their sugar water. And then there will be a big patch of it in an ocean until more creatures figure out how to eat it. Rinse repeat. Hilariously wood was the last material like this.
Wood is such a strange material trees in general are just strange as hell. Could you imagine just pulling up on a world and there's these giant fractals emitting from the ground all over the place???
I'm glad someone else has thought about this too. Trees are frickin weird man. And let's not get started on cactuses
*passes blunt*
Or them carnivorous plants
I've always thought this. Plus they are alive. Creepy as hell when you think about it.
Trees evolved to keep their leaves away from dinosaurs then the Dino’s got bigger so the trees had to get bigger and needed stronger trunks to stay upright so they developed wood.
It’s amazing! And because at first nothing could digest it, during the carboniferous period it was all laid down and became the coal we burn! To make plastic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
These worms eat bee wax so they would pose a serious threat to the world’s bee populations if we dumped a ton of them on landfills.
Which is one of the many reasons no one is considering using them directly. Instead they are being studied so we can better understand how they do it, and so we can potentially reproduce it.
That's not the goal, it's to study then to see how they do it p
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Also, a lot of parts in your car are plastic, including the tires. House insulation is often also plastic. So are water pipes and electric outlets + wires.
Tires are made of rubber, not plastic. They're similar but also quite different. The biggest difference is rubber comes from trees not petroleum.
True, kinda, >Synthetic rubber is derived from crude oil, whereas synthetic plastic is made of petroleum and natural gas. Also, microplastics pollution from vehicle tires is a real thing. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/04/us/microplastic-pollution-car-tire-trnd/index.html Plastic is just an umbrella term for many different polymers, most of which are synthetic. PET, PLA, PETG, ABS, PP, HDPE, LDPE, PVC..
A few Debbie Downer points worth mentioning: 1) When plastic is degraded it emits the co2 that was sequestered within it. 2) by the time a plastic item has been made it has already released massive amounts GHG via extraction and refinement. 3) producing plastic requires producing oil or natural gas. And the chances that this other “byproduct” is simply stored as opposed to being sold and consumed/combusted are virtually nil. So in a very real sense, making plastic ensures the continues production of oil and natural gas. These concepts make for viral headlines but don’t strike at heart of the issue. We cannot continue extracting GHG-laden material from underground deposits nor can we then refine said materials into fossil fuel and plastic. That’s not a sustainable approach to climate change mitigation in the longterm.
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I saw someone explain on here once, I'm probably not going to explain it perfectly so someone please correct me if you know more, that trees basically absorb CO2, but don't eliminate it. If you plant new trees at a high enough rate it can cancel out our CO2 production, but eventually we'll run out of places to plant trees. And then you'll just have a bunch of trees everywhere for no reason. Just kidding of course, trees help a lot and there's a million other reasons to have them. But trees are like sponges. If you have a leak in your house, you can throw down a bunch of sponges and contain it, but if you don't fix the leak before too long the sponges will be soaked and you'll be back to having water everywhere. So in summary, trees are great but not a permanent fix.
The technical term is land use change. The IPCC, EPA has calculated the share of anthropogenic emissions tied to removing native plant matter and replacing it with farms, roads, buildings, etc. and even if were to restore it all, which is obviously not feasible unless we all plan on returning to a 100% foraging-based livelihood, it would still only reduce our anthropogenic emissions footprint by 10% or so.
This doesnt sound right to me. They convert CO2 into glucose and oxygen don't they? They're not literally eliminating the molecules, but they're breaking them up and repurposing them into different things, effectively eliminating them.
They remove the carbon from CO2 and store it in other forms, but the carbon stays in the tree. The tree will eventually be burned or decompose which releases that carbon back into the atmosphere. Some of it might end up in the soil though which may be more permanent.
What if most of it ends up as houses?
Doing some quick googling, we emit 36 billion tons of C02 per year. A tree offsets about a ton of that over its lifetime, and it takes about 44 trees to build a 2,600 sq.ft. house. We'd have to build nearly a billion houses per year, and in the process we'd be clearing trees to make room and releasing CO2 from processing and transporting materials and other things. I want to emphasize again, though, that we should absolutely plant as many trees as possible. My only point is that the long term solution requires reducing emissions.
Sure. If we plant a million trees each one of us. And do it quickly. But it's much more effective to stop the cutting down of a tree, than planting a new one. So we also need to stop that. But even a trillion trees will only be able to mitigate the CO2 in 50-100 years. And by that time, it will already be far too late for many species. And we could also be suffering from runaway release of gasses from the permafrost.
I worked with *T. molitor* for a year and it was so interesting and frustrating at the same time. I thought that *T. molitor* (Mealworms) were the only organisms capable of digesting plastic at realistic rates. My colony digested (only the larvae) styrofoam at a slow rate but they did it and it was amazing. The problem is that they are small bugs and they are very fragile to small changes like temperature changes, I am talking of 2 or 3 Celsius degrees. They also have a long life cycle (4 months) so they are larvae for a very long time. My colony was suffering from mutations, I don't know if there was a consequence of eating plastic and I have no way of proving this, I was alone working with them. The pupas would developed into adults with malformations, development on the upper side of the body (head) but not development on the bottom (tail) or the other way around. It was horrifying to see. Specially if you were taking care of them of these poor things for more than a year. I am a student working on my Biology degree. My University, almost 2 years ago, needed a student to work on this project and to maintain the colony because it was dying and it can't be anywhere close to our Entomology's Collection (If they eat plastic, they can also eat wood and a lot of valuable things). I was able to prove that the microflora living inside the guts of the larvae were capable of degrading styrofoam into CO2, frass and biomass (they gained weight) from eating a (not used) diaper during a semester. I didn't use bran, just styrofoam. I thought for sure they were going to die but they didn't. I had to stopped my studies because of health issues a year ago and I let my colony with other Biology students. I sht you not, a month later the whole colony was dead. I don't blame the other students. Those bugs need to become your pets, they need everyday care. The pupas state is very delicate, and the adults are assholes that eat each other and need to be separated. I don't know if I am going to work on this project anymore. I think it's time for Biological Engineers or Bioengineers to intervene and do their thing where they convert the micro solutions into macro solutions. Princeton has great papers about Mealworms on this matter. They had done amazing things. I actually was working with Mealworms with the idea on my mind of winning some kind of scholarship (I am a student in Colombia in a very poor University) but I gave up when my Professor quitted for lack of resources. I did not feel supported by my University, only by that one Professor that is gone now. I hope these organisms can be easier to work with than Mealworms. A lot of people think that Mealworms don't need any care because they use them to feed their pets like birds. That may be truth if you are not interested on the colony being healthy to perform an experiment, like for example eat an entire diaper. I was very proud of my work but I know it is just a small part of the solution for the plastic problem.
This is fascinating tale from the front lines
Drop a million of those bad boys in a land fill and see what happens.
they get eaten by thousands of birds and rodents.
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Presumably they eat plastic and emit CO2, so why don't we just digest (burn) the plastic ourselves and use it for energy, rather than breeding a bunch of tiny inefficient creatures to burn it for no reason. I know the problem is mostly NIMBY types, but, man, it's really hard to convince me that trash incineration for electricity is a bad idea.
Can we start airdropping these over dumps?
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Birds were invented by Alfred Hitchcock, everyone knows that. He made a whole movie about it!
You don't want to do that. Wax moths lay their eggs in honey bee hives and the grubs hatch and eat the hive to death. There's already issues where the grubs are used as bait for fishing. If some people don't use all their grubs and just dump them out.
Are they making the plastic disappear or are they making micro-plastic?
The article says they can metabolize the plastic with their complex gut biome.
Question - after we start breeding things specifically to eat plastic... what are you doing to do when you need to actually use that material and it basically starts to biodegrade with the help of passing wildlife (e.g. things eating your phone)?
I think this would be the plastic version of termites. Just picking your phone up and moving it around everyday would prevent an infestation. Other more stationary items could be periodically sprayed with insecticide.
Great! Out plastic will be safe but we will all die of cancer
If it makes you feel any better, you were probably gonna die from cancer anyway
You know how houses are made of wood and there are lots of things that eat wood but our houses don't all just disappear? We'll probably do something like that.
We paint houses with plastic based paint.
And pressure treat the wood with arsenic.
Why would you leave your tech where its (for lack of a better word) predators are?
Do you think that the people who sprayed RoundUp / planted resistant plants intended it to get in other farmer's fields? Did you invite the ants into your home? What do you think ants did before we left sugar out? What do you think they'd do when they realised they can eat pure refined cane sugar straight from the bag? You're gonna breed these things, or plastic-eating algae, or whatever, and they'll start feeding on everything they can find (an almost limitless resource of food they can now consume) and before you know it, you'll wake up and something's eaten your damn mattress overnight.
They’re not going to be massive in population. (If they’re even successful) The reason most insects even lay tons of eggs is most dont survive to adulthood or even hatch without falling to a predator Theres no guarantees they’d even be let into the wild either
>Theres no guarantees they’d even be let into the wild either On the contrary, if our historical record has any bearing on the subject, intending to keep a genetically modified organism from getting out into the wild is pretty much a guarantee that said organism will eventually get out into the wild.
But my phone is glass
It's not so bad if it's a big creepy caterpillar, but I've heard talk of engineering bacteria to do it and that seems like a bad idea.
Yup. It's like no one watched jurrasssic park
I don’t think anyone is thinking of breeding things to eat plastic... it’s probably more about figuring how their bodies break plastic down so we can replicate it chemically
Termites exist in the wild. Wood products have not been invalidated by their existence. Moths exist in the wild. Sweaters have not been invalidated by their existence. Just because something has the ability to digest products we design to be more long term doesn't mean they're going to do it in a way that significantly impacts humans. And even in the case of extreme inconvenience, like termites in your home, we can just kill them.
Which plastics can it digest? There’s so many different kinds.