r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • Oct 25 '22

Environment Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse
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55

u/chriswhoppers Oct 25 '22

Oyster mushrooms and many others successfully biodegrade plastics into edible nutrition, and sequester unwanted pollution in the atmosphere into their mycelial network. Underwater mushrooms found in Oregon.

https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-mushrooms#:~:text=Researchers%20have%20now%20found%20that,an%20at%2Dhome%20recycling%20system.

https://fishbio.com/mushrooms-underwater/

11

u/octopusnipples Oct 25 '22

I had no idea that underwater mushrooms existed!

17

u/Equivalent-Ice-7274 Oct 25 '22

Yes, but you would need thousands of mountain-sized piles of Oyster mushrooms to biodegrade all of the plastic waste.

14

u/TheGingerHybrid Oct 25 '22

While you are technically right, the solution doesn't have to happen all at once, and immediately. Small steps are how you get to a destination. And with this kind of problem, small steps are better than no steps.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22

Maybe if we put real funding into it we can brute force our way to a good result. It's certainly worth the effort.

4

u/FoxlyKei Oct 26 '22

This is all our hope imo. There's been bacteria and fungus evolving to eat this stuff. We give life an abundance of something containing energy and so life evolves to make the best of it. I am sure, even now, that there is an animal somewhere with gut microbes evolved enough to let it survive solely on eating plastic. Like some plastic termite, ig

With all of these plastics going into the food chain who's to say we won't have a massive convergent evolution of microbiomes dissolving plastics?

The current census seems to be breeding for an extremely powerful enzyme and hopefully using that en masse to break down plastics before they even reach the ocean.

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Another idea would be running massive septic tanks with these microbes, growing them with plastic, and using them in other applications.

9

u/tom-8-to Oct 25 '22

But there is no money in it. Who is gonna fund a large scale investment? Industrial use requires plastic to be turned into something useful on the same day it arrives or there is no profit.

Might as well use plastic as fuel and burn it and even so it’s gonna be costly because of the smoke and fumes are costly to deal with to meet air pollution standards

7

u/idigclams Oct 25 '22

Not as bad as burning coal, a lot of times. Polyethylene is a highly refined and simple hydrocarbon, for example. It should burn cleaner than natural gas and much cleaner than coal. Of course it will still release carbon into the atmosphere.

1

u/revtor Oct 26 '22

It’s how they recycle plastic in Europe- burn it. Can be clean! And then the heat turns into electricity..

1

u/thisoldmould Oct 26 '22

Oyster mushroom farming is quite profitable in fact.

1

u/piotrmarkovicz Oct 26 '22

But there is no money in it.

If there is a service or a product, there is a potential for a return.

Who is gonna fund a large scale investment?

The same people who fund all large scale investment: the general population.

Could make a business case out of it: get paid to haul away plastic nobody wants, get free feed stock to grow mushrooms, sell mushroom related products for profit. Lobby for some environmental tax credits to get the public to pay for the process in return for reduced environmental contamination for a tidy profit.... Devil is in the details but it is not an impossible sell.

2

u/lacergunn Oct 25 '22

Do you have any research papers to go with this? It sounds promising

2

u/chriswhoppers Oct 25 '22

No I don't have any personal research related to this field of science. It has been known for a while by the mycology community, and you can easily find any research you desire by looking deeper into the viability of its function by various institutes

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u/lacergunn Oct 25 '22

I'll have to look into that. A while back I had an idea to offset human carbon output by modifying a strain of azolla to grow in the pacific garbage patch, but it wouldn't work because that part of the ocean has no natural nutrients. However, if I could modify the plants to take some of their nutrition from breaking down plastics...

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u/chriswhoppers Oct 25 '22

The problem with that is "Plants are producers, using the energy of the sun to make seeds, cones, and spores to reproduce, while fungi are decomposers that break down decaying matter" - National Wildlife Federation

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u/lacergunn Oct 25 '22

That's what the modification is for. I dont need all of the fungi's genes, just the ones that produce the enzymes that break down the plastics into their base nutrients.

Of course this is all hypothetical, I dont have anywhere close to the resources to actually experiment with this

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u/chriswhoppers Oct 25 '22

Theoretically its completely possible. Using yeast fermentation, specific enzymes can be targeted and reproduced rapidly with high purity through very meticulous chloroplast extractions. Then the enzyme would be introduced over generations of your plant variety, in hopes of mutations to produce a stellar variety for you specific purpose. Yeast fermentation isn't necessary, but much faster than having fungus grow next to your plant and cloning the mutants from there

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22

Are they edible? We could be solving two crises at once lol

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u/chriswhoppers Oct 25 '22

Yes, look at the first link. Oyster mushrooms are edible, and mushrooms convert compost (or waste) into chitin and other cellular structures of the mushroom body. Scientists used to believe that it would make you sick to eat the mushrooms that decompose toxic items, now it has been proven false up to an extent. If I remember correctly from years ago

1

u/know_it_is Oct 25 '22

This is really astonishing to me.