What's your newest obsession?

[on the rocks]

I have been thinking a lot about a sci-fi story idea where an attempt to address the horrendous plastic pollution problem has unintended consequences.  As I'm sure everyone is aware, there's an absolute shit-ton of plastic garbage floating around out there.  It's in the ocean, it's in the rivers, it's on the land, it's on the side of the roads...  It never breaks down on any reasonable time frame, it only fragments into tinier and tinier pieces until it's small enough to get ingested by the entire food chain where who knows what the fuck it's doing to everything.

So I think about a scenario where a group of scientist genetically engineer a bacteria that literally eats plastic. It latches on and somehow feeds off the incredible amount of energy that's stored in the molecular bonds of plastic, as anyone who has tossed an empty water bottle into a campfire can attest.  They release it into the ocean, possibly on the down-low because they've convinced themselves it's too great a problem to wait from some extended approval process from the entire world's governments. At first, it is a great success as over the next decade, ocean plastics start coming way down.  Currents distribute the ever growing bacteria population around the world.

But then the side effects start showing up.  Certain seals on various types of ship begin failing.  People pull their swimsuits out of storage for the warm weather and find the artificial fabrics are full of holes.  The bacteria starts being found thousands of miles inland.  At first they think it's being moved by like boats and stuff, but then they figure out it's actually getting lofted into the air during storms or something and carried inland.  The ubiquity of plastic in every day life means it has a nearly endless food supply no matter where it goes.  You could be typing on your keyboard and suddenly the keys start to shatter because it found its way into your home.  Soon we're seeing critical medical devices fail as the bacteria finds its way into hospitals.

So far, it's bad, but we're trying to adapt; bringing back things made from glass and metal which helps.

But the bacteria that was engineered to eat certain plastic compounds keeps mutating; adapting to an ever increasing number of formulations.  And then the really big, "oh fuck" happens.  Since all these plastics are made from petroleum, eventually some of the bacteria evolve to consume raw petroleum.  And it can eat petroleum in an anaerobic environment.  It starts contaminating actual oil deposits via drilling equipment.  The world plunges into an unprecedented energy crisis collapsing the entire world economy.

So these are the intrusive thoughts I'm currently obsessing over when I can't fall asleep, or whatever.

[OneLove]

The Phillipines would be a good place to start. In some areas they literally live in floating plastic detritus.

[on the rocks]

Oh I've already thought that part thru.  Ocean currents create these gyers in the middle of each ocean; one per hemisphere in the case of the Atlantic and Pacific.  These tend to concentrate floating debris over time.  So for example, if one goes north of Hawaii a thousand miles or so, there will be a higher concentration of plastic floating around.  Not literally a 'garbage island' like headlines sometimes describe it, but drag a fine net for a little while and it'll catch tons of small plastic chunks.  My thinking is these are the places the engineered bacteria are released with the understanding the currents will keep bringing them an endless of supply of food.

That being said, you're right; there are massive near shore concentrations of plastic pollution in the part of the world stretching from India thru Indonesia and up to the Philippines and China.  Poor regulation coupled with ill-conceived ideas to send Western waste plastic to that part of the world to be "recycled" have come together to create a big fucking mess.

Which is why I think initially, this unauthorized release would be welcome by much of the public.  "Hey, problem solved!" they'll think.  Until the other consequences start to catch up with everyone.

I'm enamored with the idea of trying to implement a technology solution to a problem technology created in the first place because no one thought it through long term and everyone just acted in their own short term self interest.  The collective result being a slow moving disaster that causes people to rush into an apparent solution with, again, not thinking it through long term.  And it's just this endless cycle of trying to chase the previous bad decision.

"There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed a fly.  Perhaps she'll die."
"She swallowed a spider to catch the fly that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her..."

Y'all familiar with this children's song?  The subject keeps swallowing larger and larger critters to try and catch the previously ingested animal until we get to:
"There was an old lady who swallowed a horse.  She's dead, of course!"
When you're a kid, it's a silly song, but as an adult this is a very thoughtful fable with concise exploration of the consequences of fucking with mother nature.

[hö]

Believe it or not but plastic eating bacteria actually are a thing. Check out Ideonella sakaiensis

[OneLove]

Riverborne toxins like PCBs tend to collect and concentrate in eddies. That makes me wonder if there are places in the oceans where currents meet and collect plastics,  which could then be processed.

I have always thought that the best use of garbage in general would be to harvest its nuclear energy. There is a neverending source of garbage.

[Lillab]

Riverborne toxins like PCBs tend to collect and concentrate in eddies. That makes me wonder if there are places in the oceans where currents meet and collect plastics,  which could then be processed.

I have always thought that the best use of garbage in general would be to harvest its nuclear energy. There is a neverending source of garbage.

Yes, these collection places in the ocean do exist, and OTR already mentioned them above. Using plastic eating bacteria works because energy is released as plastic breaks down. You can in fact dissolve plastic into fuel. A lot of garbage is similar, and a few countries burn their garbage for fuel. Without some major breakthroughs in physics, reclaiming the nuclear energy is not feasible. The only nuclear we have gotten to work is using very large and unstable atoms. Most of the matter we encounter around us is in a very stable state. Small atoms tend to group together to make bigger atoms, and large atoms break apart to make smaller atoms, but most atoms in garbage are very happy where they are at and will seriously resist change. With what we currently know, it will take us more energy to break these atoms down than we would be able to extract from them. Yes, matter is made of energy, but that energy is completely out of reach for us.

[on the rocks]

The big issue with plastic is two-fold.  First and foremost, it's always going to be cheaper to make new plastic rather than reclaim used plastic. Barring some massive technological leap, that is.  But that doesn't seem very likely given the chemistry at work with plastic.

So then the other huge problem is in order to try and recycle plastic, one needs to painstakingly sort it by type.  There's literally thousands of plastic formulations at this point, and each type would be a contaminant in the recycling of another type.  And it's just not feasible to collect waste plastic of the same type at scale.  Most plastic most people put in their recycle bins ends up in a landfill, I hate to say. 

[OneLove]

It staggers my imagination when I try and imagine the sheer bulk of trash generated by billions of people each day. There has to be some way we can put that garbage to work. I hope someone out there is working on this problem.