I’ve seen this every year for a decade still not a thing
Quality research is slow my dude.
and sensationalist journalism of preliminary research is faster than light
That’s nice and all but these are fungi release CO2 into the atmosphere just like burning it would. It’s a bit counter-intuitive but burning it with carbon capture is less CO2 emitting.
Filtering out particles is obvious requirement and easier than filtering CO2. This is all a worse solution than to simply use less plastic. Taxing plastic out of existence is the real solution.
Preach.
Everyone wants a silver bullet to the problem. The silver bullet begins and ends with a corporate pocketbook.
Maybe we can silver bullet a few executive conspirators too?
Taxing wasteful uses and protecting life saving uses (sanitization, hospitals, etc). Is the only solution. Treat every other approach as distractions by people who want to profit from the way things are.
Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of all time. But just like nuclear energy, it’s also the most deadly to us if we are stupid.
Man, Vincent and Jules were some really fun guys.
Don’t even ask. Just start releasing that shit.
Step 1: make everything from plastics
Step 2: create plastic eating fungus to get rid of the trash
Step 3: create serious damage to all parts of our society and technology, as plastic eating fungus spores get everywhere, including our food chain and your brain.
Theoretically if they don’t produce toxins as a byproduct of plastic metabolism, eating the plastics out of our brains could (in an idealized and highly unlikely case) be a good thing. If they don’t also eat organic matter they’ll starve out when the plastics are gone and our immune system could clean out the debris left behind
Can you eat the mushrooms later? Circle of life!
This is really bugging me. The article claims the fungus is an edible mushroom, but Pestalotiopsis (the spores on the right) is an endophytic, microscopic ascomycete. Not a mushroom and certainly not edible. So why is there a picture of Pluteus on the left? I can only imagine the author googled “Pestalotiopsis mushroom” and grabbed the first picture that came up.
This article (https://www.treehugger.com/mushroom-that-eats-plastic-5121023) goes into more detail. There are at least three species. It’s from 2022, so there’s probably something more recent…
From July last year (https://www.shroomer.com/mycoremediation-plastic-eating-mushrooms/)
Nooo fuck this is stupid!
Plastic in landfills is sequestered carbon! Why release it into the atmosphere?
Breeding bacteria to eat plastic will make plastic less useful as a material. Plastic is awesome because it DOESN’T rot. If we do release plastic eating microorganisms that might change. Whatever environmentalist think, we use plastics for a reason.
What we need is:
- Create plastics without oil and from sustainable energy
- Recycle plastics (invent better plastics and recycling processes)
- Stop throwing plastic in the oceans
- bury plastic in landfill to sequester carbon
What exactly is solved by introducing plastic eating microorganisms into the ecosystem? If microplastics don’t deteriorate, they’ll eventually become like sand and all the other shit. I swear to God this is the stupidest thing since solar fricking roadways.
PS: If you absolutely don’t want to recycle or bury plastic you can also burn it in the right circumstances. Instead of feeding it to mushrooms and releasing CO2 and methane into the air you get heat and can capture the CO2.
PPS: Microplastics is a qustion of regulation. And garbage dumping into rivers (like most of the plastic in the oceans comes from a few rivers) is a problem of economic idiocy. Neoliberal Ideology is produced in the US and exported into developing countries. Loans and shit demand privatization of all sorts of services. Including garbage removal. The result? People dump trash in the rivers because muh socialism is bad. Plastic in the ocean is a problem with very simple non-technical solutions.
Would be great if mushrooms don’t burn the carbon and turned it into some other compound using energy(maybe something like fossil fuels)
I did see something about new methods through chemical processes to turn more plastics back into the feedstock. Search “plastic feedstock” or “circular feedstock” or something. It probably requires some chemicals and heat and pressure or something, but that could be powered by solar or wind. It’s just a question of economics (money), investments, and most likely planning.
But really, burning plastic isn’t “nice” but fundamentally there isn’t a big difference between some mineral rock buried below the earth or plastic. And with carbon sequestration it’s a net positive - at least once we stop using fossil fuels and switch to a circular economy.
