At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot… And that we probably shouldn’t make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)… But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn’t it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?
It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole “we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment” angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they’re very resistant to degradation… Maybe I’m just ignorant, though.
Of course, I don’t think we’re actually in danger of bacteria suddenly eating through plastic like it’s a moldy apple or anything… Obviously wood is still hard to break down, and plastics aren’t too dissimilar. It’s just kind of cool that we can build something super cheaply out of plastic and it will hold up well in the elements without much care at all.