Now if we can breed bacteria with a taste for PMMA we could launch a really novel network attack.
(This put’s me on a watch list, doesn’t it?)
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Which have been around since the 1980’s…
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I do not think that word means what you think it means…
Well, yes it costs money to pull out and refine.
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The long-term cost of the environmental impact is literally orders of magnitude higher than that.
Well, the main formula is what you show, but to be fair plastics are often more complicated than that. Besides the monomers there can be other compounds added as initiators, stabilizers, or catalysts. Looking up PET it seems there genuinely isn’t chlorine but there is a small amount of antimony.
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uhm bring back, please. It pertains to the topic of bacteria and their viability. I don’t know much polymer chemistry.
This would be more exciting if PET wasn’t the most recyclable plastic, and therefore the plastic in least need of this kind of processing. I don’t personally see plastics in landfills being likely to reach the concentrations required to sustain a species like this, nor plastics in the ocean, so I don’t see it being used effectively in those contexts either, at least without some modification such that it can readily sustain itself and seek those plastics out in a wide variety of different environmental conditions…
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What about keep the plastic where it is, dig it out for reprocessing later? Waste dumps of today are mines of tomorrow.
Greenies. Never thinking into the future.
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I’ll take this opportunity to once again ask the internet if they remember a short story set in what is apparently a post-apocalyotic future where two people (father and son?) dig through ancient land fills looking for “dragon’s blood” (plastic). I’d love to read it again. Not because it was necessarily good but because nearly 30 years after first reading it I’m starting to wonder if I imagined it.
It is this presence of antimony in whatever quantities it constitutes recycled fiber for carpeting, Polar Fleece™…
… and other synthetic fleece, and other consumer items (home furnishings, clothing) that some folks in the green movement have criticized, calling PET nonideal for upcycling. As these spun [recycled] PET fibers break down, they do turn into fine particles that can be breathed into the lungs.1
Making Thinsulate® from old plastic soda pop bottles for sleeping bags, comforters and winter coats is one thing, getting a dose of antimony as these all get old and brittle and aerosolize is… eh… probably not what the treehuggers signed up for when aiming for virtuous reuse of PET.
Fwiw I have a natural latex pad for a rug by the front door, it’s about 10 years old, and it’s turning to dust as well. You can’t win either way, everything breaks down. Sic transit gloria mundi…
-
http://www3.epa.gov/airtoxics/hlthef/antimony.html
and
http://www1.uni-jena.de/Antimony2011/T07%20-%20Battersby_pdf.pdf
(interesting discussion, sorry I missed it)
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Many years ago I spoke with someone in the City of Austin’s “Solid Waste” Department (now rebranded as “Austin Resource Recovery”) and I was told that phrase, pretty much verbatim, is exactly how the landfill operators see the future. Absolutely. To that end, they try to keep reliable 3-D maps of what got buried where.
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Absolutely no chance of it mutating and going on to eat all the hydrocarbonz?
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There are already hydrocarbon utilizing microorganisms. Lovely little things making slimy mats in airplane fuel systems. They are affectionately called “HUM bugs”.
The things love water emulsified in the fuel. They settle on the phase boundary and gorge up on the yummy hydrocarbons.
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Wouldn’t it be better to toss it into bioreactors anyway? Why release a foreign species into already unstable environments?
You have to find, collect, sort and then put the stuff to said reactor.
The landfill is already there, and more material is coming with an already established process.
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One hydrogen desolve in water problem solved.
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