Scissors cut paper. Paper wraps rock. Lab-made enzyme eats plastic A new enzyme developed at the University of Portsmouth will enable the recycling of plastic used for disposable drinks containers. A commercial infrastructure based around the enzyme would have two benefits: disposing of the original container, and creating new clear plastic for reuse. Professor John McGeehan said the …
Some scientists can read, some can write, some can do both of those, some can even do numbers and logic and other fact-based stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Pedler
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0670035/
And, as many others have noted, Mutant 59 was directly or indirectly based on Doomwatch, S1 Ep1: The Plastic Easters.
The Daily Mail and its anti-science friends are only a few decades late catching on to this plastic dependence. Maybe they're finally learning to read. It'd be a start.
George RR Martin in the 90s did a TV movie pilot for a series called Doorways where the protagonists could jump through a portal into an alternative dimension where things were the same but slightly different. This preceded Sliders by about a year (wonder where they got the idea). Anyway one of the plot lines of the dimension they jumped into was that on earth 2 (or was it 3, I haven’t seen it since 1994) they had designed a bug that would solve the earths ecological problems by eating oil based waste. Only the bug spread worldwide eating all the oil, and anything made from it such as plastics. As a result the earth was a much healthier place to live due to no pollution, but we were pretty much living back in the 1800s technologically.
From an isolated engineered enzyme? feck all. Enzymes do not replicate on their own.
We have an increasing history of using tame, domesticated bugs to create enzymes which cannot escape the lab/factory. In Biolabs we use E. coli bacteria on the open lab bench containing all manner of genes. They are heavily crippled, they need a critical amino acid not common in the environment as their ability to make it was removed, they cannot have sex with other bacteria so cannot get it back from the environment and various other technical cripplings. If you go onto one of the biotech company sites selling those bacteria tweaked so they are ready to have dna put into them then all the cripplings are listed.
So, to make this enzymes we can just plug it into a domestic strain, perhaps one of those churning out clothes washing enzymes and which have been doing so for decades without escaping.
Yours Muscleguy BSc, Phd.
I assume any bacteria made to produce the enzymes have a risk of escaping, possibly even the gene migrating to other bacteria... but at the same time there is a risk they loose the ability naturally.
Mainly natural things don't run away catastrophically too often... but with out help things can get out of hand locally.
Note however this is an enzyme, not a bacteria.
It does not self replicate
The trouble starts if someone reverse engineers it back into a bacteria and that escapes into the wild.
Doesn't anyone think it impressive they found the prototype of this enzyme already in the wild?
Evolution in action.
Well yes. Its funny how often people forget that crude oil is a natural product so of course there are bacteria that eat it: there are bacteria that will have a go at practically anything.
But for all the doom doom about it escaping, we have a world full of bacteria, fungi, insects and goodness knows what else that happily eat wood, and we manage to live with it quite happily.
Incidentally I am very unsure about this "Plastic lasts thousands of years" stuff. I'm 30 plus years out of date now, but when I was briefly in the industry the problem that was always exercising us was stopping the stuff breaking down ion its own.
Read about this yesterday and it sounds amazing, hopefully they can produce it enough quantity to make it a viable solution.
Although, I am reminded of the fact that in Niven's Ringworld novels it's revealed that the Ringworld creator's civilisation failed because of an errant bacteria being accidentally introduced that ate all of their superconductors. There'd need to be some fairly tight controls around using this to avoid it getting out into the "wild".
Yep, the scariest word in that article is "accidentally". What else are they accidentally creating and what are the odds it might not be controllable... Lots of sci-fi references on similar stories but I like Michael Critchon's "The Andromeda Strain" in which an alien bacterium is brought back to earth and mutates rapidly. At one stage it likes dissolving rubber...
> ... Ringworld creator's civilisation failed because of an errant bacteria being accidentally introduced that ate all of their superconductors.
As I recollect, it was not accidental - it was a deliberate act by a (different) alien civilisation.
Which somehow makes all this talk about enzymes and the (presumed) bacteria that produce them slightly more scary.
and once they've eaten all the plastic, and having gone through (unexpectedly, but of course) blitz adaptation to consume metal, "scientists have discovered, to their concern, that a new strain of bacteria has developed, which is capable of disassembling human body and turning it into compost in less than 2 milis
;)
"and having gone through (unexpectedly, but of course) blitz adaptation to consume metal, "
Good luck with that.
I know you're joking, but you can't "consume" metals very easily. Completely different metabolic pathway needed, and the bacteria would need to arise quite independently. With all the steel structures we have around the place, you'd have thought if it was easy bacteria would be chewing them up by now.
Concrete however...thiobacter concretivorans lives in hot springs and uses limestone as a substrate. The pools of nuclear reactors turned out to be a similar environment. But it does like warm conditions.
So they shouldn't alternately excrete perovskites, electroparamagnetic organics, graphene and nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes? What's a successor microbe to do? Straight up turn terepthalate into photonic crystals that emulate gold or some fashionable late transition metal? WiMP-consuming hyperperiodic bosonic condensates that turn deep space into light daytime talk/comedy space?
ViM>You can't "consume" metals very easily.
Not until the spring-steel connective tissue patch really hits 9.0.
You don't want to sample compartment syndrome at 8.0. Ping!
This post has been deleted by its author
I think some readers may see that as inferring this is a problem of Chinese origin. It's not; their action has simply highlighted the scale of the issue.
Yes - that's exactly what I meant. Not blaming China - if blaming anyone, then blaming the UK for just paying to push the problem onto someone else.
"Yes - that's exactly what I meant. Not blaming China - if blaming anyone, then blaming the UK for just paying to push the problem onto someone else."
For that matter, does New York (other US coastal cities are available) still barge it's rubbish out to sea and dump it? If not, how recently did they stop?
For that matter, does New York (other US coastal cities are available) still barge it's rubbish out to sea and dump it? If not, how recently did they stop?
They definitely weren't dumping it in the ocean in 1987, otherwise NYC wouldn't have had the garbage barge incident:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trash-fight-long-voyage-new-york-unwanted-garbage-barge-article-1.812895
They definitely weren't dumping it in the ocean in 1987, otherwise NYC wouldn't have had the garbage barge incident:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trash-fight-long-voyage-new-york-unwanted-garbage-barge-article-1.812895
Thanks for that. That's probably the incident that got distorted in my hazy memory and made me think they were dumping it at sea.
I think some readers may see that as inferring this is a problem of Chinese origin
Ridiculous, the origin of it suddenly becoming more of a priority problem is that suddenly the problem can't be offloaded for someone else to deal with.
The SEP field broke down, and reality poked it's nose round the door, grinned smugly and presented a huge bill.
When I was a kid, I used to supplement pocket money looking for glass bottles that could be returned for a few pennys (I think penny chews were just moving into 2p range - so that'll give you an idea the date). Then plastic was more convenient, now we're talking about returning to to a similar solution (only with stick not carrot).
I can't decide, one step forward, two steps back or two steps forward, one step back.
I was at a music festival with my family. There were those plastic glasses being used and people (generally did recycle on site). However, we noticed children/teens collecting glasses from the field. The staff at the bar agreed to give free drinks via tokens (that could also be used on chips/pizza). The children turned it into an enterprise (although I did notice turf wars between different groups of children). However - the field was generally rubbish free. Child labour but the children were perfectly happy doing it, in return for free drinks and food.
I remember returning bottles for 2p too (back when a 10p mix up was a really big bag of sweets)
Single-use is design tragedy of sorts. Brutalism for nothingness fans. You either integrate the pipecleaner with the single-use straw or call it trash and imagine it thoroughly enough to pop out in a way that at least agonizes gulls if not performing as silage straw, doing turtle-gut cleansing that missing seaweeds no longer do, and making supercaustic in breakdown to combat carbonic acid.
I remember when beer was less than 1 shilling a pint.
More to the point, try keeping count of the bits of plastic you throw away each day - yoghurt pots, snack wrappers, bubble wrap and polystyrene popcorn packaging, toothpaste tubes etc,etc,etc - all carefully made, high spec materials made to be thrown away.
"Black Jacks and Fruit Salads were 1/2 p each when I was growing up."
Pah! Kids!. They were 4 for a penny when I was a kid (that's 1d not 1 new penny too!)
Technically, they cost a farthing each, but even I'm not quite old enough to remember actual farthings.
(and yes, for you youngsters, farthing as in the Penny Farthing Bicycle, so-called because a penny was a large coin and a farthing, a 1/4 penny, was very small)
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