Why This May Be the Future of Plastic Recycling
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- Опубликовано: 3 апр 2023
- Why Worms May Be the Future of Plastic Recycling. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/undecided - Enter promo code UNDECIDED for 83% off and 3 extra months for FREE! The vast majority of the world’s plastic isn’t recycled because it’s currently cheaper to produce new plastic. But nature has evolved in response. Several species of insects, bacteria, and fungi can break down plastics all on their own. By studying the enzymes that make this happen, bioengineers are realizing ways to degrade plastics that don't involve burning them or dousing them in chemical solvents. One company has successfully developed a plastic eating enzyme that doesn’t need industrial conditions to work, allowing consumers to add bioplastics to compost piles at home. How did researchers get us to this plastic recycling solution? And does this mean we can have our plastics and eat them, too?
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I'm never going to eat worms or bugs Matt. I don't care what the WEF says.
Lol my gf overheard they're making bottles and fabric from recycled pet waste and I had to advise we were not in fact drinking from or wearing cat and dog poop 😅
@IIISi HF LE we've created a mass extinction 🤦🏻♂️
I see this as a waste of a resource. These plastics can be broken down into carbon by pyrolysis into carbon and carbon neutral fuels. Including all of the gases. Without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by using an induction furnace process.
Let's just pretend we're going to carry on business as usual 😅
I’m currently commercializing a technology out of MIT where we are able to upcycle any type of PET & Polyester plastic waste to virgin grade quality PET. We are able to remove colors and other impurities in the process, and we can do this at an energy intensity of about 80% less compared to traditional means of plastic production. After seeing the last few videos you have made on plastic, I now have a new goal where I hope this venture I’m working on makes it to one your videos! Thanks for all you have done informing the world of the struggles of plastic recycling!
Good luck! I hope you succeed.
Any idea if it would work with PETG?
What about the bpa or bps problematic? But I'm interested in your solution. I'm based in Tanzania and there is a big plastic problem in East Africa
I don't mind my tax dollars going to this. Or the reverse engineering of sriracha, for that matter. All good things.
@@logicalfundy We are currently expanding the research into thermoplastics such as PETG, and so far there are very promising results. Is not as far developed compared to our upcycling of PET/Polyester, but with a few more process improvements, we are confident we can recycle it into similar quality end products.
A fairly recent (2020+ I believe) study was looking for clean blood samples for a baseline, or control. They tested blood samples in the US, and found them contaminated with microplastics. Then they tested in the EU, China, and kept trying with smaller and smaller populations. *_ALL_* of the samples contained microplastics. They finally found a clean sample - from US military blood samples taken before plastics were invented. If I can find the author again I'll update this.
Really only matters if there are negative consequences
@@reiverdaemon search on study plastics health effects. There are many studies proving problems already
In other words, they bio engineer bugs to produce enzymes. Then somehow or another some group of people will eat the bugs or something that the bugs were around, then the enzymes slowly dissolve them from the nside out. I don't know what I am talking about.
@@eeledahc no, it's more like plastics get torn up by weather, cars, animals using it for bedding, etc., and it washes into the oceans where it collects and gets further degraded by surf and fish. When it gets small enough, birds and fish mistake it for food and eat it or it's just so small it's carried in water which we drink.
I think that the study wasn't plastics in general as much as it was talking about forever chemicals or PFOAs and such. I remember hearing about the study on John Oliver's show on PFOAs.
You make a really good point at the end: algae and mycelium can replace plastic, we can't just focus our efforts on ways to break it down, and certainly not just continuing to make more plastic packaging from the current slew of waste we already created
Yaaaa.. but we will. Because it’s cheapest to do oil plastics.
I agree.
I would like to have seen a discussion of what is, exactly, the byproduct of this process, and have there been any studies of what happens when plants are grown in it. In other other words, are we ending up with something that’s beneficial, or just something that will, like the plastic, need to be disposed of?
Plastic is an organic molecule that certainly can be eaten by organisms without creating more problems. Plastic is carbon and hydrogen bonds, with oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, chlorine.
Sulfur and chlorine are valuable for batteries, agriculture, water treatment, industrial chemistry, etc.
Agree with Charlie on this one, but I should have touched on that in the video directly. 👍
I had the exact same question!
@@UndecidedMF Yep, big miss on that one.
@@UndecidedMF There have been hopeful advances in science that have, upon further review, been shown to be less than good. Even if plastics *can* be eaten by organisms, the question is will the organisms eat 100% of the plastic. There are *hundreds* of chemicals in plastics that act like potent and harmful hormones in humans - if the organisms and enzymes leave significant amounts of these chemicals in real-world situations, human health could suffer even more than if the plastics were left whole.
Scene two: We create a strain of bacteria that thrives on plastics, which then spreads, causing widespread catastrophic damage to our homes, vehicles, electronics, etc. (I am only half-joking.)
Complete destruction of all modern housing vinyl siding,Azek exterior trim, Styrofoam foundation insulation all annihilated in theaters now!!!
This would be a great update to have a debate with..... I think this is very important for all of us... thinking soon... this will be dumped and we cannot re-capture it if we find out bad things later (look at that lab recently that was in the news which i cannot discuss.. you know what i am talking about if you study politics)
I hope more people give John a like for this... and future talks are brought up regarding this *major* (major in my honest opinion) topic.... which is innovation that can lead to bad side effects. Speaking as someone who knows all about soil microbes and teaches them... believe me, there is some crazy bacterias out there that do wonderful things and also... scary things.
Termites eat the wood we build houses from now.
We'll have plenty of GM microbes to eat plastics, and do countless other tasks. They won't spread, just like brewer's yeast won't spread to eat your house or family.
Engineered microbes will be easy to control because they'll be wimpy by design outside of their one purpose, to live in a big tank of garbage and break everything down into sludge.
The general public watches too many wacky zombie movies.
Matt, I'm a little upset that the video title isn't 'Dew worms have a future in plastic recycling?'
Why don't you make that video then
Do dew worms?
@@GeneralBananana Do Dew
I know I'm eager for the PLA enzyme to hit the open market. Being able to safely break down my 3d prints will be a huge help. The pile of shame could really use a helping cilia. xD
I've been sorting and stockpiling my PLA misprints, test prints, and purge lines for months, waiting for a local recycling program to launch after over a year of covid delays. The total quantity so far is a fraction of the commercial packaging goes into our recycling bin every week, but I'd still feel bad throwing it into the trash.
Matt…you truly have a way with words,”have our plastics and eat them too”!
The best words: “reduce my dependence on RUclips “. Brilliant!
Love the topic, garbage has always bothered me.
👍
"have our plastics and eat them, too"
A fun phrase for anyone who has seen the movie Crimes of the Future
@@UndecidedMF on this one here, I am NOT undecided !!!
I'm excited about enzymes that can break down our existing plastic waste but the future needs to not involve the plastics we're using.
I firmly believe that industrially compostable is functionally useless because it relies too much on the plastic finding its way into the right place.
I agree.
I was always worried when my superworms ate the Styrofoam and bags, never thought they were actually digesting it, thought it was just boring through and making micro plastics. This is neat
Way back in 1995 I got involved with a project to recycle HDPE into plastic pallets. While we were able to complete all the test equipment and even scale the first extruder to make the pallets we could not find a end customer for the pallets. All do to government regulations...
For pallets? Do tell. Wood pallets are heavy and die fairly quickly. I don't see that happening with plastic ones. A perfect use for old plastics.
Fire spread constraints? What government constraints?
Thanks for all that detail research on a big issue. Most impressive to me is the idea of being able to create a decent percentage of virgin material from this process. Issues at hand are of scale and any long term repercussions from the enzymes/worms/bacteria, etc. to the ecosystem and species health. It's a great start, imho. Hopefully something can get done before droughts, hurricanes, floods, fires, tornadoes and atmospheric rivers recycle it all back anyway in our own Hearse Song with enthalpic entropy. ;-P
I read a science fiction book back in the 1970s that predicted the discovery of an enzyme or bacteria of sorts that ate waste plastics. The problem was when the waste plastic supply was exhausted the enzymes went wild and started eating everything, everywhere, that was made of plastic. Turns out the enzymes became great hunters I sure wish I could remember the name of that book.
The name of the story was “ Mutant 59 the Plastic Eater(s)” by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, 1971.
@@robcranny1464 - cool. Thank you
It really is sad how much plastic waste we go through, we need to change our ways.
Agreed. I do think plastic is an amazing material, but we have to find a better way to make use of it. If we can truly make fully biodegradable plastics, it's going to solve a lot of problems.
@@UndecidedMF Yep.
See ya in a few days on Trek In Time!
You should look into an Australian company kelpie, they make “plastic” pellets that work in traditional plastic machines out of kelp. Best thing is they naturally degrade so if they end up in the sea no issues. Made fully out of kelp, very cool stuff.
Interesting.
As somebody who got a 3D printer for Christmas, this has been a topic of concern for me. Being able to compost PLA in a residential compost pile would be huge, as PLA is the top type of plastic used by 3D printing. Although "Evanesto" would have to endure temperatures of around 200°C for a short period of time, as that's the temperature 3D printing generally uses. Perhaps the emzyme can be made available separately if it can't be made compatible with 3D printing.
I'm also wondering if the processes compatible with PET would also work with PETG - which is PET with a glycol modifier. Which is also a plastic commonly used in 3D printing.
Would also like to know if there has been any progress made with ABS, PTU, and other materials used in 3D printing.
"How do we clean up our mess?" Don't let things get messed up in the first place, right? But that isn't PROFITABLE...... There you have it.
I'm hoping that these work out well. I can envision a day when enzymes and other catalysts are used to "farm" old waste dumps for materials; imagine turning waste mountains back to mole hills, and maybe one day being able to use said land for food production again.
From a far more practical standpoint, being able to turn these materials back into resources that can be sold to factories for production of new materials will drastically increase recycling.
Plastics can be melted, filtered, turned into Diesel fuel. It’s crude diesel, but is already being done by lots of people who live off grid; they use it for generators and lawnmowers. It’s not expensive to do at all.
We make synthetic rubber sheets from discarded single use plastic bags, shopping bags etc. More than two metric ton of plastic bags are recycled everyday in our factory for rubber sheets, which later used as raw materials for local footwear business. Our plant is located in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Just because we think we have some solutions doesn't mean we can now ignore the huge problem we have with plastics.
Agreed. I don't see this as "the" solution, but just one part of a multifaceted approach. I'm a huge fan of plastic alternatives like mycelium, algae, etc.
I have a Master's in Physical Chemistry and I found this video encouraging, especially that plastics may be made to biodegrade better. That was the take-home message I got. Keep on making these videos!
I recall years ago that in Japan they were doing something very similar. Not necessarily plastic bottles but some source of waste.
Technology that is underutilized and poorly developed, but has high chance of working is Plasma gasification - to remove the plastic permanently from the environment, get useful byproducts and recover energy, btnit has to be combined with a wholesale move to algae, mycelium and less packaging overall.
These breakthroughs seem promising. I'm hopeful that we can overcome the economic barrier to proper sustainable plastic. Plastic is so useful, which is why it is so ubiquitous, so it would be great if we can keep using it without destroying the environment.
We'll easily be recycling plastics on a large scale by the late century. The solutions are nearly at hand using likely genetically engineered organisms. The sooner the better.
That's doubtful. This can deal with a lot of plastic if scaled but the main issue in the long run is going to be microplastics, plastic takes about 500 years to biodegrade, most plastic has been produced in the last 50 years and we're already seeing significant issues. Plastic isn't going to disappear completely but the way it's currently used is completely unsustainable. I suspect we'll see a mix of moves away from plastic, biodegradable alternatives where possible and recycling. But in the long run simple recycling doesn't allow us to keep using plastic as we do today.
Plastic should totally be replaced with a more viable environmental substance. The fact that there is not much research done to find the perfect replacement astound me. Why would people put money to decompose polyester when it still being actively created everyday polluting our earth. This decompose things should be done later when we already have a perfect replacement for plastic that are cheaper and can be naturally degraded within years unlike plastic.
I think any living thing feeding off of plastic is scary. There is so much “food” for them. 😅
I’m ok with the enzymes :D
I keep thinking it might be immoral to trap and force feed living creatures garbage. If karma is a thing... but we humans do far worse already. At least we can start to clean up.
I agree - while it's bad for 90+% of our uses of plastic that it takes SO long to break down, there are some uses for which it is critical it doesn't break down, nor be prone to causing some kind of infestation...
For that reason whether we want to keep using plastic or never use it again its important right now to reduce the amount we use.
An immediate actoin would be to boycott plastic packaged products. I made a switch to laundry detergent strips packaged in a paper box. It's easier to store & transport than bulky,leaking plastic bottles. There's a potential market for products that are plastic free. Powdered milk if properly reconstituted and stored in glass bottle or pitcher is identical to milk in plastic containers. If you think about mainly unhealthy processed foods are packaged in plastics. Fresh fruits and vegetables have their own biodegradable/ compostable packaging. If you make it we will buy.
We will have to keep our houses very clean or else plastic containers might just fall apart before we have consumed their contents!
Would really appreciate an explanation of how/why these digesters would not become a problem. That is, why wouldnt they start digesting plastics we are still using, in cars, appliances, food storage etc. Is it the high temperatures needed? But cars run hot. Very interested in the answer, thanks.
Not if the enzymes require a constant temperature, which doesn't exist in most environments.
Because these enzymes are not alive. They can’t “escape”.
@@CampingforCool41 Well, if they are beneficial for the organism, then the gene that makes them can escape, and get reproduced in bacteria and virii of other organisms, including humans. The only question is "How long". But, that can be said of a gazillion of other things. The point is, life is a constant struggle - preserving one thing means hurting another thing.
@@JurekOK ??? There are already organisms that can digest plastic out in nature, the scientists didn’t create them. They are just studying the enzyme that makes it possible for these life forms to do it, and isolating the enzyme itself, which isn’t alive. There is nothing there to escape or evolve. Maybe eventually more bacteria will evolve in nature to digest plastic more efficiently but that had nothing to do with what they are doing in labs.
promising as it all sounds, & as excited as I am for recycling stepping up.
Maybe in the meantime, we should still work on ways to reduce how much plastic we dispose of, or at least find ways to pick back as much of the already disposed of plastic so it can be recycled later, just to make sure
Same here!! Also prefer to see recycling of plastics stepped up
Thing is you still have to get the plastics out of your rubbish. In Sydney we have 3 bins - Yellow (recyclable plastics, glass, aluminium, and paper), Green (garden waste) and Red (generic household waste and non-recyclable waste.) What if we could keep the Yellow bin for glass, aluminium and paper recycling - but move ALL the plastics into the RED bin in which everything was gasified? Gasifiers are expensive because of energy costs - but that's where Super-power comes in. Have you heard of SUPER-POWER? It’s all about solving the wind and solar power problem of power output dropping off in winter. We used to wonder how we were going to store power for a few months. But now that renewables are so cheap, instead of trying to store power for winter, the engineers plan to build extra renewables. If winter cuts output in half, then double the wind and solar! This simple concept can get the country through winter. Wind and solar are now so cheap, this trick is still cheaper than coal. And that’s without counting the health and climate costs of coal so it’s actually MUCH cheaper!
But now that we’ve solved winter, we have another problem. What are we going to do with all the EXCESS power the other 10 months of the year? We could just turn those farms off to stop them frying the grid - but that seems wasteful. Yet all today’s regular power demands have been met. What are we going to do with truly huge excess super-cheap power? We can put this to any EXTRA task - as as long as we can shut down this service for winter.
There are many extra jobs I can think of. Splitting water to make vast amounts of hydrogen for synthetic fuel for airlines. We can also use hydrogen to replace coking coal to make steel. We can use that power to run desal to fill fresh water reservoirs. Then there’s the miraculous technology of the Gasifier. These things rip municipal waste into molecules - with synthetic gas that shoots off the top to go to the petro-chemical and plastics industry - and lava like slag that can be turned into pavers, bricks, or rock-wool for insulation or fibreglass. The punchline? Gasifiers can turn household rubbish into half the stuff to build the next house! eclipsenow.wordpress.com/gasification/ Renewables are now so cheap that solving the ‘problem’ of winter becomes an opportunity to solve many other high-energy challenges we would not have been able to afford. No wonder Tony Seba calls it ‘Super-Power’. ruclips.net/video/fsnkPLkf1ao/видео.html
When I lived in Tennessee they had a plastic recycle program for type one and two at least. I usually had a 40lb dog food bag each month when I went to what they called a convenience station. They also had recycle bins for clear and colored glass, cardboard, appliance and aluminum. Nothing like that here in Arkansas
The 3d printing community would love all the free filament if it was affordable to get the equipment to process
Awesome... thanks for sharing Matt..
Agriculture and soil microbes (from worms too) makes the world go round... important stuff 👍
Very true!
@@UndecidedMF We need more kids to learn soil science, and biochemistry... very much under researched. Fungi and microbes, are so far behind in research it's amazingly under-funded... only 10 percent they claim in studies... have even been discovered.
I get that the enzymes need specific conditions to do their job, but what still concerns me is the impact of those enzymes on the environment itself. So for that reason I would prefer the development of eco friendly substitutes for plastic.
Thanks for the post, very interesting stuff and this could be the breakthrough we need to deal with existing plastics to an extent but even more for the future if we modify our plastics.
5:25 this was very well made and funny, I hope to see more moments like this, been watching every one of your videos for a while now
Glad you liked that part! That's the brainchild from one of my team ... I instantly jumped at the suggestion when it came up.
@@UndecidedMF thank you soo much for reading this and replying too, very rare for a youtuber of your size to do so
The idea of single-use plastic is an all-around bad idea. Recycling no matter how efficient will never 100% and it uses energy that we really cannot afford. I am old enough to remember a day when most containers were either wax-paper or glass. To be sure we live in a plastic age and there are some solutions that should remain, but recycling is a practice from the 20th century that we need to drop.
i am too and i think about all the glass buried in landfills. glass is very heavy when it comes to shipping.
@samhklm you said there shouldn't be a single use plastic and then said we should stop recycling. What would you even have as a solution then?
Matt gives me great hope for the future. Not easy to convince me, but his videos about better car batteries, various grid scale batteries, and things like this.
I have found the enzyme based drain cleaners better than the old standard lye based one. The ingredient list is a long list of "ases."
The thing is that we only use plastic for packaging because it doesn't degrade easily, if we create bacteria that can degrade plastics in mere hours with no special conditions, there will be no point in using plastic in packaging in the first place.
The one thing that concerns me about this is what happens when they manage to create a bunch of super bugs, and then they get loose and start going after plastics we don't want them to eat? Plastics are in just about everything everywhere. Just like in medicine, this could trade off one problem for another in the long run. Science is infamous for let's fix it now and let someone else deal with the consequences later.
Covid 2.0
if the enzyme is in the plastic wont that lead to the plastic braking down while in storage and would have you consume more micro plastics?
Has to get wet and warm
Nice job keeping your presentation style plastic and not recycling the same formula over and over again 😊 I like how you had some fun making this one ("it's super bug"), keep it up!
Let's create things that not only eat plastic but are capable of self replication because as we all know things never escape labs or leak out of factory facilities....
Sounds like great news to me! It's a great feature, I'll definitely buy products that have compostable packaging if I have the option!
I mean if the enzymes exist, but they're more expensive than creating new plastics, it's the government's job to fix it with a "new plastics" tax or something, because if it isn't commercially viable, they won't switch.
Yes .. everything, every idea stucks at govt. Because working in that big scale need govt support.
well put. Was about to comment the same thing
Some of my peers did this with one of the new PET enzyme mutants. They were the first in the world to test it except their results were on the order of months to digest anything significant. Whatever the new research is doing, they’re probably s using a better mutant enzyme and are really blending it up small.
The translucent plastic shopping bags are polypropylene (PP) . Clear plastic bags are LDPE
The foam food trays are expanded PE.
The trouble is, a lot of the reason why we prize plastics is for their inertness, that they don't break down and can seal food to keep it safe to consume for longer.
And I think instead of just referring to "plastics" we should be differentiating disposable items from ones designed to last. Like you don't want the handle of your power tools, or an electrical plug from starting to break down over time. We want them to last for as long as possible to avoid having to replace them in the first place.
Thing is those tools are supposed to last long term, and not be in such ubiquity. We (humanity) created millitude more plastic than we need. And we continue to create it as a disposable short lived product. Even in more high tech products was included idea of short-time life, so that consumer buys more of it.
Nice info, I think I want to grow earthworms and go fishing now.
This is fantastic news! I'm a volunteer who cleans up lakes and rivers in my hometown. There are really lots of plastics there!
I was in the high-density polyethylene film industry for 15 years starting in 89. If we had used a cornstarch method of biodegradable Plastics we would not have this problem. The petrochemical companies lobbied to have that stuff deemed inferior
I mean worms work for free seems really great if producing more worms are easy
Matt, I'd love to see you do a segment on PHA plastics (polyhydroxylalkanoates). Seems like these may have a real chance as they are shelf-stable but degrade in soil or marine environment with ambient bacteria and temperatures. Sounds almost to good to be true! Would love to see your thoughtful analysis on this one.
I'm interested in this also, Matt
Good on you Mat for bringing the enzymatic breakdown of non natural plastics ..perhaps if we had a law that forbid products like plastic from being manufactured in the first place ..because they “can’t be gotten rid of” ..we mightn’t be in this trouble with plastic garbage ..either the huge Pacific plastic patch, or the increasingly worrying micro fibre volumes present in washing machine water ..which carry’s it to water purifying plants ..sewerage farms or systems ..even household dust and the air we breathe is now laced with micro samples of what we wear ,sit on or sleep under ..Don’t make something you can’t get rid of..as a new law would serve to save us from unintended problems ..like those we are dealing with now ,with products made decades ,years ago and more recently ..it’s huge industry
Our economic system in a nutshell: All of humanity is going to die but fixing it would hurt some billionaires short term profits so our amazingly democratic government are like, naww lets now do the things that are good for literally everyone and everything.
It is actually absurd and amazing how dumb society can be.
so many details i want to know.
how pricy / difficult to produce the enzyme, how many time it can be reused (i'ts a catalyst after all), how can you extract all the product in industrial scale, how pricy the whole process is, etc etc.
But for now, it's nice to see that in 10000 yrs, future human(?) will not find a thick layer of plastic in the soil and wondering how it ends up there
Matt . Your channel is going from strength to strength . Well done. Any videos on chatgbt and this technology and how it might effect other industries. My thinking is it will be possible to “ create a best friend “
As with many problems, using enzymes to recycle plastic is just one of the components of a greener plastic industry.
I think that, like you said in the video, one key component is our plastic-manufacturing habits.
Now this whole issue (enzyme degradation+manufacturing plastics that are easily de-gradated by enzymes) also has the potential to make plastic containers more fragile and prone to contamination. Like all complicated matters, this issue requires achieving a good balance between all the processes AND make it economically viable to boot.
Matt, I enjoy your play on words reporting, and find you such an easily digestable "Fun-Guy" to watch at work !
It's a really compelling set of discoveries, but even if the bottles etc. are made of fully recycled plastics, microplastics can still be shed and accumulate in the various places that they are already.
Unsure how to fix some dependencies on plastics (single-use lab consumables are basically essential), but overall reducing the plastic usage is probably going to be a big part of how we address this environmental and health challenge.
Another fantastic video thanks so much! Lots of exciting future tech solutions - it seems like we've been talking about it now for years but without regulation or penalties on current unsustainable plastic overuse practices we are still in a dire situation with plastic pollution. I'm in Japan and the situation seems to be getting worse with 99% of all vending machine drinks available only in PET bottles which are mostly incinerated in Japan but the public level of awareness is low, most people think it's recycled like aluminum and glass 😅 Good to see shift in more ethical brands like MUJI now having water refill stations in all stores (rare in Japan) and selling drinks only in aluminum cans, glass or paper. Unfortunately, CocaCola & the other major beverage companies not at all motivated to change.
Great video. Will be forwarding to a friend of mine that works for a large Japanese plastics manufacturer; hopeful they are engaged in the research.
There is a process already being used to degrade plastic in landfill sites. The company is based in the USA. The process, sheet of '-ve' plastic (to degrade the plastic)land fill to 1 meter, insert extraction pipes and cover with another sheet. This process continued until the site is capped. Residues = methane from biodegrading plastic and other contents. The Methane is piped to an onsite generator with site working life of around 10 years. After 10yrs the remaining site is degraded by 90% can have the metals remaining recovered and the landfill site can be reinstated. There are working sites in the UK, USA, Canada and Europe that I am aware of.
this is the sort of thing that actually makes me excited to get old. all this technology and science, i wanna see where it ends and how itll impact us.
Well there goes the actively used household plastics like PEX plumbing (small leaks) , sandwich bags, etc because these microbes will eventually be everywhere eating all plastics waste or not
I have been waiting for a video to use this quote!!
"Life, Ugh, Finds a way" ~ Dr. Ian Malcom (Jurassic Park)
Enzymes can be expensive to produce. The market for recycling generally won't support an expensive input. So we have to think of the entire system in order to come up with a scalable method for eliminating and/or sustainably using plastics.
I'd be interested to know how these do in the wild. Pour them over landfills. Test them in conditions that mimic the oceanic garbage patch. See what effects they have on items we've already produced.
If plastics are broken down through natural means, won’t it lose it efficacy? It is the very resilient, it’s ability to not brake down that makes it so useful. I could imagine a naturally occurring enzyme in a supermarket causing all the pop bottles to start leaking or the seats in my care to fall apart. I dislike plastic in most forms, but it is truly ubiquitous. The effect of a naturally occurring process for decomposition, if it got out in the world could be interesting to say the least
Many plastics are used in construction and infrastructue projects because of their resistance to corrosion. A lot of PE and PVC is used in water mains and sewer systems. Plastic wraps and insulations are used in a lot of our homes and buildings. Is it a legitimate concern moving forward that these enzymes could attack our infrastructure?
There's also a way to turn it into graphene, carbon nanotubes, activated carbon, etc as a quite cheap and interesting way to recycle almost all plastics.
The greatest problem is people doing things that aren't so great instead of doing the good things. So many young kids who could maybe, if inspired work towards focusing and participating in better behavior. Exploring solutions to the worlds many issues, the plastic one being major of course. May seem like a crazy suggestion but as I watched, and listened carefully, to what you had to say I thought what a great movie could be made. Matt you have a very entertaining, engaging personality, presentation and voice. I could see you as the Superhero pursuing the problem, exploring solutions with consideration to good suggestions in all the commentaries. Could be huge fun while engaging and maybe encourging kids. Alternative to the endless rubbish on various platforms that isn't helpful. A good script and millions of kids who don't care might find they do. Perhaps something too sensible like.....using less plastic
This was a fascinating video I chanced upon.
You're always so positive without boarding the hype train and your research is top-notch. Keep rockin'
Matt - good piece. Some discussion of products of microbes' digestion of plastic (likely CO2, CO, CH4 and other hydrocarbons) would be worthwhile. If you deploy this tech at scale, how do you process the waste products and would these be considered "semi green" because you are displacing the consumption of virgin petroleum products? And, how to pay for this (Maybe beyond your scope, but interesting)?
You got me with that “must’ve been too green” pun, bravo 👏
I think the worm idea is fascinating, and I'm all for "all hands on deck" solutions to the plastic crisis, but it's not truly "recycling" because the plastic is just fed to worms... and then what? So much of the plastic pollution crisis is a matter of production, and while this worm idea does present an alternative way to dispose of plastic, it's not clear to me that it is scalable. If anything, when plastic is fed to worms (or burned or landfilled), it signals to the market that there's a demand for more plastics. In contrast, traditional recycling puts recycled plastics back into the supply chain and (in theory) displaces the need to produce virgin plastics. Virgin plastics are cheap because the raw material for plastics, oil and gas, have been massively subsidized by the federal government for decades.
There's also the problem of collections. People love to cite that only 9% of all plastics ever made have been recycled but don't acknowledge that recycling collection infrastructure is vastly underdeveloped. What good are newer recycling technologies if plastics struggle to be conveniently captured for recycling? Many (perhaps most) types of plastics, such as the dashboard in your car, are not even designed to be recycled. EPR policies (Extended Producer Responsibility) will help with funding collection systems and incentivizing less plastic overall with more recyclable plastics. The solution to prevent more plastic pollution is to reduce production.
So long as it's not used to maintain business as usual, it should be fine. But as you said, it'd be better to move along to something better. Plastics have their place, and it's not where we mostly use it. The main issue will be getting alternatives to emit less co2
Thank You for this, I really needed. I recycle but in the back of my head, I always wonder if I am making an impact and if there ever will be improvements to current processes.
Depends on the plastic. Many are excellent to reform into filament which can be repurposed in 3D printing of needed objects. Others can be broken down as fuel, or reformed into a raw plastic again.
Enzymes. Are safe to play with? Building blocks of life. Are these toyed with in biolabs with little scrutiny too?
I used to watch your videos as they came live but RUclips decided to stop recomending your channel to me. Today I just felt saudade from your videos and am watching like 7 videos at once. Thanks, RUclips.
Next in the news: Strange new bacteria is eating away people's things made of plastic. "I was watching TV when it just collapsed into a heap of electronic parts and half disintegrated plastic" said Joe Smith from California. People's cars, toys, cellphones, everything is just falling apart as people watch.
I heard the United States had previously been shipping most of our recyclables to China and I later heard that many of the ships containing those recyclables would sail into the middle of the ocean and dump the materials out there. If that is true, then that is one of the major sources for all of the plastic garbage floating around in the oceans. Either way, how do we get rid of so much plastic waste?
I heard one scientist suggest that burning plastic to convert it into energy would be the likely best use for plastic waste, so long as you put scrubbers on the smoke stacks coming out of the incinerators. Apparently, modern scrubbers are very good and the burn residue would be a fraction of the volume of the actual plastic being burned, plus doing so would get the waste out of the oceans and landfills. I don't know what the solution is, but short of a revolution in material sciences, it is said that plastics are not going to go away as we depend on them too much and getting rid of them would force us to go back to old ways which pollute the environment even more. I hope scientists can find a great solution soon.
How do we reduce the #1 use of plastic: Medical Waste (sturdy single use sterile). Much cannot use compostable plastics (think: IV bags, tubing, surgical supplies, PPE). What solutions are there to replacing plastics that require longevity+tensile strength?
Please make a short of this video listing the manufacturers that plan to use biodegradable plastics.
I believe we need to charge manufacturers of plastic products a recycling “fee”, that way we can calculate true cost of this packaging. This may encourage manufacturers to use more glass packaging or alternatives and recycling them, so we can use it again and again versus using it once and throwing it away. Example you might use a plastic straw for 2 minutes to sip a beverage from a fast food restaurant, then it will end up in a landfill waste, but it will probably take 1000 years to break down. Seems like an illogical solution for a minor issue.
Also some interesting work going on in flash production of Graphene from plastic
On balance, I wish this video focused more on the lifecycle impact of plastic.
Since virgin plastic is currently made from fossil fuels, we seem to be left with only bad options for disposing of it - let it break down naturally (our original approach, resulting in microplastics everywhere), accelerate a complete breakdown into CO2 which is effectively adding CO2 to the atmosphere as if we were burning fossil fuels, or accelerate the partial breakdown so it can be made into more plastics, which at the end of their life will pose the same problem of disposal options (what you discussed here).
While it sounds promising that PETase could reduce the demand for new fossil fuel extraction to make more plastic, it sounds like its actual potential to turn plastic into a “green” material depends heavily on changing the source of our virgin plastics away from fossil fuel. I wish you’d covered this more heavily in the video - similar to how burning wood is considered “carbon neutral” because it relies entirely on recently sequestered carbon, sourcing plastics from recently sequestered carbon instead of fossil fuels would mean that research on accelerating plastic decomposition wouldn’t simply be contributing to global warming under the guise of being “green”.
I just had a who sci-fi suspense movie pop into my head. A modified enzyme that eats all kinds of plastics but it gets loose and spreads all over, all plastics on the earth are in real danger of being rapidly eaten by the new enzyme. Insulation for wires, parts of cell phones, medical equipment and more starts to dissolve and the world starts to panic.
The Great Pacific Garbage patch has also been a source of organisms capable of degrading plastics. If a similar approach was used to find enzymes to degrade cellulose (for example from bacteria in the stomach of thermites) sugar could be produced industrially from waste agricultural products such as sawdust, cut grass from city parks or coffee grinds & waste tea leaves.
Excellent coverage of a corner of human industry that is cause for optimism based on faith in technology. You hinted at an alternative perspective to one of technological solutionism, but your focus is on inventing our way out of a problem. That's OK, that's why I like this content. But the social and political side is equally important, IMO. I'm reminded of a line from the movie, The Graduate: "One word: Plastics." There it was broad philosophical commentary, but perhaps in hindsight that commentary/scene was not only critical of the aesthetic, but indeed, the vital parts of our civilization. Plastic is great, and I wouldn't want to live without it or some equivalents. But I believe the most important insight is that there is no invention or process or societal change that does not carry the unintended consequences, or environmental costs externalized by those driving the process - foreseen or not. What process doesn't have byproducts? is it OK to engineer organisms to ingest our plastic waste? Are the outputs really benign? Have we really considered the long-term implications with sufficient scrutiny and clarity? We vertainly were less aware of the plastic problem in 1967. Would it not be hubris to not be extremely cautious?
The fact that we are watching this video means we are the beneficiaries of plastics. The device used to make, store and watch these videos all contain plastics. Realize that everything has at least 2 sides. Are plastics a problem, yes. Are they necessary for a modern society, yes. Are we going to be able to convince society to return to a lifestyle that does not contain plastics. No. Finding a way that can be economically viable to recycle our plastic waste stream is probably the best answer to all these problems.
I would love to know more about what the end products are that the worms poop out?
It’s important to make sure we also understand what they are turning the plastic into.
If they can actually grow from it, they're turning it into the organic materials they're made of. There could be some byproducts, though.
So one of the things that I've wondered about with these plastic eating germs... Does there exist the risk of like... diseased plastics? Are we moving toward a future where I have to get a new tv because it's case was eaten through by a bunch of bacteria, and distribution centers have to keep their warehouses below a certain temperature so that they don't get an e plasti outbreak?
I'm guessing it's not very likely, since nobody seems concerned enough about it to even mention that we don't need to be concerned about it.
The biggest problem we have with plastics (as well as many other current crises) is greed (especially on the industrial side) company's that make plastics honestly do not want to change any part of there processes unless they can save money to turn over to there stockholders.
yes this is a hopeful partial solution to fix some of the issues we have out there, but until we can adjust the greed of the top 10% and especially the top 1%. companies who make damaging products to the environment and ourselves.
I love your work and things like this prove that the world will evolve to fix the problems we create . . . but we may not survive until the world fixes our problems.
I love your work and I am happy that there is so much work going into the problems that have been made by industrial greed.
I am always annoyed when companies patent a process that is nature
Missed opportunity for American Beauty reference with floating plastic bag. But it’s great to see this moving forward. It’s going to take a combination of emerging alternative materials replacing plastics and creating recycling/upcycling processes.
having a biodegradable feedstock is key, in my opinion, but work on the fungi and bacteria will also help. Wonder if they are testing in "landfill" conditions, where years of plastic is being "stored"
I expect we'll have lots of engineered microbes to eat all the junk in landfills.
Very interesting video, any thoughts on this with the vast usage of both PVC and PEX piping for utilities today, from electrical wire jacketing, both supply and waste water piping and even gas supply piping??
Matt, absolutely love the content of your channel and the thorough topical reviews in each video. I’d love it even more if you slowed down a bit as having to stop and rewind the video several times to follow along new and complex technical information makes for a really ineffective and annoying viewing experience. Still, I keep coming back for the excellent content!