[colordrops]

To be blunt your argument for polluting our environment doesn't feel like it's in good faith when you blame wood for being a pollutant until a fungus showed up hundreds of millions of years ago. I absolutely loathe the term "whataboutism" but this seems like a real example - "what about the fact that wood was a pollutant hundreds of millions of years ago? We should be able to dump plastic now".

[darawk]

His point is that nature adapts to these things and learns to consume them eventually. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with storing plastic in the earth, as long as it isn't disrupting ecosystems.

[ephbit]

Nature is a complex dynamic system. Yes, it can adapt to new influences without becoming instable.

But needlessly bombarding it with artificial chemicals surely has some kind of threshold over which adaptation mostly fails, equilibria get destroyed and the system becomes indeed instable.

> ... as long as it isn't disrupting ecosystems.

Problem is, who can reliably tell when it'll be too much?

IMO not worth risking "everything" for some added convenience of "ingenious" food packaging.

[colordrops]

"Nature" is arbitrarly defined. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything. "Wrong" is a human definition. "Nature" is perfectly fine with wood and plastic piling up for eternity without decomposition if no organism happens to evolve to do so. "Nature" is fine with human genocide. "Nature" is fine with a nearby supernova or asteroid destroying all life on earth.

The point is that from a human perspective, and from the perspective of most multicellular organisms, plastics discarded into the environment are a really bad thing for our health.

[hallway_monitor]

It would be somewhat ironic if a bacteria were to evolve to eat plastic and be invasive. An organism like that would have quite an effect on humanity's habits.

[ephbit]

Specific species of bacteria have indeed been found that can catabolize specific types of plastics. In some niches they will definitely evolve to decompose plastics.

Since all life forms on earth rely heavily on water as solvent (being present ideally all the time), those 'invasive' bacteria won't have that much of an effect on humanity's habits IMHO, since regularly removing the water easily keeps their impact low.

Fungi might play an important role in decomposition of plastics as well, since they have advantages over bacteria that may be relevant for decomposition of plastics in the same way in which they are for decomposing wood. (Which is difficult for bacteria)

[ASalazarMX]

Corporations: Behold our new duraplastic with embedded antibiotics! Don't thank us, just give us money!

[8ytecoder]

... and pray that a fungus that can eat plastic shows up in another millennia