[whatshisface]

I don't really see why there is a problem with degrading whole bottles. If you have separated from the waste stream, you can incinerate or even landfill them (it's not like you'd be wasting any resources). It's the microplastics that form when the bottles are dumped into the oceans or waterways and broken up by Nature which need a novel solution for removal.

[nihzm]

I think what lysozyme said holds even if you do not consider "whole" bottles at all. According to wikipedia the biggest microplastics are 5mm, whereas the enzyme is 10nm, that is 5 orders of magnitude of difference, but just in lenght! To process the entire volume you need to cube the units and you get 15 orders of magnitude in difference (1 mm^3 to 10 nm^3).

To get an idea I asked wolfram alpha what is the volume of the average human, and apparently that is around 66 liters. Then I looked up the estimated water volume of the Baltic sea, and wikipedia says it is 21,700 km^3 of water, soo

    $ units
    586 units, 56 prefixes
    You have: 21.7E3 km3
    You want: 66 liters
        * 3.2878788e+14
        / 3.0414747e-15

if you could somehow fill your entire body with water, then make 30 copies of yourself, and you (30 of you) drink an entire Baltic sea (one for each), that is a very very rough analogy of the task we are giving to that poor enzyme. And this is for a single speck of microplastic! Of course the enzyme is not alone, there are a few other billions (trillions?) others with it, but there are also a few million specks of microplastic at any point in the sea. This is a very difficult task.

[readyplayernull]

Plastic aren't simply plastics, they have lots of additives to give them different properties. Incinerating is transforming these additives into other chemicals maybe making more toxic molecules escape to the environment in ashes, dust, smoke. And landfilling is storing trash for future generations to solve the problem.

[whatshisface]

Future generations will never have a reason to dig up landfills.

[in_vestor]

The most plausible reason they might need to dig them up is to remediate them. Landfills require maintenance in perpetuity, which costs a considerable amount of money. The biggest expense is maintaining the top cap—if it leaks, big problems can result.

After several centuries, it’s hard to imagine that most landfills will still be doing regular maintenance and fighting off entropy maintaining the cap. At some point, with the right technology, it becomes more sensible to reprocess the waste in a more permanent manner.

I think plasma gasification is likely the best idea, but it still needs work.

[reactordev]

I would agree. Burying our post-nuclear family waste worldwide for the last 60 years will come back to haunt us. I also agree that we’ll have the tech to address it then into a more sustainable solution and possibly extract energy from it.

[skybrian]

This is not how haunting works. We won’t be around anymore. We will haunt whoever is there after us.

Maybe they’ll have better enzymes, though.

[reactordev]

it's a figure of speech, not literal. There are no ghosts.