Despite the fact that 40% of Americans - about 120 million people - believe that plastic is biodegradable
, there are no organisms in the biosphere that eat plastic, no metabolic pathways that break it down. Plastic isn’t biodegradable. It just gets torn into smaller and smaller pieces.
The volume of plastic is growing, probably exponentially, each year. It’s like the character said in “The Graduate” “Plastics – There’s a great future in plastic.” Much of this garbage winds up in the oceans. There is a large nexus of plastic swirling around the Pacific, called and the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Dump,” in the vicinity of the ‘Horse Latitudes.’ (Click here for the Green Peace report on the extent of the problem. Click Here, Here, Here or Google ‘Plastic debris in the oceans’). By “Large” I mean 10 million square miles - about the size of Africa - and about 100 feet thick. Captain Charles Moore, of the ORV Alguita, has been exploring the dump click here or here.
The theory of evolution would suggest that eventually a denizen of the gyre, be it bacterial, plankton, or jellyfish, will evolve a metabolic pathway such that this organism will be able to eat, that is degrade, the plastic. It will eat, gorge itself, and reproduce. And then there will be 2 organisms that can eat plastic. Then 4, 8, 16, 32, … 1,024, 2,048, … and then millions and millions. This could start tomorrow, or in 10,000 years.
Scientists could kick start this process. Take some bacteria, plastics and mutagenic agents, put them together in salt water – and wait. Or better yet use genetic engineering and biochemistry to engineer metabolic pathways to biodegrade, i.e., “eat” plastic.
Or, if I may be permitted to wax sarcastic, dump radioactive wastes into this plastic soup. The radioactive wastes may eventually trigger the mutations that create the required metabolic pathways.
(Also posted on Orion Magazine on the discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s Reasons Not to Glow, LF)
Orion Magazine - Reasons Not to Glow
