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chriswhoppers t1_itpra59 wrote

Oyster mushrooms and many others successfully biodegrade plastics into edible nutrition, and sequester unwanted pollution in the atmosphere into their mycelial network. Underwater mushrooms found in Oregon.

https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-mushrooms#:~:text=Researchers%20have%20now%20found%20that,an%20at%2Dhome%20recycling%20system.

https://fishbio.com/mushrooms-underwater/

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Equivalent-Ice-7274 t1_itq4kti wrote

Yes, but you would need thousands of mountain-sized piles of Oyster mushrooms to biodegrade all of the plastic waste.

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TheGingerHybrid t1_itqds6o wrote

While you are technically right, the solution doesn't have to happen all at once, and immediately. Small steps are how you get to a destination. And with this kind of problem, small steps are better than no steps.

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Foxodroid t1_itr0wom wrote

Maybe if we put real funding into it we can brute force our way to a good result. It's certainly worth the effort.

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tom-8-to t1_itq4d33 wrote

But there is no money in it. Who is gonna fund a large scale investment? Industrial use requires plastic to be turned into something useful on the same day it arrives or there is no profit.

Might as well use plastic as fuel and burn it and even so it’s gonna be costly because of the smoke and fumes are costly to deal with to meet air pollution standards

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idigclams t1_itqw8vq wrote

Not as bad as burning coal, a lot of times. Polyethylene is a highly refined and simple hydrocarbon, for example. It should burn cleaner than natural gas and much cleaner than coal. Of course it will still release carbon into the atmosphere.

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revtor t1_itsnzum wrote

It’s how they recycle plastic in Europe- burn it. Can be clean! And then the heat turns into electricity..

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piotrmarkovicz t1_ittuwjg wrote

> But there is no money in it.

If there is a service or a product, there is a potential for a return.

>Who is gonna fund a large scale investment?

The same people who fund all large scale investment: the general population.

Could make a business case out of it: get paid to haul away plastic nobody wants, get free feed stock to grow mushrooms, sell mushroom related products for profit. Lobby for some environmental tax credits to get the public to pay for the process in return for reduced environmental contamination for a tidy profit.... Devil is in the details but it is not an impossible sell.

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FoxlyKei t1_itsplzd wrote

This is all our hope imo. There's been bacteria and fungus evolving to eat this stuff. We give life an abundance of something containing energy and so life evolves to make the best of it. I am sure, even now, that there is an animal somewhere with gut microbes evolved enough to let it survive solely on eating plastic. Like some plastic termite, ig

With all of these plastics going into the food chain who's to say we won't have a massive convergent evolution of microbiomes dissolving plastics?

The current census seems to be breeding for an extremely powerful enzyme and hopefully using that en masse to break down plastics before they even reach the ocean.

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Another idea would be running massive septic tanks with these microbes, growing them with plastic, and using them in other applications.

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lacergunn t1_itqwwvg wrote

Do you have any research papers to go with this? It sounds promising

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chriswhoppers t1_itqxkc4 wrote

No I don't have any personal research related to this field of science. It has been known for a while by the mycology community, and you can easily find any research you desire by looking deeper into the viability of its function by various institutes

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lacergunn t1_itr4orp wrote

I'll have to look into that. A while back I had an idea to offset human carbon output by modifying a strain of azolla to grow in the pacific garbage patch, but it wouldn't work because that part of the ocean has no natural nutrients. However, if I could modify the plants to take some of their nutrition from breaking down plastics...

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chriswhoppers t1_itr5an3 wrote

The problem with that is "Plants are producers, using the energy of the sun to make seeds, cones, and spores to reproduce, while fungi are decomposers that break down decaying matter" - National Wildlife Federation

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lacergunn t1_itr5mrr wrote

That's what the modification is for. I dont need all of the fungi's genes, just the ones that produce the enzymes that break down the plastics into their base nutrients.

Of course this is all hypothetical, I dont have anywhere close to the resources to actually experiment with this

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chriswhoppers t1_itr6gfs wrote

Theoretically its completely possible. Using yeast fermentation, specific enzymes can be targeted and reproduced rapidly with high purity through very meticulous chloroplast extractions. Then the enzyme would be introduced over generations of your plant variety, in hopes of mutations to produce a stellar variety for you specific purpose. Yeast fermentation isn't necessary, but much faster than having fungus grow next to your plant and cloning the mutants from there

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Foxodroid t1_itr1hpb wrote

Are they edible? We could be solving two crises at once lol

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chriswhoppers t1_itr24md wrote

Yes, look at the first link. Oyster mushrooms are edible, and mushrooms convert compost (or waste) into chitin and other cellular structures of the mushroom body. Scientists used to believe that it would make you sick to eat the mushrooms that decompose toxic items, now it has been proven false up to an extent. If I remember correctly from years ago

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