Tires take decades to decompose, and millions are improperly dumped every year. An intrepid group sets out to clear Kentucky’s ‘conveyor belt of trash’
The good news is with all the small plastic bits floating around the environment, it’s only a matter of time until something evolves to decompose it. Tons and tons of surface area in a wide variety of environments and exposed to a wide variety of microorganisms. I mean heck even our anaerobic gut microbes are getting a chance! And plastic is basically just energy in solid form, so it’ll happen sooner or later.
The bad news is if that happens while we still use plastics, we are going to have a bad time with it.
We probably won’t even know it’s happening until it’s spread far and wide.
The good news is with all the small plastic bits floating around the environment, it’s only a matter of time until something evolves to decompose it. Tons and tons of surface area in a wide variety of environments and exposed to a wide variety of microorganisms. I mean heck even our anaerobic gut microbes are getting a chance! And plastic is basically just energy in solid form, so it’ll happen sooner or later.
The bad news is if that happens while we still use plastics, we are going to have a bad time with it.
We probably won’t even know it’s happening until it’s spread far and wide.
It’s already happening, but the issue is so big it’ll take a lot more than this to even make a dent.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste