Photo by Hagerty Ryan, USFWS

ABC News Australia recently reported that scientists from the University of Sydney have found that two varieties of fungi—Aspergillus terreus and Engyodontium album—are productive at breaking down polypropylene, a plastic that is located in popular containers that we ordinarily toss in the recycling bin or the trashcan. ABC New Australia explains:

It took 90 days for the fungi to degrade 27 per cent of the plastic tested, and about 140 days to totally break it down, right after the samples have been exposed to ultraviolet rays or heat. Chemical engineering professor Ali Abbas, who supervised the analysis group, mentioned the findings have been considerable: “It really is the highest degradation price reported in the literature that we know in the planet,” the professor mentioned. 

I feel it is wonderful news that scientists are getting approaches to break down plastic—because lots of plastic trash is not recycled, and therefore ends up in landfills. And even lots of the waste that is placed in recycling bins is never ever in fact recycled. Plastic Pollution Coalition explains:

When you place utilized plastic (packaging, bottles, wraps, films, and so on.) in a recycling bin (or trash bin), it is transferred into the hands of the international waste sector. This sector is created up of a wide network of corporations, governments, and men and women vying for a share of the nearly $500 billion that is generated annually in the international waste marketplace. This trash trade has grown substantially more than time, apace with plastics production and per capita waste generation, even though recycling of plastic and other varieties of waste tends to make up a incredibly modest share of the marketplace.

From a recycling bin, plastics are sent by rail or truck to waste-sorting facilities, also referred to as components recovery facilities (MRFs). Right here, plastics are typically sorted by like varieties (feel films and bags, bottles, foams) and baled (squashed with each other into effortlessly transportable space-saving cubes). Then it is loaded back up on a train or truck, or a cargo ship, for the subsequent leg of its journey.

So, I definitely am glad for ongoing analysis getting new approaches to break down plastics. But let’s not kid ourselves. Just as we should not fall for the concept that recycling is the answer to all our ecological difficulties, we also should not fall for the concept that scientific breakthroughs—even these that are grounded in nature, such as these plastic-dissolving fungi—are going to save us. This is an instance of technological utopianism—the concept that, as Maize explains, “An much easier life in a best society is achievable, and science is the important to attain it.” Against this concept that science will save us, the Plastic Pollution Coalition argues that the genuine remedy to solving our plastic waste difficulty is to “turn off the plastic tap”: 

Only 9 percent of the plastics created given that they have been very first mass-made in the mid-1900s have been recycled. The recycling price in the US, the world’s most significant plastic-waste producer, is presently a mere 5 to six %. But even if plastic recycling prices have been larger, recycling alone could never ever come close to solving the severe and wide-ranging well being, justice, socio-financial, and environmental crises brought on by industries’ continued plastic production and plastic pollution, which go hand in hand. Production of plastic has only grown more than time, and has presently hit a price of more than 400 million metric tons per year, much more than double the price at which plastics have been created just 20 years ago.

This is clearly a a great deal much more speedy pace than at which plastic recycling actually occurs. It really is clear recycling is not adequate to resolve the plastic pollution crisis. The fossil fuel sector, governments, and corporations definitely require to turn off the plastic tap. 

Echoing this sentiment, Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson, researchers at Lancaster Atmosphere Centre, argued in a current piece published in Nature Climate Alter:

For forty years, climate action has been delayed by technological promises. Modern promises are equally risky. Our operate exposes how such promises have raised expectations of much more productive policy choices becoming offered in the future, and thereby enabled a continued politics of prevarication and inadequate action.

They also explain that, as an alternative, we must be placing our efforts into collective action to produce genuine structural modify:

Placing our hopes in however much more new technologies is unwise. As an alternative, cultural, social and political transformation is necessary to allow widespread deployment of each behavioural and technological responses to climate modify.