Engineering360: "New microbes can quickly degrade plastic in hot environments"

Certainly it's good to get plastics out of oceans, and biodegradability helps there. We are saying we'd rather have the plastic turn into CO2 than chemically and physically pollute the ocean (assuming it floats and doesn't go to the bottom).

But on land you have the opposite problem-- you want LESS degradation. Plastics in landfills should last long, and NOT turn into methane. It's far better that they do what most naturally want to do, which is to stay in the landfill for geologic amounts of time, as if they were still fossil fuel and had never been converted to plastic. That represents carbon which has been "captured" and "sequestered" for near-free. Making less stable plastics for land-end-disposal just interferes with a system that works well naturally (landfill, if it is deep, works even to "capture and sequester" carbon in paper, which means it does so for the CO2 used to make the paper).

To sum up: before deploying this degradation technology for any plastic use, some thought and work needs to be put into figuring out where the plastic will go otherwise. If into deep landfill, we might NOT want to use degradable plastics, and thus get rid of carbon that way.