PET-Plastic-Eating Bacteria

Grey Goo....

It seems that every act has a drawback and an advantage. I use this observation in my engineering. I will not commit to a design approach until I can recognize at least some of the drawbacks. I'm pleased when I find the only obvious drawbacks are trivial inconveniences.

<...will this contribute a lot of extra CO2 to the atmosphere...> The quantity will be 44/12 of the mass of carbon in the material minus that quantity involved in growth of the organisms during that period.

This could be a classic example of "Be careful what you wish for". It's very easy for things that are alive to get out of control. Live things mutate in ways to aid their own survival.

Yeah, just look at what happened with homo sapiens.

There are those here who would argue that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore and the gov'ment as a power grab.

Oh, and fracking doesn't cause earthquakes either.

What does "isolation of a new bacteria species" mean?

Did these bacteria evolve because PET is everywhere?

Can they be cultivated?

Genetically modified to enhance their population?

I'd think it would be simple enough to monitor the by-products to determine the impact of this.

Most here are of an age that we won't live to see what we have done to the Earth, but I fear what we will leave behind for our progeny. Asthma and COPD are already far worse than they were 30-40 years ago.

If you visited Los Angeles in the 1950's and your eyes burned and you couldn't breath, did you worry about your future.

The world will vanish and we can claim it was those pesky bacteria we put on the job.

Some things outstanding:

1. Why do we need to break it down? How about separation, containment and so on?
2. What about reduction efforts for PET products?
3. substitution?
4. elimination?

Of course for 3 and 4 we have to evaluate the possible impact on society and nature.
All this can and should be done without thinking about the so called "Climate Change".Why would you be worried about it if you have not done point 1 and 2 yet? And even then you have been around long enough to know what a debate you can trigger with this reference to "climate change".

How much of it is unavailable for standard recycling?

Yes, bacteria has a lot of uses not only for our daily life, but also for the scientific research. For instance the bacterial expression system.