smallworlnd on Nostr: I wish it were that easy. A big problem is that it's very hard to get microbes to do ...

I wish it were that easy. A big problem is that it's very hard to get microbes to do just the one thing you want to achieve in complex environments, especially recalcitrant environments like landfills. There's 40 years or so of scientific literature on exactly this subject and there's been quite a lot of progress but still no magic pill. The reality is that our junk is just going to long outlast us.

Microbes essentially have the genetic complement to do the job but there's lots going on that determines what, when, where and how they eat. Sometimes the bad stuff gets broken into food or building blocks, but then sometimes digesting something toxic ends up being conjugated into something equally toxic with a longer half-life.

quoting nevent1q…h2ku

Bacteria and fungi already have genes that code for things capable of degrading plastic and other industrial waste. It's just that it's a much tougher source of food to break open, and almost always requires more easily-digestible food in the environment to supplement and fuel extracellular digestion of the tougher stuff.

Saturated environments like those impose a big negative selection, so the locked up food source sits there for a while. But eventually someone will move in and make use of it, albeit very slowly. I stumbled upon a pile of old asphalt shingles in the woods many years ago. It appeared more degraded than from weathering alone so it became the basis for a research project later on. We found all sorts of microbes expressing all sorts of genes beyond the big family of peroxidases in order to eat break down the medium. Many of those genes are also involved in recycling celluloses/hemicelluloses/ligins.