r/Green • u/ilikemyprivacytbt • Jul 27 '26

Why aren't we putting these creatures in landfills?

Why aren't we putting these creatures in landfills to eat plastic? Supposedly they don't eat fast fast enough but with animals if there is more food than can be consumed won't their population increase to a level that matches the food supply?

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u/EmielDeBil Jul 29 '26

If a bug can eat plastic and is released out there, everything plastic will get eaten and your world will be destroyed. Your tshirt, your electrical cables, half your car.

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u/ilikemyprivacytbt Jul 29 '26

That is a scary thought. You make a good point. I do remember their was a time when every closet and wardrobe had mothballs to protect clothes from bugs but what would we do with everything else?

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u/EmielDeBil Jul 29 '26

A long, long time ago (360~300Mya), there were trees, but no organisms that could consume tree material (lignin, soecifically). For tens of millions of years, older trees got stacked on top of each other, kilometers high, as they could not rot. All of that tree material is now all of our oil and coal reserves. This period ended when organisms figured out how to consume lignin and allowed trees to rot. This was the Carboniferous period. No more coal or oil is replenished since then.

You could say we are niw in the Plastiferous era, with us piling up massive amounts of plastic that cannot rot. This will end when we release plastic eating bugs, or when organisms evolve ways to eat through all this available energy (plastic has a lot of energy available, which is released when it burns, for example, very similar to wood). This could happen sooner than we think. When that beast is loose, that will be the end of plastic for human use.

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u/FlirtySanchez Jul 29 '26

I get where you're going with this. But the comparison doesn't quite seem right.

Just because we have organisms that break down dead trees, doesn't mean we no longer have trees. Trees developed defenses against this.

I could easily see us developing an additive to plastic that breaks down over time, or you treat at a plant before feeding it to the bugs, that would make it so that plastic items would have a shelf-life.

I'm just curious if we get to this point, since a lot of plastic are oil-based products, what would it break down into? One of the articles lists that it would break down into monomers, which could then be recycled into more plastic, but be far more energy efficient because you bypass the process to get to the monomer point.

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u/AnnArchist Jul 27 '26

If they can eat the plastic, they will find a way to the food source without us doing anything.

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u/Wobbar Jul 28 '26

Guessing because they can only eat one of the many kinds of plastic, or because it could have ecological effects

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u/Tinyfishy Jul 29 '26

As a beekeeper, I deal with waxworms all the time. They aren’t attracted to plastic by itself. But, if you have the eggs for the worms on beeswax in a plastic bag, they will shred the bag as well as the wax. So, you’d have to mix the bags with lotsa beeswax.