Life finds a way.
We're going to see an increase in plastic metabolizing bacteria as well, so eventually our plastics will 'rust' and degrade faster.
replies(4):
We're going to see an increase in plastic metabolizing bacteria as well, so eventually our plastics will 'rust' and degrade faster.
Earth had a plastic like problem before. There were no fungi that eat cellulose so dead trees were just piling up without degrading. Those trees turned into ~petroleum~ coal that we consume now.
That trees somehow turned into ~petroleum~ coal, I learnt in school. I used to imagine trees were somehow buried under stand suddenly and before they could be degraded they turned into ~petroleum~ coal under heavy pressure.
Also the availability of other resources might have meant that even if eating the tree parts did develop earlier it just wasn't enough to be a key survival advantage, especially if initial “versions” of the process were inefficient. Perhaps what happening was in one strain it lost the ability to feed on the older sources but had the latent ability to consume the new ones, even if much less efficient, so switched and continued from there to quickly refine the process via further mutation. Changes in the availability of other components, which the trees themselves will have had a hand in, will have changed the balance but over a significant amount of time.
Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly the components of our plastics and how they hang together are not that novel, requiring less changes to come together in one individual or population to make consuming them practical.