On: Plastic-Eating Mushrooms (2021)

[culi]

I have a problem with such a claim. When measuring how "damaging to the environment" something is, what are we looking at? Compostable plastics, for example, might seem more eco when looking at the waste, but the truth is that just means they're breaking down into micro-plastics faster

How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it?

I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim

[Retric → culi]

I mean this quite literally. Cellulose is useful as plastic, it’s also what makes wood stiff.

Worrying about cellulose micro plastics is like worrying about the cell walls of lettuce. You can’t digest the stuff but it’s non toxic.