IVIV plastics

[Monte Davis]

Doug Millison sez:

> My understanding is that plastics don't break down, ever, they
> will remain in Earth's geological record forever...

And quotes: 

> But plastics are kinda outside the 'natural' processes of entropy, not
> breaking down unless you want to take a really, really long view of
> things.

Geological processes and their (only slightly younger) cousins, biological
processes, have been learning to play with carbon compounds for several
billion years. On *our* mingy time scale, yes, some plastics are way more
durable than flesh or wicker or wood (C plus H,O,N) or, for that matter,
steel (Fe with a controlled soupcon of C).

But they're not magic, the brilliant poetry of GR's deep tarry strata
notwithstanding. Thermodynamically, they're not as tough to break down as
yer basic bone and shell and chalk, where a trace of the C,H,O,N "mortar"
endures for ages amid the "bricks" of Ca, Mg, Na compounds.

My bet is that the more and more widely they hang around, the sooner we'll
see (or make) mutant microbes that find them tasty. Failing that, on the
time scale of the geochemistry that turns greenhouse-hot eras into
miles-deep chalk beds, then lifts up the chalk beds into mountains as
erosion and greenery and critters pull the C back into circulation again,
there's nothing special about plastics.

I realize this is no comfort to the waterfowl strangled by my plastic
sixpack yoke, or the ten thousand sea creatures entangled in a nylon drift
net that some Japanese trawler lost in 1983, but that's the way it is. If
you accept the profound power of the ideas behind entropy, you also have to
accept that nothing is "kinda 'outside'" them. It's the only game in town.

-Monte "sub specie aeternitatis, for the moment" Davis