"Just One Word: Microplastics"

[Dark Lightning]

That's a lot smarter than printing "food". Sometimes people get so wrapped up in a process that they miss a prime opportunity.

[Recusant]

Not searching for it, but of course the folks who've been working on the basic biotech see the possibilities of turning plastic into something that life can work with.  The cookies are transparently a gimmick to get eyes on their project.

[Dark Lightning]

Good point, Casey. I guess fertilizer ain't all that sexy. I'm just reminded of a project I worked on years ago where the torque on a certain size screw was determined by the end user (us). We bought a device from a vendor and used our torque requirement without considering the manufacturer's spec. Their fastener stripped. The analysis people were all over the fact that the screw was plenty strong enough for that application. It took a guy on the shop floor (me) to point out that it wasn't that high tensile strength fastener that was the failure.

[Recusant]

I try to find positive items for this thread, but I'm not going to ignore the other sort. 

"Microplastics Aren't Inert After All: In Water, They Make DNA-Damaging Free Radicals" | Columbia Climate School

Plastics are supposed to be chemically inert. It's the reason they're used so frequently to package food, bottle water and create children's toys.

But something important happens when a large piece of plastic fragments into micro and nanoparticles: its surface area increases dramatically relative to its volume. Vastly more of the material is now exposed to its surroundings.

A new study by researchers from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that this newly created surface is not necessarily safe and identified the chemical reasons why.

"As plastic fragments into smaller and smaller particles, its surface area increases enormously," said Wei Min, a Columbia professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. "Then microplastics change the water that surrounds them, generating high-energy, reactive radicals that very likely contribute to biological damage that we see in animals and potentially in humans as a result of microplastic exposure."

The work challenges the common view of microplastics as largely passive fragments of inert material and contributes to a growing understanding of why the large-scale presence of microplastics is a cause for concern. The research was published today in the journal Nature.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is open access:

"Intrinsic physicochemical activity at microplastic–water interfaces" | Nature

Abstract:

Plastics have become an integral part of our modern society, largely because they are generally regarded as chemically inert under normal circumstances. However, plastics fragmented into microplastics (less than 5 mm in size) have recently raised significant public concerns, and have been detected widely across ecosystems and human tissues with increasing environmental and health risks.

Here we show that commodity microplastics exhibit intrinsic physicochemical activity in water, manifested by the spontaneous generation of reactive oxygen species that increases with interfacial hydrophobicity and strongly correlates with interfacial electrostatics. Ab initio calculations support these observations and reveal that hydroxide oxidation becomes energetically more favourable at increasingly hydrophobic microplastic–water interfaces through the combined effects of partial solvation and electrostatics.

These interfacial properties and the resulting oxidative chemistry have direct implications for biomolecular adsorption, protein aggregation, and even cellular damage. Together, our findings challenge the prevailing paradigm of plastic inertness, identify a possibly overlooked mechanism for the detrimental effects of microplastics on health and the environment, and contribute to a fundamental understanding of the structure–activity relationship of interfacial water, which may inform the design of safer and more sustainable plastic materials.