>Plastic isn't always forever

But molecularly, plastic is around forever. A wooden bucket will eventually breakdown to not be wood at all anymore. Products made from plastic is not what lasts forever, the plastic itself is.

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ssl-3 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn't sound right to me, either. Let's use PLA as an example of a thing that is definitely plastic.

In the right conditions (hot aerobic compost, which is admittedly difficult to achieve), PLA rather quickly decomposes all the way back down to lactic acid.

Lactic acid is definitely not plastic. It's liquid, and is one of the primary products of the happy little microbes that I nurture in my pepper ferments at home.

Again, it's hard to pin the long-term properties of plastic (noun) down in absolutes.

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TZubiri 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you need to grind the plastic into dust for that to happen?

	▲	ssl-3 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, AFAICT. Everything goes faster in hot compost with additional preprocessing, but it's not strictly necessary to reduce things to dust. Hydrolysis of the PLA still happens whether it is dust or something larger. After that, the chains are small enough to be available for microbes to eat fairly quickly. They're just eating one bite at a time; they don't know that they have an entire elephant to eat. More surface area improves immediate availability and speed, but less surface area doesn't cause the process to cease.