The obvious side effect I can see is that plastic will no longer be super-durable and plastic goods used outside may now start to "rot". It's an interesting problem we're creating for ourselves by failing to properly dispose of our trash.
> The obvious side effect I can see is that plastic will no longer be super-durable and plastic goods used outside may now start to "rot".
When left outside, most plastic goods degrade after a few years of solar UV exposure. Not well enough to remove the plastic from the environment, but sufficiently degraded that it breaks and is no longer fit for purpose. Like an old plastic lawn chair that becomes brittle and eventually shatters when you sit on it.
Indoors things are different. But indoors, wood furniture and whatnot can last hundreds of years.
A different perspective is that rotting is the ecology's natural function for returning material back into the ecology for new life and new growth. We have suspended that process, so now the ecology is adapting to it.
It doesn’t need to not be exposed to microbes at all, but rather just not reach a critical mass / density to become a viable and readily available food source.
Recycling and incineration come to mind, albeit impractical and environmentally harmful.
Well, maybe we could have "rotting" plastic for stuff we dispose of anyway, and "durable" plastic engineered around these microbes that we use for stuff we want to keep around.
Or, maybe by then we could just rebuild whatever is rotting with our home 3d printer.
As with wood, I think this will only be an issue for goods left in life-friendly environments (like outdoors). It seems unlikely that your monitor would rot on your desk in your climate-controlled house, just like the desk itself doesn't rot.
Wood generally doesn't rot unless it gets wet. Wood is typically treated so that if it gets wet there is a mechanism to prevent fungi from eating it. Painting it, for example, causes the water to slide off the wood before the underlying wood can get wet. But even a tiny puncture of that paint will expose the wood to rot causing fungi that float in the air everywhere. Most wood already has rot causing fungi inside of it, all you need to do to activate it is add water.
Woodbugs are another water loving creature. No water, no problem.
I've got a balcony who's floor is made out of wooden planks. It was varnished at some point, but the varnish is damaged in many places, how long before the wood degrades completely and is unsafe to stand on?
Usually the planks under a balcony are protected by the balcony itself, so they remain fairly dry, especially if there are drip flashings that redirect rain drips and rivulets away. Or, they may be pressure treated wood, in which case it's likely to outlast the building whether it gets wet or not. There might be a fascia board that is designed to take the rain and rot away, separated from the structural beams by a flashing, vapor barrier, standoffs, hidden paint/stain, or nothing!
It would be great in some ways, but it would also have enormous consequences. There is so much infrastructure that would need to be prematurely replaced -- so many consumer durables which will fail years or even decades ahead of their expected shelf lives.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if we were to start concocting additives with antimicrobial properties, which would probably be even worse for the environment while also preventing the beneficial function of post-use decomposition.
Or perhaps, our way of life changes and we live without a durable, non-biodegradable, lightweight, apparently-cheap material that enables a disposable, consumerist lifestyle.
Well, it would be great when we wanted to get rid of those items. It would be less great when we wanted to preserve those items, like the massive amount of goods and infrastructure that are constructed out of plastic. The insulation on power cables, for one thing, would be bad if it started rotting.
Not exactly the same, but rats eating the power cables has been a problem with cars built in the last decade because of the switch to soy-based insulation.
They are plastic today because earlier they were steel and rusted. Thus the “rustproof undercoating” which some dealers offered. A mechanic said my 1990 Honda CRX was mostly rust after 6 years in the Northeast US.
Rust is an entirely different process though. You can mitigate it with sacrificial anodes, for example (that's how steel ships survive bobbing around in salt water).
Wooden furniture is not treated. You are thinking of pressure-treated lumber, which is not used for furniture, but rather for outdoor wood in contact with soil.
Completely untreated wood stored in a dry environment will last many years (hundreds? tens at least) without degrading. Look at woodworkers hoarding wood in basements, beams in old buildings, etc
Staining/waxing/varnishing is used to protect the surface from wear and tear or change aesthetics. A varnished table that has been worn through in areas can be sanded back and look like new. The wood under worn spots won't be noticeably different.
We often use plastic for things that need to be able to deal with environmental exposure, though, or to protect things that can't deal with that sort of thing.
Things like water-pipes and cable insulators would be especially problematic if they started rotting.
