Don't see why you couldn't supplement existing recycle infra till we understand it better.
TBH, I'm sure any company would jump to be the first to show off plastic eating bacteria. Even if it's kept in a clean room and only eats employee's soda bottles from time to time.
It would definitely open the door to more funding and research if hyped enough.
We just have to make sure we know exactly how it propagates and how to safely handle that like anything else.
Ideally you wouldn't want it to be a covid 2.0, of course. Something more like medical grade maggots that are engineered to never reproduce would suffice.
Hmm, I might suggest reading/watching Andromeda Strain to see how well "clean room" reacts to unkown foreign substance. How much plastic is used in proposed clean room that the bacteria will feast on to weaken the "well laid plans" of the clean room's designers before escaping into the wild?
And the dinosaurs in Jurasic Park were engineered to be only females.
I don't trust humans manipulating organisms at this level. We're too new at it, but I understand that you have to try things out. We all do it with code when we're learning a new language/framework/etc. However, we've all had code that was only intended to be a PoC that then gets released into production without being fully tested. That's when the issues are found. Some lab wants to monetize the thing they've spent years researching but not fully understood/tested and then we're all some scifi plot.
Not all fiction is pure fantasy. Sometimes, the fictional work is from someone very smart and researched on a topic that comes up with a story that not only entertains but provokes a larger discussion on the topic. For example, Tom Clancy wrote about using an airplane as a kinetic weapon. Clancy was known for being very well researched on the topics he discussed. Too bad his plot device wasn't given more attention in the real world or the beginning decades of the 21st century might have turned out differently. From my understanding Crichton was known to have researched his topics as well.
Humanity ignore the thought discussions that ficitional work provokes at humanity's peril.
It's enzymes the organisms are producing. You don't have to release the "bugs" (Bacteria, I assume? I don't love the writing here.) into the environment. You culture the bacteria and extract the enzymes for use in removing plastic from the environment.
TBH, I'm sure any company would jump to be the first to show off plastic eating bacteria. Even if it's kept in a clean room and only eats employee's soda bottles from time to time.
It would definitely open the door to more funding and research if hyped enough.
We just have to make sure we know exactly how it propagates and how to safely handle that like anything else.
Ideally you wouldn't want it to be a covid 2.0, of course. Something more like medical grade maggots that are engineered to never reproduce would suffice.