I agree. Fix the source, not the symptom. Meanwhile, we’ve got an awful lot of symptom out there though. Should we just wait a thousand years to watch the trash dumps that are already there slowly dissolve? Because I don’t think we’re about to quit them anytime soon, although there is good news and bad news. The good is that MI is finally thinking of a 10 cent deposit for plastic water bottles. That will keep some out of the landfills. The bad news is that Pampers has a new commercial encouraging the use of those awful landfill clogging diapers. Using Pampers, a child somewhere gets free vaccine. This one step forward, two steps back isn’t helping matters.

Other examples include programs to capture and sequester carbon emissions (when it makes more sense to try and consume less carbon-based fuels first), or big investments in hydrogen-fueled vehicles (when more carbon is consumed to make the hydrogen fuel than is saved by just using a more efficient internal combustion auto) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

What I’m saying is we shouldn’t put blind faith in unproven new technologies to solve our problems without addressing the sources of the problems first.

These kinds of mentalities make me think of this old rhyme…

There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.
Imagine that, she swallowed a cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die…

One concern with engineering organisms that are relatively non-selective in what they consume is often referred to as the “grey goo” scenario. We need to be very careful what we genetically engineer and then release into the “wild” of a landfill. These things have a natural tendency to evolve and find new niche’s. I’d imagine you would not be very happy if someone dropped a sample of his bacteria in your car and it ate your dashboard, or in your home, where it ate all your electronics and everything else made of plastic and similar hydrocarbons.

Twenty years ago there were experiments with bacteria that could eat crude oil in oil slicks…imagine if that stuff got loose in our oil fields and ate all the worlds remaining crude oil.

There are rarely simple solutions to complex problems…or worse, the apparently simple solutions may end up causing far more problems.

Grey goo [from Wikipedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler#Grey_goo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

“…One convenient analogy for the grey goo problem is to consider bacteria as the most perfect example of biological nanotechnology”…”one scenario suggested danger to life could arise in the form of grey goo which consumes carbon to make more of itself. If unchecked such mechanical replication could potentially consume whole ecoregions or the whole Earth (ecophagy), or it could simply outcompete other natural lifeforms for necessary resources.”