If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?

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If plastic was made in 1907 how do they know it may take up to 1000 years to decompose?

In: Chemistry

26 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You don’t need to observe the full lifecycle of a material or molecule or atom to understand how it works. In this case, you can say that a plastic bag in the forest decomposes or breaks down X% over a one year period, so using that math and knowledge you know that it will take Y years to break down completely.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Simple math.

If it takes 500 years to decompose 50% of a plastic sample, then it takes 1000 years to fully decompose.

If it takes 10 years to decompose 1% of a plastic sample, then it takes 1000 years to fully decompose.

Edit: As many of you have pointed out, yes, the relationship might not exactly be linear. I just gave an example to how we can find the time to decompose without actually waiting that long. It could be exponential, or any other model that can be solved by math. This was just an example so it would be easy for anyone to understand.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Let’s say you see a piece of wood. And a bunch of termites are chewing away at it. Each day, you can measure how much material is being eaten by the termites. You also have information on other, smaller pieces of wood that have been COMPLETELY eaten by termites so you know HOW the termites eat wood (do they eat the same amount each day? Maybe they eat a little bit at first, eat a lot later, and then slow down, or maybe they eat a small amount initially, but gradually eat more, and more each day, etc.).

Using this information, you can mathematically predict when that piece of wood is going to get completely eaten.

It’s the same thing with plastic, except instead of that piece of wood, it’s plastic, instead of termites, it’s the summation of all the natural processes that break down plastic.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It has been explained below – but it just made me think of an even more absurd example: we have experimental evidence, that the half-life of proton (which is, simply speaking, the typical time it takes for a proton to decay) is at least 1.67×10^34 years, even though that’s 24 orders of magnitude longer than the existence of the Universe, so it’s … pretty damn sure nobody has watched a proton that long! It’s simply because there is a *lot* of protons to watch and particle decay happen randomly, so even if the average time is unfathomably long, if you watch enough protons, one would be almost guaranteed to decay in an accessible time frame if their half-life were “short” enough. (We still do not know whether they decay at all, this is just as close as we come experimental get to saying that they don’t as we can.)

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are different types of plastic, and they all break down eventually. I’d believe the thousand years is a generalization, isn’t it?

Anonymous 0 Comments

I read a comment about a plastic engineer that said that plastic doesn’t take up to 1000 years to decompose. May have been bullshit.

He said something like the stabilizers that help the plastic not break down don’t take up that much to decompose.