The collection started when I pulled a thin, translucent sliver from the battery compartment of a holiday toy. It had been placed there in order to insulate a battery terminal from the battery during shipment and thus help assure that the toy was ready, literally, out of the box. Now it had become a forlorn bit of exotic garbage, placed at the corner of my desk to be admired.
It was soon joined by: a narrow strip of tape holding a set of underwear in a bundle, a jagged tear from a jasmine tea packet, a small, fragile and ripped anti-static bag, a twist cap from a water bottle, some remnants of shrink-wrap, a blade guard from a safety razor and a millimeter long fragment of red tinsel garland.
Only the water bottle lid is marked with a plastic identification code (#2, high density polyethylene) indicating recyleability. All the rest, every dinky bit, is without any obvious further use, destined for the garbage sack and dim points beyond.
Perhaps they will migrate far away, down the hill across the valley and out into the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of plastic crap twice the area of Texas. Perhaps they will drift evil and help choke a pelican or a turtle.
At best they will just be passive parasites, adding noise to food identification signals and taking up space until something comes along that can digest them. Will it be something that is friendly to the human-sustaining ecosystem? Maybe a microbe that sinks some carbon and excretes some water and oxygen along the way. Can we wait? Do we have to?
It seems that the potential of crap to commodity (”C to C” ?) processing should be a multi-billion dollar business, even with the current fledgling state of bio-engineering. Waste farmers armed with tweaked-out microorganisms, wielding digestion for the greater good.
Or perhaps the little bits of plastic crap are here to stay, a secondary life form condensed by an enzymatic action of human industry. A quiet organism whose replication and adaptative core is completely external to its form, residing instead in human memes. These controlling and facilitating memes are in turn parasitic aspects of human adaptation which must be culled in any long-term human future. A subtly toxic grey goo, independent of nanotech.
But likely it’s just a lot of garbage, produced by ignorant meat-sticks in their haste to earn a cheap buck. And the first generations of waste farmers will taste a new and hyper-lucrative arbitrage game thus far undampened by serious competition. Perhaps too, waste farming/mining will be the coming-out event for bio-engineering, as the science quickly begets the tech that begins to suck up all those discarded commodities.
For the moment however my little pile of resin orts requires a trivial immediate personal cost to discard, against an equally trivial near future return. The reversal of that time-valuation calculus will truly represent an economic revolution.