Where did all the plastic go?

[Barcode]

Heya,

Standard D&D fantasy milieu, but set in North America in the far-future, 10K years out or so, after the fall of the technological age of man. Trying to stay light on standard post apocalyptic elements (no mutants, radiation or spray paint).

I want artifacts of the current day to be rare, and have gotten good feedback from the folks here on how to explain away the absence of metal and concrete structures.

The question is, how do I get rid of all the plastic? I don't want the world to be littered with styrofoam peanuts and plastic sporks or Coke bottles. I want the occasional plastic artifact to throw at the PC's, but given the rather sizeable half-life of plastic, I need to explain away the rest of the current supply of plastic garbage.

Some thoughts I've had:

Early survivors came to the conclusion that plastic was evil (it is highly magic resistant and would therefore resist divine magic) and destroyed it somehow. But how? Can plastic be converted into a fuel and burned?

Early scavengers found all the plastic and converted it to something useful, but not obviously plastic. I am not up on my plastic recycling techniques, but I know milk bottles are used to make Polarfleece, for example. Any recycling scientists out there have the inside scoop on how plastic is recycled? Could these techniques be used in a time of chaos?

Variation on the previous: early spellcasters who conquered the plastic-using technologists had some sort of long-lost technique for destroying plastic, and wiped it out.

Any other cool ideas?

 

[The Traveler]

Biological warfare. One country developed a bacterium that would break down polymers as food, thus destroying modern technology.

Okay, so technically I stole it from the DC comic "Birds of Prey", but it's a good concept for putting someone back into the stone age.

 

[geezerjoe]

Plastic Monsters ... a varriation of the Rust Monster OK Sorry had to go there ...

but more seriously, a varriation on one of your ideas would be to allow plastic to replace many spell casting components which would allow the quick disposal of much of the matieral and give your players even more reason to search for the stuff.

Also, plastic could be inheriently magical ... due to some very twisted occurance / logic ok ... now I'm grasping


l8r

Joe Too Old

 

[Morrus]

Plastic requires oil, does it not? I wonder if the process works backwards in some way? World's oil resources depleted, people develop a way to extract the oil from plastic. Plastic gets all used up.

 

[Jeph]

Teleport it, forget about it. All plastic eventually ends up getting thrown out--plastic bottles, packaging peanuts, broken PVC pipes, you name it--and as soon as teleportation magic was discovered, it would obviously be put to commercial use. Zappo! Caster teleports self and day's load of garbage to outer space (while surrounded by a Mage Armor variant that seals in air), then comes back, plastic is hundreds of thousands of lightyears away.

 

[Oogar]

Personally, I think an Eco-Friendly scientist would be all over the creation of a bio engineered Enzyme that eats plastic, and in doing so, saves the environment. Perhaps it was even under control and used safely, until society collapsed (or it caused society to collapse). At some point in your history, it gets free, eats all the plastic which is not secured away somewhere. Then the Enzyme (or creature) dies off with no food. The bio mass created in this process could even be the basis for some subtle mutations which began to overtake the earth. The enzye could have even mutated into a few of the jelly and ooze creatures which still populate the world.

Just wait until a spell caster reads about "it's all comming to an end. The tires melted off my car this morning, and my cell phone just crumbled in my hand. I don't know how it got out of the lab, much less how it became airborn. Did I destroy the planet? Did I doom us all? My children, My wife... the pen it is melting as I try to wr......"

Pardon any more spelling errors that I missed, please.

 

[Fast Learner]

The enzyme/biological concept is good. You might also consider nanotechnological machines designed to break down plastic and convert it into energy, something not terribly far fetched. If we created such a thing, we'd be mining our own landfills. Eventually it could get out of control, but the machines wouldn't function without instruction, so they needn't be active in your current world.

 

[Maldur]

I read a novel with somekinda bacteria/virus that ate plastic.
Ill see if I can find the title when I get home this afternoon.

 

[Azure Trance]

Okay, so technically I stole it from the DC comic "Birds of Prey", but it's a good concept for putting someone back into the stone age.

Saw the cover for the new issue, Phil Noto drippy goodness

 

[I'm A Banana]

Oh! the enzyme is cool, especially if it 'evolved' to be some oozy mofo!