system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do corn based drinking straws differ scientifically from plastic drinking straws?
gpt
Straws made of plastic have not occured in nature before humans made them. No organism have yet evolved to eat them.

Straws made of something like corn will get eaten by worms and bacteria same way they would eat a leaf. We call this being bio-degradable.

Trees back in the day that resulted in fossil fuel were not bio-degradable. The organisms to eat them did not exist back then. They do now which is why current trees that die do not end up the same way.

It could be possible that hundreds of thousands of years from now some organism would come to exist that would eat all the plastic we produced on the planet.