Transparency isn't the reason we use so much plastic. We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products. Or it will stick around in various components without needing to worry about rain and such.
What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU
For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too.
At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions.
One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.
Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.
If it's used to generate electricity or usable heat and not only to get rid of it, plastic would substitute for another fuel, so it's not as simple as looking at co2 from burning plastic vs co2 from dumping it in landfill.
I don't have numbers, but if burning plastic replaces some coal or fracked natural gas, that could be a win, all things considered.
Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
And evwn if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
> Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
My argument is not that burning plastic is more efficient than burning whatever fuel. My argument is that extracting, transporting and burning waste plastic may be more efficient than extracting, transporting, and burning whatever fuel. Waste to energy might need a lot less transportation if the plants are near where the waste is generated and/or where it is already collected.
> Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
There's already sorting and education for recycling, so the question becomes what's the incremental input needed to get a usable waste to useful energy pipeline.
> And even if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
Yes, but I don't know how that relates? My argument is that the emissions of burning plastic for usable energy might not be as bad as it looks because it would reduce lifecycle emissions from (direct) fossil fuels. That's not an argument for or against burning plastic, it's an argument that we need to get marginal emissions numbers for the alternatives, and if emissions is the only criteria, then it would make sense to burn plastic in cases where the marginal emissions are in favor of burning it; but even that wouldn't be universal. It might make more (or less) sense to setup trash for energy plants in isolated locations where transport of other fuel is difficult; it almost certainly makes less sense to setup trash for energy plants in places where natgas is a waste product, natgas is a clear choice there.
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I am) talking about plastic bags.
I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.
> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately 13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75 ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags even affect the last decimal of that number.
Why would we discuss plastic bags exclusively? Singling out one item like this makes little sense - the problem is the aggregate of all plastic we use, not specifically one item. If we only used plastic for our shopping bags, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The oxygen is not contained in the 150kg of plastic, it’s pulled out of the atmosphere. You’re actually “burning” substantially more than 150kg if you include all the reactants.
Burning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would expect the number to be around 500kg (quick calculation) max.
Polyethylene is roughly CH2, and burns into CO2 and H20. So 1.5 moles of oxygen (O2) for each mole of polyethylene. The molar mass of CH2 is 14 and oxygen is 32, so 1 kg of CH2 will result in ~4.5kg of CO2.
How do you figure that? 14g of CH2 results in 44g of CO2 (water we can ignore), so 150kg of CH2 becomes ~470kg of CO2. 1kg of CH2 would give ~3.1kg CO2. Or am I missing something?
I don't disagree with anything on this chain but I think things like hypothetical miles deep landfill can't be worse than burning, it'll stay there for million years and the next iteration of life to do the same discussion as being done here.
To me a "miles deep" landfill sounds like a wonderful way to contaminate groundwater.
I think it's facile to imagine that the Earth is large, thus that burying something can "make it go away".
But the Earth is also an incredibly dynamic place over long enough time scales (which for the purposes of this discussion can simply mean decades or centuries) so much of the lightweight matter you bury deep in dense rock can find a way to buoy back top the surface far sooner than in millions of years.
We know for sure that CO2 is a huge problem in the next century, and even earlier. We are already seeing massive impact from global warming today.
Any theoretical other concern from possible impacts of plastic in a landfill (which already will contain many other unknown pollutants) is at best secondary, unless we have some solid evidence otherwise.
Consider also that some significant amount of plastic in landfills is inevitable regardless of any sepatate collection policies. Especially with current recycling practices, you are encouraged to only separately collect certain kinds of fairly clean plastics. If you have a dirty styrofoam container that you just ate out of, you're not even supposed to throw that in the plastic recycling - so it will go to a landfill anyway. This means that landfills have to be mindful of potential plastic pollution even if we burn a lot of the plastic we use.
Plus, if we're truly worried about the health impact of plastic use, the only solution is to massively reduce plastic use. The fact that we "cleanly burn it" instead of letting it seap into groundwater is not going to help one iota when we store and transport and sometimes cook much of our food directly in it.
We also vastly overestimate the amount of trash created by the human race. Last time i did the math, a 1km cube could contain basically all the trash currently in every landfill a few times over. The plastic pollution problem is containable, literally. We just need to stop certain countries from dumping it into rivers.
Yes but humans have an innate need for apocalyptic thinking. If the world isn’t ending because of something we did, we will invent reasons to believe so
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.
Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.
Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.
And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.
I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our civilization. With current global warmig trends, countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other issues.
> Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does.
I also wanted to answer this. This is non-scientific BS based on literally nothing. Risks don't work like this: unless you can quantify them, you can't act on them. Any activity has some potential risk of unknown catastrophic effects. Maybe there is some chance that after a threshold, flushing our toilets will cause tidal effects that rip our planet apart - it's unlikely but it's possible. So let's all stop flushing our toilets. And stop using 5G if we're there, some people think that has a high risk of causing cancer or whatever.
Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
> CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
By what possible measure? Despite clear, well documented science, including very clear dire economical impact, and all within an extremely clear and short term time frame, with escalating effects already visible literally everywhere in the world, we have had almost 0 progress in combating global warming. The best we've done is slowing the rate of acceleration - as in CO2 release is still accelerating, just not as much.
Plastic waste has environmental impact, especially in the oceans, but nowhere near to the level that 2-3-4 degrees warming will have. And that is what we are currently on track for by the end of this century.
Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
That consists to a great extent of maritime generated garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in the middle of the ocean.
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".
However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...
Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water.
You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells?
>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature
Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.
Nothing made of atoms is truly chemically inert, not even noble gases. It's just more or less reactive, and when/how.
But even if it was literally un-reactive, sometimes it's enough to just be in the way. Imagine folding a protein, or assembling a structure of RNA origami*, but some big lump of un-reactive molecule is in the middle — the ultimate shape is different, leading to different biochemical results. Grit in the gears.
Or even just heavy: deuterium is chemically identical to hydrogen, but still has a lethal concentration** because it is twice the mass.
** Replacing 50% of the hydrogen in a multicellular organism with deuterium is generally lethal, unless this is a widely believed myth that's about to get a bunch of debunking
Not all harmful effects are caused by direct chemical reactions. For instance, asbestos causes health problems through the physical process of friction and piercing. Small particles that aren't removed by the body can do a lot of harm.
Two scenarios here:
1) They don't react with anything, meaning the billions of tons we produce keep increasing. Forever.
2) They do react, break down, get into the soil, water, blood, people, and have studied detrimental effects, and many more yet unstudied.
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.
If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.
The goal is get every last drop of unwanted water out of the Titanic. We can at least theoretically spread heavy canvas over some the huge gash in the bow, so you are focusing on a leaky water cooler in the stern.
No, I'm just saying that we shouldn't start taking buckets and pouring more water in. The default behavior is to store garbage in landfills. Let's leave it like that, rather than burning it to produce even more CO2.
"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
What are paper packs? I can't think of anything that could be qualified of "paper pack" and be currently in use as a replacement for a "plastic container".
I know I don't want to use paper BAGS because they break super easily when carrying goods but that doesn't seem to be what the article is talking about.
That's not entirely true. I throw away a lot of cardboard packaging with a plastic window glued into it. Obviously this can't replace all plastic, but it can certainly replace some.
Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
Curiously, a lot of tape is made from "cellophane", which is chemically similar to paper. The windows on envelopes are typically made from it. Not sure about cardboard boxes but you can make cellophane pretty strong.
Nobody likes plastic because it lasts "thousands of years". People care about storing food products well. If we can do that without lasting thousands of years that seems like a pretty good win.
Good at storing food products and lasting thousands of years are very closely related.
The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree.
The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
The problem with plastic is not that nothing can be done with it after disposal, the problem with plastic is that it harms the environment during use.
There is no problem with the fact that a plastic bag does not deteriorate for thousands of years after use: you just throw it in the trash, and it lies in a pile of garbage for thousands of years, absolutely harmless and with a near-zero impact on the environment (because the areas of garbage dumps are tiny both relative to the environment and relative to other human impacts on the environment)
Propaganda about the harm of plastic bags is designed for complete idiots, whose idiocy borders on a clinical diagnosis.
The real problem is with other products of plastic, which break down while in use, polluting the water and air with microparticles.
Car tires, synthetic fabrics, paints and paint coatings and various exterior finishes, sidings and so on. All of this, even with the slightest wear, whether from mechanics or ultraviolet radiation, pollutes the environment throughout the entire use.
Against this problem, plastic bags are completely harmless even if we start using them ten times more and throwing them away ten times more often. And this problem cannot be solved by changing the method of disposal or recycling. Only by stopping the use.
The fight against plastic bags and all this stuff about recycling plastic is literally a joke how drunk man searching for something under the streetlight that he lost somewhere else in the park. Only he searches for it at someone else's expense, actively spending the allocated funds on alcohol and large-scale media projects on the need and importance of the search under the streetlight
Yes. It still produces microplastics. It might be compostable or biodegradable in some environments, but we're a far distance away from from an environmentally safe plastic.
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point.
I haven’t really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I didn’t really use to do that previously anyways, but now I don’t even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect them in a separate bag.
Also, in bigger cities(Oslo in my case), even if you throw empties in public trash cans, they get fished out by various types of poor people who walk around all day collecting them. Though I tend to leave them next to the trashcan as long as it's not too windy, just as a nice gesture to the less fortunate. Or, often you'll see one of them as you finish your drink and you just hand them the bottle. Of course, I'd prefer a society where people didn't need to do this to get their next fix or meal or whatever it is, but it is sort of neat that utrash sorting can just naturally emerge in a society once the trash is imbued with monetary value.
One wonders why we don't do this with larger categories of garbage that needs to be sorted. I suppose bottles and cans are fairly easy to semi-automate given their fairly standardised shapes. But that just feels like an implementation detail.
In the poorer districts of Ho Chi Minh City, like Q4, Go Vap, etc, it is similar yet different. Each evening, folks set their garbage bags directly on the curb. At night, other people rip open the bags and scatter the trash in the street looking for anything salvageable. Finally, around midnight, city employees walk the streets pushing wheeled bins and sweep up the trash. When it rains, the trash is carried to clog drains, causing large-scale flooding.
Not a great system for many reasons, not least of which is relying on truly poor people. But they are remarkably efficient at extracting value from the waste stream.
Automated recyclable separation is hard and fascinating. Magnets for ferrous metals. Something about non-ferrous metal and eddy currents for aluminum. Infrared cameras and mechanical arms to detect and separate types of plastics. Blower systems to extract paper. Tumblers with various sized holes (like those coin counting machines) for other separation. (Source: Not that great. I just watched a few Youtubes.)
Here in Vancouver we have little shelves around garbage cans for the empties to go, and someone will come by in a few minutes to collect it for the deposit.
> Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point.
AKA "Container-deposit legislation" (or "Pant" as we call it in Sweden and maybe also Germany?). Seems to work very well, and you also have a ton of people collecting cans that others throw in the environment, as they'll get money for it.
Kind of wish we had it here in Spain too, as the environment and the sea ends up with a lot of cans and glass bottles. Seems like such an obvious idea to have nationwide.
Yeah, in Germany pretty much all cans and bottles require a deposit (single-use plastic bottles: 0.25 €) and every shop selling cans/bottles with deposit is required to take them and similar bottles back.
Most supermarkets have a reverse vending machine that take cans and bottles, crushes single-use ones, and returns a voucher for the deposit.
Some videos of these machines in action (not sure whether there are people on HN who have never seen one):
Yep same scheme started in Ireland recently, just a transplant of the German system it seems. Some people complain but it has massively reduced waste and litter.
Ireland's had a tax on plastic shopping bags for years, which basically eliminated them as a form of litter. The bottle deposit scheme is doubly clever by making collected litter have an actual cash value, don't think it would have worked without that.
> That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Or that governments care enough to create laws and incentives for people to collect it.
Besides, there are many places that don't have as much plastic as others in their environment, so clearly it's possible to avoid in some way. Have to figure out how and why, but I'm guessing the researchers kind of feel like that's outside the scope of their research.
THere’s a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit isn’t lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesn’t need to either.
The plastic doesn't need to last for thousands of years for our actual use, but the properties that make it last for thousands of years are also what make it desirable for our use: fully waterproof, impermeability to microbes, etc.
Yeah but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties. It's not even the case that all those properties are necessary for all actual cases of their use.
> but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties
Yes, it is. Lasting for thousands of years is the same thing as (1) impermeability to microbes (mold / insects / etc...) plus (2) failure to react with local chemicals. Those two things are the things we want, and if you have them both, you last for thousands of years, because there's nothing to stop you from doing that.
I think the answer to this question (with emphasis on "all") is clearly none that we know of. Plastic is really hundreds of different polymers, each with different priperties and uses.
If a new material can take the place of some of those, that's a win. We don't need to replace plastic wholesale with a single new thing, there's no rule against using multiple targeted materials, we've just got used to material science being all about one material for recent history.
There are many uses of plastic that can be easily replaced with cornstarch, bamboo, or leaves. Food packaging can be with aluminum or glass, granted those last thousands of years too but the point is they’re more easily recyclable and we can make a circular economy around them.
Those don't work in Tokyo during summers. 40C/104F ambient temp, all-day 100% RH, optional salt in the wind, the every populated areas of the country is basically a bioreactor. We just haven't found such materials that can make distinction between just waiting at a crosswalk in Tokyo and being in a bacterial composting chamber.
I mean, the simplest solution to this problem might be to leave that borderline uninhabitable hellhole and move to Europe where food in bamboo wraps or home-washed glass containers don't start stringing in matters of hours, but that's not an option for most.
Also, you might be thinking that some of those wrap materials were historically viable, but it has to be noted that the content inside were much less healthier than it is now. Medieval Japanese people were estimated to have taken as much as 50g/day/person of salt, which is literally 10x WHO recommendations, or like 1.5 cups per week, or one small backpack worth per year. Adding that much of salt to food is no different from marinading it in chemical preservatives, only much worse.
I don't think so. I was clarifying my point which seemed misunderstood by 2muchcoffeeman and didn't contain much of a sweeping generalization (more a statement of fact about the nature of plastic).
There are numerous other reasons for liking plastic ... in fact that's a very odd and unusual reason to like it. You say that the properties that we like about it are why it lasts thousands of years, but that's a very different statement. In fact, people have pointed out that we would prefer for it to have its likable properties but NOT last for thousands of years. So you've made a whole host of logic errors. You may not think so, but that's another consequence of the underlying problem here.
Yep, plastic has a lot of benefits. But I genuinely don't think the translucency is that much of a selling point. If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
> If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
- any sort of housing window and display protection, I have at least half a dozen within easy reach not including actual computer displays
- transparent food packaging is important to both identify the product and ascertain its state (especially at the store e.g. berries)
- viewing liquid levels at a glance is extremely useful
I'm haunted by a story I read once, about East German beer glasses that were unbreakable. They developed them because of a serious shortage of raw materials as I recall. I would be happy to buy two dozen and pass them on to my family when I die. But that's the problem, isn't it? The lack of sales. Just ask Pyrex, I guess?
We would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why don’t we have plastic that degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.
Until the last coal fired power plant is decommissioned, the rational way to "recycle" plastic is to burn it. There's you're "not common trigger:" the temperature in a coal furnace.
Currently, plastic packaging is measured in the tens of millions of tons per year, while coal is measured in the billions of tons.
No, burning it is not "rational", it is the very opposite. We talk so much of carbon sequestration, and then "rationally" try to release all of the already-sequestered carbon back in the atmosphere.
If the plastic to be burned substitutes for coal or oil, it is carbon neutral. Isn't that what the Scandinavian countries do with their trash as an alternative to landfilling it?
Not burning the plastic risks its turning into microplastics, which will tend to interfere with the physiology of all plants and animals.
It's not carbon neutral, it still adds to the problem. We need to replace our carbon emitting power generation with renewable energy, not burn our trash to keep emitting the same. And trash can just be buried, it doesn't need to be burned.
There's a lot of talk generally of running carbon sequestration technologies and how important that will be. Burying plastic waste is exactly doing that, without spending the extra power to actually extract the carbon from the air.
That's like nicking a vein while you have a arterial hemmohrage - sure, it won't make a big difference, but it also doesn't help in any way. We need to stop burning coal, oil, and methane - and replacing any of them with plastic would not be helpful in the least.
It's technically correct that it doesn't help with reducing CO2 emissions. But plastic recycling is a flop and a charade. Reducing use of plastic is going to be the only effective way to reduce the harm from plastic. But if we're up to our asses in plastic that's going into the environment in our bodies, burning it isn't a bad choice.
I'm not talking about recycling plastic, but about burying it it in landfills.
The plastic in our bodies is not generally getting there from environmental pollution, it's getting there from us using plastic to wrap and cook the majority of our food and drink and cosmetics etc.
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products.
We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
Reading the thread so far I feel everyone one is missing the biggest reason why plastic. Not to negate the technical uses and requirements mentioned especially yours, which are incredibly important…
And of course that reason is economic.
Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating.
At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs.
Regarding that lifecycle:
I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
Singular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute.
In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
There isn't one replacement for plastic. Hence also we can't expect every single replacement to address every single use of plastic. Transparent paper is fine.
We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.
Sometimes. Its plasticity of use means that we use it for for a lot of single-use products. The Clive Thompson Wired article I’m reading right now starts with “a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.” Of course, the problem is that it’s optimized for cost sans externalities.
The article is unclear on what this actually is. Pure cellulose? Cellulose acetate? Cellulose based plastics have been around for a century, but making them is apparently too expensive for packaging. [1] Is this new stuff cheaper to make?
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
Glass. You are talking about glass. It is re-usable and recycle-able. It just has the unfortunate property that if you break it, the resulting shards will slice people up pretty badly, so it is far less safe for transport logistics. Not to mention heavy.
Ideal would be a material that has all the properties, but biodegrades after a reasonable period (what is reasonable depends on the usecase of course).
We use plastic for a wide range of reasons depending on the application & one of them is transparency. The alternative in the case tends to be glass which ticks a lot of your boxes (rain proof, etc.) but is heavy & brittle.
It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
Also something that doesn't slowly poison you over time like what plastics (microplastics) do with microplastics. There's almost no way to get rid of those from our body except breastfeeding, but in that case, it's actually even worse, since usually people don't breastfeed for fun.
Exactly. The specific properties that make plastic useful in industry are the exact same properties that make it an ecological problem. You cannot realistically replace plastic without first accepting an inferior product, trying to make an equally good product will lead you to a new ecologically problematic product.
People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything.
The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.
Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from getting fused to the previous page.
I have a hard time using "balanced" and Roman in the same sentence.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
They were mining coal and using it for both heating and metal working.
They also deforested large sections of Europe for fuel (especially to make charcoal for smelting iron), building materials and to clear land for crops. They didn't really practice much in the way of sustainable forests, unless they ran into local shortages of fuel wood.
They also mined by tearing apart mountains, and threw noticeable amounts of lead into the air doing it.
> Roman-era mining activities increased atmospheric lead concentrations by at least a factor of 10, polluting air over Europe more heavily and for longer than previously thought, according to a new analysis of ice cores taken from glaciers on France's Mont Blanc.
A lot less than modern technology manages, but a lot more than nothing. And that with a much smaller population.
53 million amphoras... That is ceramic containers chugged to a pile... Not exactly sustainable or efficient choice either. Well there is lot of clay, but still not exactly sustainable approach...
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
I dunno I read it somewhere that some other thing in the pipes formed a protective layer that prevented the lead from actually seeping into the water or something
Same thing happened in Flint Michigan, the lead pipes weren't the issue; They stopped treating the water a certain way and the slight acidity in the water caused (iirc) some sort of calcium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate layer to be washed away until the acidic water started leaching lead into the water.
The viscose process used to produce cellophane is highly toxic. The lyocell process is safer because the chemicals used are less volatile. But both require a lot of fine chemicals (carbon disulfide or N-methylmorpholine oxide or, recently, 1,5-diazabicyclo[4.3.0]non-5-enium acetate). This is why cellophane is typically used in small amounts and rayon likewise.
By contrast, lithium bromide is a stable salt and is basically as cheap as the elements used to produce it, so it can be easily scaled up and recycled.
"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."
It’s funny how we’ve all just become desensitized to the idea that some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean and rather than work on that problem, we work on creating better garbage.
> some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean
And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.
Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.
If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.
> Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the ocean
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
The Ocean Cleanup is probably the most impressive and inspiring humanitarian / climate endeavor around right now. Been following them for a long time, their PR is really good. Actually showing the places before and after, showing the trash they take out, explaining how the tech works, being transparent about the struggles and whatnot. Really, really well orchestrated, I always feel a spark of hope after I see something from them.
> Its really hard to change people without using threats or force.
People change all the time. We are much different than ~10 years ago, before the rise of the far-right in the West. We are much different than 100 years ago.
People get much more exercise, eat healthier, are better educated ... so much as changed. Another new thing is people love to embrace nihilism rather than hope and progress - almost nobody embraces the latter these days.
Yes; many of those things influence people to change. The military also strongly influences people to change. In fact, any group you are in - work, school, friends, HN - changes you.
“some countries” is doing a lot of heavy work to say “basically the Philippines”, which is a gigantic outlier in output per capita and just also absolute volume. China and India produce quite a bit, but not compared to how many humans they have.
It is easier to process a single type trash. Home trash is where burning get pretty expensive because people put all sort of stuffs in there. And I am sure the energy is net negative to.
The main issue of trash has always been separation.
Which also iirc Japan does very well. Sure, the power generated is connected to it's grid and it pales in comparison to their other forms of energy production but it is also a part of their waste management policy.
My mom’s been helping out at a small local shop, and they’ve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didn’t hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
I think that degradation of plastic is the larger concern. Storage of garbage is generally an overstated concern, while microplastic pollution clearly show the threat of plastics that break into millions of tiny pieces.[1] Stable plastics that last pose so many fewer problems when it comes to pollutants.
It would be incredible if they could make plastic that didn't break down. But given the history of plastics, I would have to be very convinced that whatever they do to it isn't making it terribly toxic in ways that we don't measure. I would rather ditch plastics for better materials than have to check that yet another new acronym isn't in my water bottle.
Eh, I think we just overshot our goals by 100x. We could settle on a plastic that degrades into harmless dust after 10 years, but no less (nor anymore than 100). That's good enough to keep going with all of it.
What, that we're collectively unable to deal with relatively minor and innocuous inconveniences for the sake of the planet (setting aside whether or not straws are actually a huge deal)?
That in spite of all the progress humans have made, we're somehow unable just take the lid off and drink out of a cup without pitching a fit?
Unfortunately, I think it's that either there's a microorganism that will eat your material, and you get a couple of years, or there's not, and you get thousands.
Most tetra pak like materials and even aluminum cans are actually lined with plastic. Plastic is the greatest material ever, right until it needs to be disposed and then suddenly the biggest upside becomes the biggest downside.
Wood, cardboards, and papers. Unfortunately, they are not as easily shaped and more expensive to make. Figure out how you can mass produce an iPhone, including all the PCBs, out of wood and paper and you will become a billionaire.
Not really, no. For packaging type materials, either something will oxidize and is also water soluble, or it doesn’t oxidize and isn’t water soluble. Not much room in the middle. Making any paper based product last longer takes.. plastic.
Not a surprise given how everything in Japan is wrapped in plastic. Loved everything about visiting the place that was far ahead of the US except for this.
Apparently the total mass of plastic used in wrapping the same volume of goods is lower in japan than in other countries (using more bags, less hard shell packaging).
In Japan individual crackers are typically wrapped in plastic inside the package, possibly due to the high humidity, possibly for social reasons (or both). Gift packets of for example chocolate also always use individually packed pieces. In the grocery store, if you buy plastic-wrapped on-styrofoam fish or meat and some other foodstuff, the cashier will always put this in an additional plastic bag.
Eggs are packed in plastic (in my home country that would be cardboard).
And so on and so forth. We bring our own bags,typically, but there's just so much plastic..
This product seems to solve for a lot of things that have nothing to do with why we use plastic. Plastic is everywhere because it is durable & cheap, that's about it got 80% of applications. This misses the mark even more for the other 20% that cares about things like caustic resistance.
An expensive non-durable product will never replace it. It's nonsensical to say it's as durable as plastic, I assume that's referring to tensile strength, which is not the main property industry cares about. They want a material that will keep their product protected for months or years, it being able to lift a similar amount of weight is irrelevant when you're wrapping bread.
They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem there.
They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes: sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a week.
Again, they claim the properties are similar to polycarbonate. The properties of polycarbonate are thoroughly understood, and are perfectly suitable for a drinking straw.
So again, what do you base this judgement on exactly? Do you have a sample of the material and can claim they are lying and it's not actually like PC and that it somehow fails when used as a drinking straw? Does it taste bad? Did it steal your girlfriend? Like what?
>Again, they claim the properties are similar to polycarbonate
The claim in the article is "strength" which is not a material property at all. Just a very vague description.
Besides that obviously they do not have the same properties, because the article literally says that it is being eaten by bacteria quite quickly in sea water.
If it is as described, won't it harm turtles in the same way plastic straws do? That is, after all, why paper straws became popular following that viral video that went around. Poor structural integrity was the desirable trait they offered.
What do you mean it was widely overstated? It is held by the mainstream news as the driver of paper straw adoption. It is not like people gave up on plastics in general over concern for the environment, it was only straws specifically.
I think you misread my comment. The worry that turtles were having widespread injuries due to plastic straws was overstated. It started with a viral video. There's no evidence that was anything other than a freak accident.
That's not to say plastics are good, or that marine life aren't affected by them. Clearly they are. Straws are a small factor in that, and I was simply stating that a cellulose based straw that degrades in the ocean is not going to impact turtles, certainly not more than the few rare instances plastic straws harmed them.
Then you misunderstand the situation. People didn't start flocking to paper straws because they actually pose a widespread threat to turtles. It was only done so under feeling good about the idea of helping turtles avoid the hypothetical fate shown in said video. In order to achieve that goal in maintaining the idea of helping turtles, it is necessary for the straws to have poor structural integrity.
Granted, I expect the novelty has already started to wear off. There seems to be growing movement towards returning to plastic straws. And fair enough. You can only worry about turtles for so long before the next viral video gives you something new to worry about. And for that reason, plastic straws may no longer need a replacement (from the irrational human emotion point of view).
Even if it doesn't replace all use-cases for plastics, it seems like it can replace lots of throw-away plastic products. That alone would be good progress.
I don't mind cellulose shopping bags, straws, throwaway cups, plates, utensils, etc.
Since this comes from Japan before trying to convert people to use transparent paper that has half the carbon footprint of plastic, why not reducing the massive packaging waste in Japan where everything is packed into 10 layers of plastic for no good reason?
“The paper sheets become transparent because they are packed tightly with nanometer-scale (one 1-billionth of a meter) fibers. The concentration of these fibers allows light to pass straight through the sheets without experiencing diffusion.”
My mom’s been helping out at a small local shop, and they’ve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didn’t hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
Plastics and other oil-derivative, crucial materials should be the main use of crude oil and methane, not energy. Save the oil to make things that don't have an easy replacement. Replace oil burning with solar, wind, nuclear, etc., and use the underground reserve of hydrocarbons for noble causes like medecine, or for the type of investments that add to the net good for our species.
Plastics can be made from pretty much any plant-derived oil. Heat some vegetable oil, and voila, you have essentially plastic gunk and toxic side-products. The root problem is we have corrupt governments around the world in the pockets of big oil who don't care about the survival of the species or the planet long term so long as they advance short-term profits and expanding demand for oil.
I don't remember how often I have seen basically this exact same story. "Material X is going to replace plastics" is not a new story.
Every time they have failed to replace plastics, because it is extremely hard to match all of the great qualities of the common plastic varieties. Since plastics are so common people underestimate what a great materials they really are.
Sounds pretty promising. If this kind of material can really replace single-use plastic, that would be amazing.
We use way too much plastic every day. Sometimes just for a few minutes, but it takes decades to break down.
If the alternative is actually safe and easy to use, I think people would be more willing to make the switch.
If anyone has tried drinking from the straw, can you confirm there's no paper taste? I can't stand paper straws for this reason, it messes with my nerves like the scratching/screeching of a blackboard.
Wow, I was just wondering about this yesterday! I had read about how some researchers made a sort of glass out of wood and wondered if they could make resilient bottles for beverages out of a sort of maybe polymerized paper.
They briefly describe the process in the article, and very different from the "transparent wood" I think you are referring to. I'll try to summarise from my brief understanding.
- Transparent wood takes wood, dissolves the lignin (natural wood glue-ish) with a solvent, and replaces it with epoxy under pressure. It's a pain to make, but is very cool and preserves the wood fibre structure.
- This transparent paper involves dissolving very pure cellulose (long starch) and then allowing it to reconnect tightly (with heat) before drying. It appears to be composed primarily of cellulose at the end and exhibits plastic properties. I presume the chemicals change the cellulose properties to allow this.
"lithium bromide-water" is (apparently, I was corrected) not very toxic and lilley recycled in the process. If this can be scaled and the solvent process can be done safely, then its very clever. It's effectively plastic but using a more "natural" carbon chain, which nature has had a few million extra years to figure out how to break down.
They describe it as paper and compare it to polycarbonate... so my guess is that it is a bit brittle, and cannot nicely replace plastic wrap or plastic bags... but it has some nice properties to replace a group of plastics we don't have very good alternatives to. One open question I have is UV resistance. Most transparent plastics tend to become brittle over time... but I don't know my chemistry enough to know if cellulose has the same issue. Greenhouses would otherwise benefit from it (as they're often made from polycarbonate sheets rather than glass)
I don't know why it "Sounds toxic as s*t". It's a reactive salt. LD50 is ~1gram so don't swallow or get it in your eyes or nose. It seems comparable in hazard to commonly available cleaning compounds like ammonia and bleach.
That doesn't make it safe, but it's not a crazy carcinogen or auto-immune risk, and it literally dissolves in water. It's present in all sea water ~0.1ppm so you can't escape it.
Bromine itself is very toxic, but it all depends on the dose and form (it's used as an anti-algae agent). The article doesn't mention the concentration or if it remains in the end product. I'm not a chemist though, most of my knowledge comes from nilered.
I’m a chemist. Bromine isn’t bromide, and lithium bromide is a simple nontoxic salt. If this is as simple as is described in the news article, then it’s likely a pretty “green” process overall.
From TFA it says it's only about 3x as expensive as normal paper packaging, just needs a factory. Implies that at least some people believe it's viable.
hits all the marks for replacing plastic. curious how long it'll take before widespread adoption; my cynical assumption's that it'll be at least a decade. will be happy to be wrong ...
I'm concerned about microplastics too, but I think on the whole plastics have been good for health. Any harm microplastics may cause must be rather small if it hasn't been identified yet, and easily outweighed by the benefits of reducing spoilage and pathogen growth.
I somewhat agree with you. Unfortunately if it does turn out that we need to clean up the plastic pollution someday (because of longer term harms), we're pretty much fucked.
Is it really biodegradable? Almost all varieties are not. They only fall apart in smaller plastic or need special heated environments. None of them will degrade if you simply throw them „into the woods“.
*1. Limited Degradation Conditions*
- Most biodegradable plastics only break down under specific conditions, such as high temperatures found in industrial composting facilities, which are not widely available[3][4][6].
- In landfills or the natural environment, they may persist for years and even release methane, a potent greenhouse gas[4].
*2. Contamination of Recycling Streams*
- Biodegradable plastics can contaminate conventional plastic recycling, reducing the quality and durability of recycled products[1][7].
- They require separate collection and processing, adding complexity and cost to waste management[5][7].
*3. Microplastics and Environmental Harm*
- Some types, especially oxo-degradable plastics, fragment into microplastics, which pollute ecosystems and can enter the food chain[1].
*4. Toxicity and Chemical Concerns*
- Biodegradable and bioplastics often contain thousands of chemicals, some of which are toxic and comparable to those in traditional plastics[2][8].
- Cellulose and starch-based bioplastics have shown strong toxicity in laboratory studies[2].
*5. High Production Costs and Resource Use*
- Production is generally more expensive than conventional plastics and may require significant agricultural resources, potentially competing with food production and increasing carbon emissions[3][2][7].
*6. Durability and Usability Issues*
- Biodegradable plastics may not be as durable, limiting their application in some products[5].
- Some products have faced consumer complaints about performance, such as packaging noise or fragility[3].
*7. Greenwashing and Misleading Claims*
- Marketing often exaggerates environmental benefits, leading to consumer confusion and a false sense of sustainability[1][6].
*8. Infrastructure and Collection Challenges*
- Lack of proper infrastructure means many biodegradable plastics end up in landfills or are incinerated rather than composted[4][7].
In summary, biodegradable plastics face significant challenges regarding waste management, environmental impact, toxicity, and practicality, making them far from a perfect solution to plastic pollution[1][2][3].
Transparency isn't the reason we use so much plastic. We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products. Or it will stick around in various components without needing to worry about rain and such.
What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
This is probably the most important comment ITT
The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use sledgehammer methods like a “plastic tax” - which you’ll find very difficult to pass outside of more developed jurisdictions like the EU
The economic term for this is "externality" [1].
A pigovian tax is one solution, though it suffers from issues like the one you describe.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Collecting, sorting and burning is not that expensive
Burning is much worse than burying plastic - as it releases much of its mass as CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, and likely other pollutants as well.
For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You can burn trash to generate electricity too.
At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of the emissions.
One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the environmentally impact of things we personally touch. People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups, while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of sight.
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.
Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from using so much plastic is not hurting.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plastic-waste-ma...
If it's used to generate electricity or usable heat and not only to get rid of it, plastic would substitute for another fuel, so it's not as simple as looking at co2 from burning plastic vs co2 from dumping it in landfill.
I don't have numbers, but if burning plastic replaces some coal or fracked natural gas, that could be a win, all things considered.
Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
And evwn if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
> Burning plastic is both dirtier and less efficient than burning at least oil and natural gas. So you will actually pollute more (both CO2 and various other byproducts) by burning plastic than by burning oil and methane to get the same amount of energy out.
My argument is not that burning plastic is more efficient than burning whatever fuel. My argument is that extracting, transporting and burning waste plastic may be more efficient than extracting, transporting, and burning whatever fuel. Waste to energy might need a lot less transportation if the plants are near where the waste is generated and/or where it is already collected.
> Not to mention, to get usable energy out of the plastic, you have to invest lots of energy for recycling it first - you need infrastructure and education to collect it separately from other trash, you need additional processing to sort it by type, to clean it of many other residue, etc.
There's already sorting and education for recycling, so the question becomes what's the incremental input needed to get a usable waste to useful energy pipeline.
> And even if you do all that fairly efficiently, you're still never going to collect a large percentage of the plastic people use. So any extra environmental impact from plastic in landfills will still be there and need to be resolved.
Yes, but I don't know how that relates? My argument is that the emissions of burning plastic for usable energy might not be as bad as it looks because it would reduce lifecycle emissions from (direct) fossil fuels. That's not an argument for or against burning plastic, it's an argument that we need to get marginal emissions numbers for the alternatives, and if emissions is the only criteria, then it would make sense to burn plastic in cases where the marginal emissions are in favor of burning it; but even that wouldn't be universal. It might make more (or less) sense to setup trash for energy plants in isolated locations where transport of other fuel is difficult; it almost certainly makes less sense to setup trash for energy plants in places where natgas is a waste product, natgas is a clear choice there.
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I am) talking about plastic bags.
I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.
> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately 13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75 ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags even affect the last decimal of that number.
Why would we discuss plastic bags exclusively? Singling out one item like this makes little sense - the problem is the aggregate of all plastic we use, not specifically one item. If we only used plastic for our shopping bags, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
My original comment was to a post claiming that "a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost" of a plastic bag.
It's far from the most important issue, but it was the one I had a disagreement with.
It sounds like you agree that plastic bags are not a big problem.
How can burning 150 kg of mass create 750 kg of mass?
The oxygen is not contained in the 150kg of plastic, it’s pulled out of the atmosphere. You’re actually “burning” substantially more than 150kg if you include all the reactants.
Burning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would expect the number to be around 500kg (quick calculation) max.
Polyethylene is roughly CH2, and burns into CO2 and H20. So 1.5 moles of oxygen (O2) for each mole of polyethylene. The molar mass of CH2 is 14 and oxygen is 32, so 1 kg of CH2 will result in ~4.5kg of CO2.
How do you figure that? 14g of CH2 results in 44g of CO2 (water we can ignore), so 150kg of CH2 becomes ~470kg of CO2. 1kg of CH2 would give ~3.1kg CO2. Or am I missing something?
Ah. I didn't ignore the water. D'oh.
Otoh, if our emissions would be only 1 ton per person per capita, it would bring us close to paris agreement goals.
Also, scrubbing 1 ton co2 is around $600 with current tech if I’m not mistaken.
I don't disagree with anything on this chain but I think things like hypothetical miles deep landfill can't be worse than burning, it'll stay there for million years and the next iteration of life to do the same discussion as being done here.
To me a "miles deep" landfill sounds like a wonderful way to contaminate groundwater.
I think it's facile to imagine that the Earth is large, thus that burying something can "make it go away".
But the Earth is also an incredibly dynamic place over long enough time scales (which for the purposes of this discussion can simply mean decades or centuries) so much of the lightweight matter you bury deep in dense rock can find a way to buoy back top the surface far sooner than in millions of years.
We know for sure that CO2 is a huge problem in the next century, and even earlier. We are already seeing massive impact from global warming today.
Any theoretical other concern from possible impacts of plastic in a landfill (which already will contain many other unknown pollutants) is at best secondary, unless we have some solid evidence otherwise.
Consider also that some significant amount of plastic in landfills is inevitable regardless of any sepatate collection policies. Especially with current recycling practices, you are encouraged to only separately collect certain kinds of fairly clean plastics. If you have a dirty styrofoam container that you just ate out of, you're not even supposed to throw that in the plastic recycling - so it will go to a landfill anyway. This means that landfills have to be mindful of potential plastic pollution even if we burn a lot of the plastic we use.
Plus, if we're truly worried about the health impact of plastic use, the only solution is to massively reduce plastic use. The fact that we "cleanly burn it" instead of letting it seap into groundwater is not going to help one iota when we store and transport and sometimes cook much of our food directly in it.
We also vastly overestimate the amount of trash created by the human race. Last time i did the math, a 1km cube could contain basically all the trash currently in every landfill a few times over. The plastic pollution problem is containable, literally. We just need to stop certain countries from dumping it into rivers.
Yes but humans have an innate need for apocalyptic thinking. If the world isn’t ending because of something we did, we will invent reasons to believe so
I'm just saying that plastic waste shouldn't be burned, regardless of how much or little we produce.
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But burning in facility design for that is really clean.
Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that they will eventually diversify.
Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull, without plastic millions of peoples would die every year from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death of everything is better than preventing a billion death.
And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is clear.
I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our civilization. With current global warmig trends, countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other issues.
> Since we don't know about the effects microplastics accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at that there exists some threshold that make higher life form impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it does.
I also wanted to answer this. This is non-scientific BS based on literally nothing. Risks don't work like this: unless you can quantify them, you can't act on them. Any activity has some potential risk of unknown catastrophic effects. Maybe there is some chance that after a threshold, flushing our toilets will cause tidal effects that rip our planet apart - it's unlikely but it's possible. So let's all stop flushing our toilets. And stop using 5G if we're there, some people think that has a high risk of causing cancer or whatever.
Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
> CO2 is a much smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
By what possible measure? Despite clear, well documented science, including very clear dire economical impact, and all within an extremely clear and short term time frame, with escalating effects already visible literally everywhere in the world, we have had almost 0 progress in combating global warming. The best we've done is slowing the rate of acceleration - as in CO2 release is still accelerating, just not as much.
Plastic waste has environmental impact, especially in the oceans, but nowhere near to the level that 2-3-4 degrees warming will have. And that is what we are currently on track for by the end of this century.
I think few cents do represent it. Production alone per piece is more like really small fraction of a cent.
Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
If it were that easy there wouldn't be a garbage patch the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.
That consists to a great extent of maritime generated garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in the middle of the ocean.
Putting your trash in a local garbage dump is EASIER and CHEAPER than putting it in the garbage patch in the Pacific, so stop doing that right now.
Incorrect. If I throw my plastic bags out on the road it's much easier. It'll find its way to the Pacific eventually
This is a problem with the (lack of) environmental laws in many countries. All things considered, landfills are really cheap.
We produce uncountable billions of plastic bags. What specifically is the huge cost?
Environmental. Those billions of not degrading bags end up in places that harm the ecosystem.
I think they overwhelmingly end up in landfills, where they have no material effect on any ecosystem.
I'm no chemist, but they don't really react chemically with anything in nature, as I understand it.
I know it feels dirty and unnatural that they just lie there, but in practical terms I don't think they do any substantial harm.
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be limited to just developed nations — I visited Nairobi a decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".
However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p, increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because it's just so easy to just not care enough about free things to make sure they end up in landfill (or recycling): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...
Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming amounts. They get into the human body through food and water.
You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics" does not ring any bells?
>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with anything in nature
Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics bioaccumulate.
By what mechanism are PFAs harmful to health? Is it because they are not, in fact, chemically inert? Or else how.
Nothing made of atoms is truly chemically inert, not even noble gases. It's just more or less reactive, and when/how.
But even if it was literally un-reactive, sometimes it's enough to just be in the way. Imagine folding a protein, or assembling a structure of RNA origami*, but some big lump of un-reactive molecule is in the middle — the ultimate shape is different, leading to different biochemical results. Grit in the gears.
Or even just heavy: deuterium is chemically identical to hydrogen, but still has a lethal concentration** because it is twice the mass.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_origami
** Replacing 50% of the hydrogen in a multicellular organism with deuterium is generally lethal, unless this is a widely believed myth that's about to get a bunch of debunking
Not all harmful effects are caused by direct chemical reactions. For instance, asbestos causes health problems through the physical process of friction and piercing. Small particles that aren't removed by the body can do a lot of harm.
Two scenarios here: 1) They don't react with anything, meaning the billions of tons we produce keep increasing. Forever. 2) They do react, break down, get into the soil, water, blood, people, and have studied detrimental effects, and many more yet unstudied.
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.
If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day, I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997% performative pretend environmentalism.
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at least theoretically power some of these things with renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a solution.
The goal is get every last drop of unwanted water out of the Titanic. We can at least theoretically spread heavy canvas over some the huge gash in the bow, so you are focusing on a leaky water cooler in the stern.
No, I'm just saying that we shouldn't start taking buckets and pouring more water in. The default behavior is to store garbage in landfills. Let's leave it like that, rather than burning it to produce even more CO2.
Disposing not cost that much. Plastic disposing is CHEAPER than it's production.
It does not cost a dollar to burn or bury a single plastic bag, there’s no reason to be hyperbolic.
> super-easy to mold
Or "plastic".
A use case is already stated in the article:
"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
What are paper packs? I can't think of anything that could be qualified of "paper pack" and be currently in use as a replacement for a "plastic container".
I know I don't want to use paper BAGS because they break super easily when carrying goods but that doesn't seem to be what the article is talking about.
Some consumers. In the context of e-commerce, product is on a screen, does it matter?
That's not entirely true. I throw away a lot of cardboard packaging with a plastic window glued into it. Obviously this can't replace all plastic, but it can certainly replace some.
Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
Curiously, a lot of tape is made from "cellophane", which is chemically similar to paper. The windows on envelopes are typically made from it. Not sure about cardboard boxes but you can make cellophane pretty strong.
Nobody likes plastic because it lasts "thousands of years". People care about storing food products well. If we can do that without lasting thousands of years that seems like a pretty good win.
Good at storing food products and lasting thousands of years are very closely related.
The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree.
The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
The problem with plastic is not that nothing can be done with it after disposal, the problem with plastic is that it harms the environment during use.
There is no problem with the fact that a plastic bag does not deteriorate for thousands of years after use: you just throw it in the trash, and it lies in a pile of garbage for thousands of years, absolutely harmless and with a near-zero impact on the environment (because the areas of garbage dumps are tiny both relative to the environment and relative to other human impacts on the environment)
Propaganda about the harm of plastic bags is designed for complete idiots, whose idiocy borders on a clinical diagnosis.
The real problem is with other products of plastic, which break down while in use, polluting the water and air with microparticles.
Car tires, synthetic fabrics, paints and paint coatings and various exterior finishes, sidings and so on. All of this, even with the slightest wear, whether from mechanics or ultraviolet radiation, pollutes the environment throughout the entire use.
Against this problem, plastic bags are completely harmless even if we start using them ten times more and throwing them away ten times more often. And this problem cannot be solved by changing the method of disposal or recycling. Only by stopping the use.
The fight against plastic bags and all this stuff about recycling plastic is literally a joke how drunk man searching for something under the streetlight that he lost somewhere else in the park. Only he searches for it at someone else's expense, actively spending the allocated funds on alcohol and large-scale media projects on the need and importance of the search under the streetlight
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207115
Have you ever heard of Cellophane?
Yes. It still produces microplastics. It might be compostable or biodegradable in some environments, but we're a far distance away from from an environmentally safe plastic.
Aka rayon (but foil not fiber).
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point.
I haven’t really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I didn’t really use to do that previously anyways, but now I don’t even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect them in a separate bag.
I’d say it’s all about some sort of an incentive.
Also, in bigger cities(Oslo in my case), even if you throw empties in public trash cans, they get fished out by various types of poor people who walk around all day collecting them. Though I tend to leave them next to the trashcan as long as it's not too windy, just as a nice gesture to the less fortunate. Or, often you'll see one of them as you finish your drink and you just hand them the bottle. Of course, I'd prefer a society where people didn't need to do this to get their next fix or meal or whatever it is, but it is sort of neat that utrash sorting can just naturally emerge in a society once the trash is imbued with monetary value.
One wonders why we don't do this with larger categories of garbage that needs to be sorted. I suppose bottles and cans are fairly easy to semi-automate given their fairly standardised shapes. But that just feels like an implementation detail.
In the poorer districts of Ho Chi Minh City, like Q4, Go Vap, etc, it is similar yet different. Each evening, folks set their garbage bags directly on the curb. At night, other people rip open the bags and scatter the trash in the street looking for anything salvageable. Finally, around midnight, city employees walk the streets pushing wheeled bins and sweep up the trash. When it rains, the trash is carried to clog drains, causing large-scale flooding.
Not a great system for many reasons, not least of which is relying on truly poor people. But they are remarkably efficient at extracting value from the waste stream.
Automated recyclable separation is hard and fascinating. Magnets for ferrous metals. Something about non-ferrous metal and eddy currents for aluminum. Infrared cameras and mechanical arms to detect and separate types of plastics. Blower systems to extract paper. Tumblers with various sized holes (like those coin counting machines) for other separation. (Source: Not that great. I just watched a few Youtubes.)
Here in Vancouver we have little shelves around garbage cans for the empties to go, and someone will come by in a few minutes to collect it for the deposit.
> Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point.
AKA "Container-deposit legislation" (or "Pant" as we call it in Sweden and maybe also Germany?). Seems to work very well, and you also have a ton of people collecting cans that others throw in the environment, as they'll get money for it.
Kind of wish we had it here in Spain too, as the environment and the sea ends up with a lot of cans and glass bottles. Seems like such an obvious idea to have nationwide.
Yeah, in Germany pretty much all cans and bottles require a deposit (single-use plastic bottles: 0.25 €) and every shop selling cans/bottles with deposit is required to take them and similar bottles back.
Most supermarkets have a reverse vending machine that take cans and bottles, crushes single-use ones, and returns a voucher for the deposit.
Some videos of these machines in action (not sure whether there are people on HN who have never seen one):
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWqwu63eTPQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlfDavzHq7I - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozVpMDDawnw
"Statiegeld" in the netherlands. It already exists for at least as long as I live.
Pfand in Germany, yes.
Yep same scheme started in Ireland recently, just a transplant of the German system it seems. Some people complain but it has massively reduced waste and litter.
Ireland's had a tax on plastic shopping bags for years, which basically eliminated them as a form of litter. The bottle deposit scheme is doubly clever by making collected litter have an actual cash value, don't think it would have worked without that.
> That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Or that governments care enough to create laws and incentives for people to collect it.
Besides, there are many places that don't have as much plastic as others in their environment, so clearly it's possible to avoid in some way. Have to figure out how and why, but I'm guessing the researchers kind of feel like that's outside the scope of their research.
THere’s a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit isn’t lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesn’t need to either.
The plastic doesn't need to last for thousands of years for our actual use, but the properties that make it last for thousands of years are also what make it desirable for our use: fully waterproof, impermeability to microbes, etc.
Yeah but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties. It's not even the case that all those properties are necessary for all actual cases of their use.
> but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties
Yes, it is. Lasting for thousands of years is the same thing as (1) impermeability to microbes (mold / insects / etc...) plus (2) failure to react with local chemicals. Those two things are the things we want, and if you have them both, you last for thousands of years, because there's nothing to stop you from doing that.
Correlation is still not causation, so since pollution is a real problem we need to keep researching alternatives
Its not correlation. There is a causal chemical/compositional relationship between the two things.
That phrase isn't relevant here, since all the claims are causal. (I'm not taking a position on whether the claims are correct).
> Correlation is still not causation
Um, a stitch in time saves nine.
Are you just typing random words?
Which material has all the useful properties of plastic and doesn't last for an inconvenient amount of time?
I think the answer to this question (with emphasis on "all") is clearly none that we know of. Plastic is really hundreds of different polymers, each with different priperties and uses.
If a new material can take the place of some of those, that's a win. We don't need to replace plastic wholesale with a single new thing, there's no rule against using multiple targeted materials, we've just got used to material science being all about one material for recent history.
There are many uses of plastic that can be easily replaced with cornstarch, bamboo, or leaves. Food packaging can be with aluminum or glass, granted those last thousands of years too but the point is they’re more easily recyclable and we can make a circular economy around them.
Those don't work in Tokyo during summers. 40C/104F ambient temp, all-day 100% RH, optional salt in the wind, the every populated areas of the country is basically a bioreactor. We just haven't found such materials that can make distinction between just waiting at a crosswalk in Tokyo and being in a bacterial composting chamber.
I mean, the simplest solution to this problem might be to leave that borderline uninhabitable hellhole and move to Europe where food in bamboo wraps or home-washed glass containers don't start stringing in matters of hours, but that's not an option for most.
Also, you might be thinking that some of those wrap materials were historically viable, but it has to be noted that the content inside were much less healthier than it is now. Medieval Japanese people were estimated to have taken as much as 50g/day/person of salt, which is literally 10x WHO recommendations, or like 1.5 cups per week, or one small backpack worth per year. Adding that much of salt to food is no different from marinading it in chemical preservatives, only much worse.
You're just repeating yourself, while ignoring that your sweeping generalization has already been refuted.
I don't think so. I was clarifying my point which seemed misunderstood by 2muchcoffeeman and didn't contain much of a sweeping generalization (more a statement of fact about the nature of plastic).
Wrong on both counts.
"We like it because it lasts thousands of years."
There are numerous other reasons for liking plastic ... in fact that's a very odd and unusual reason to like it. You say that the properties that we like about it are why it lasts thousands of years, but that's a very different statement. In fact, people have pointed out that we would prefer for it to have its likable properties but NOT last for thousands of years. So you've made a whole host of logic errors. You may not think so, but that's another consequence of the underlying problem here.
I won't respond further.
Plastic likes:
Priced inexpensively (damage to the commons is not factored in...)Yep, plastic has a lot of benefits. But I genuinely don't think the translucency is that much of a selling point. If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
> If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
- any sort of housing window and display protection, I have at least half a dozen within easy reach not including actual computer displays
- transparent food packaging is important to both identify the product and ascertain its state (especially at the store e.g. berries)
- viewing liquid levels at a glance is extremely useful
It’s almost like we just gave up on making glass less breakable when we found plastic
A plastic bottle is not just less breakable. It's also way lighter weight than glass, and harder to dent and pierce than aluminum.
Also needs to be robust to salt and acid, aluminum cans have a plastic lining.
Part of the reason that a lot of drinks in aluminium have short shelf life. Acidity eventually makes aluminium leak into the drink.
On a very long timeline, sure
Slightly different situation with steel in contact with the contents, but this can happen rapidly: https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/chemistry/electrochemist...
I'm not sure if there is a scenario something similar could happen with a drink.
More importantly, and unlike glass, if you do break plastic, it's not dangerous.
I'm haunted by a story I read once, about East German beer glasses that were unbreakable. They developed them because of a serious shortage of raw materials as I recall. I would be happy to buy two dozen and pass them on to my family when I die. But that's the problem, isn't it? The lack of sales. Just ask Pyrex, I guess?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173177
Aha! I'd forgotten where I'd read it, but it makes sense it was here. Thank you!
There’s quite a lot of packaging that’s mostly cardboard but with a transparent plastic window to see the product.
Those are usually cellophane, which is essentially transparent paper.
We would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why don’t we have plastic that degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.
Until the last coal fired power plant is decommissioned, the rational way to "recycle" plastic is to burn it. There's you're "not common trigger:" the temperature in a coal furnace.
Currently, plastic packaging is measured in the tens of millions of tons per year, while coal is measured in the billions of tons.
No, burning it is not "rational", it is the very opposite. We talk so much of carbon sequestration, and then "rationally" try to release all of the already-sequestered carbon back in the atmosphere.
If the plastic to be burned substitutes for coal or oil, it is carbon neutral. Isn't that what the Scandinavian countries do with their trash as an alternative to landfilling it?
Not burning the plastic risks its turning into microplastics, which will tend to interfere with the physiology of all plants and animals.
It's not carbon neutral, it still adds to the problem. We need to replace our carbon emitting power generation with renewable energy, not burn our trash to keep emitting the same. And trash can just be buried, it doesn't need to be burned.
There's a lot of talk generally of running carbon sequestration technologies and how important that will be. Burying plastic waste is exactly doing that, without spending the extra power to actually extract the carbon from the air.
It won't make a significant difference compared to burning coal.
That's like nicking a vein while you have a arterial hemmohrage - sure, it won't make a big difference, but it also doesn't help in any way. We need to stop burning coal, oil, and methane - and replacing any of them with plastic would not be helpful in the least.
It's technically correct that it doesn't help with reducing CO2 emissions. But plastic recycling is a flop and a charade. Reducing use of plastic is going to be the only effective way to reduce the harm from plastic. But if we're up to our asses in plastic that's going into the environment in our bodies, burning it isn't a bad choice.
I'm not talking about recycling plastic, but about burying it it in landfills.
The plastic in our bodies is not generally getting there from environmental pollution, it's getting there from us using plastic to wrap and cook the majority of our food and drink and cosmetics etc.
Plastic production produces several times as much co2 as is it contains.
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products.
We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
Exactly. Most foods in plastic have a shelf life of <12 months and those that need longer can just continue to use plastic.
Most fruit only lasts 1-2 weeks and comes in plastic trays, wrapped in plastic film that last hundreds of years after
Reading the thread so far I feel everyone one is missing the biggest reason why plastic. Not to negate the technical uses and requirements mentioned especially yours, which are incredibly important…
And of course that reason is economic.
Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating. At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs.
Regarding that lifecycle: I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
Singular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute.
In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
There isn't one replacement for plastic. Hence also we can't expect every single replacement to address every single use of plastic. Transparent paper is fine.
»We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.«
Depends on the type of plastic used.
Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.
You mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A sea-water dissolving plastic : https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...
This is cellulose, which is for many practical purposes just paper.
This sounds like something that'd be very cheap and flexible. I've drunk out of plenty of paper cups before.
So maybe this is a transparent paper cup. Which is possibly useful somewhere.
The article is unclear on what this actually is. Pure cellulose? Cellulose acetate? Cellulose based plastics have been around for a century, but making them is apparently too expensive for packaging. [1] Is this new stuff cheaper to make?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
Glass. You are talking about glass. It is re-usable and recycle-able. It just has the unfortunate property that if you break it, the resulting shards will slice people up pretty badly, so it is far less safe for transport logistics. Not to mention heavy.
Ideal would be a material that has all the properties, but biodegrades after a reasonable period (what is reasonable depends on the usecase of course).
We use plastic for a wide range of reasons depending on the application & one of them is transparency. The alternative in the case tends to be glass which ticks a lot of your boxes (rain proof, etc.) but is heavy & brittle.
It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years.
Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
There's a lot of food in plastic that will expire long before any plastic/paper will biodegrade.
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions
You mean like a "forever chemical"?
We already have such material, and it is plastic. It degrades quite rapidly if exposed to 400°-500°C temperature.
Also something that doesn't slowly poison you over time like what plastics (microplastics) do with microplastics. There's almost no way to get rid of those from our body except breastfeeding, but in that case, it's actually even worse, since usually people don't breastfeed for fun.
No one was ever harmed by incorporating plastics. And id your body can’t make any use if it, it will leave your body through the digestive system.
Sadly that’s not the case:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819327/
Etc… just google microplastics.
Exactly. The specific properties that make plastic useful in industry are the exact same properties that make it an ecological problem. You cannot realistically replace plastic without first accepting an inferior product, trying to make an equally good product will lead you to a new ecologically problematic product.
People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything.
The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
Glass?
I disagree. We use plastic because it's cheap, lightweight, waterproof and not (very) toxic.
If we had plastic that is not transparent and biodegraded in a year, it would be perfectly fine, as it would cover almost all food packaging cases.
But, unfortunately, we use plastics for everything these days. I saw even some cars are now made of plastic (Bezos's Slate).
Old is new again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celluloid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
Here is the original paper from the researchers:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads2426
Apparently they wanted to create a material that:
1. is transparent,
2. can be made thick enough,
3. and is purely cellulose-based.
Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.
I think it's Glassine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassine
Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from getting fused to the previous page.
Glassine has been around forever. Useful for philately!
There are also transparent rolling papers
Celluloid (nitrated cellulose with camphor) is not the only transformation of cellulose into a plastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate dates back to the 19th century; tough enough to be used for films and eyeglass frames.
Production involves some chems: "cellulose [pulp] is reacted with acetic acid and acetic anhydride in the presence of sulfuric acid."
Acetic anhydride is restricted in some countries because it's used in making heroin.
But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.
A decently transparent (for the purposes) cellolose-based material is a wet cotton T-shirt.
Great summary of paper akin of TL;DR.
If only AI/LLM can summarize most research papers like this correctly and intuitively I think most people will pay good money for it, I know I would.
The Wall Street Journal recently started putting a 3-bullet-point AI generated summary at the top of each story.
I genuinely wonder if the Romans actually had peak technology all things considered & balanced.
I have a hard time using "balanced" and Roman in the same sentence.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
> They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
That's the point. They had sustainable and clean technology. It was a sweet spot.
They were mining coal and using it for both heating and metal working.
They also deforested large sections of Europe for fuel (especially to make charcoal for smelting iron), building materials and to clear land for crops. They didn't really practice much in the way of sustainable forests, unless they ran into local shortages of fuel wood.
They also mined by tearing apart mountains, and threw noticeable amounts of lead into the air doing it.
> Roman-era mining activities increased atmospheric lead concentrations by at least a factor of 10, polluting air over Europe more heavily and for longer than previously thought, according to a new analysis of ice cores taken from glaciers on France's Mont Blanc.
A lot less than modern technology manages, but a lot more than nothing. And that with a much smaller population.
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-he... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruina_montium
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/monte-testaccio-ro...
53 million amphoras... That is ceramic containers chugged to a pile... Not exactly sustainable or efficient choice either. Well there is lot of clay, but still not exactly sustainable approach...
Aside from the, you know, literal slave labor required to power things, they also burnt down most of the trees within reach of the cities.
Did the ancient Romans have transparent paper, celluloid or cellophane?
Just curious whether I'm missing some connection.
I'd take modern healthcare tbh
Meh, a longer life isn't necessarily a happier one.
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
Too much lead.
It actually wasn't poisonous given the circumstances.
Could you elaborate? Just because it was less poisonous than it could have been, does not make it non-poisonous.
I dunno I read it somewhere that some other thing in the pipes formed a protective layer that prevented the lead from actually seeping into the water or something
Same thing happened in Flint Michigan, the lead pipes weren't the issue; They stopped treating the water a certain way and the slight acidity in the water caused (iirc) some sort of calcium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate layer to be washed away until the acidic water started leaching lead into the water.
They would cook food in lead pots, which made it poisonous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
The viscose process used to produce cellophane is highly toxic. The lyocell process is safer because the chemicals used are less volatile. But both require a lot of fine chemicals (carbon disulfide or N-methylmorpholine oxide or, recently, 1,5-diazabicyclo[4.3.0]non-5-enium acetate). This is why cellophane is typically used in small amounts and rayon likewise.
By contrast, lithium bromide is a stable salt and is basically as cheap as the elements used to produce it, so it can be easily scaled up and recycled.
Huh, I somehow never made the connection to cellophane being cellulose-based. I just thought it was plastic…
Sounds similar to cellophane. But the process to make it is very different. Maybe it has some new properties that cellophane doesn't.
"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."
It’s funny how we’ve all just become desensitized to the idea that some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean and rather than work on that problem, we work on creating better garbage.
> some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean
And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.
Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.
If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/industrialised-countries-are...
> Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the ocean
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
It's not about recycling, their regular garbage goes into the ocean too (after they dump it into their rivers).
There are people working that angle as well[0], and they focus on prevention for this reason. We need all angles.
[0] https://theoceancleanup.com/
The Ocean Cleanup is probably the most impressive and inspiring humanitarian / climate endeavor around right now. Been following them for a long time, their PR is really good. Actually showing the places before and after, showing the trash they take out, explaining how the tech works, being transparent about the struggles and whatnot. Really, really well orchestrated, I always feel a spark of hope after I see something from them.
Its really hard to change people without using threats or force. Easier to change their environment.
> Its really hard to change people without using threats or force.
People change all the time. We are much different than ~10 years ago, before the rise of the far-right in the West. We are much different than 100 years ago.
People get much more exercise, eat healthier, are better educated ... so much as changed. Another new thing is people love to embrace nihilism rather than hope and progress - almost nobody embraces the latter these days.
What makes you think that people eat healthier and get more exercise?
In the US at least, Obesity is on the rise, people eat more meat than ever before, and life expectancy is basically flat over the past decade.
And they smoke a lot less. Of course it depends on your starting point, but compared to all of human history before 50 years ago, the trend is clear.
"People changing" and "changing people" are radically different things.
Yes; many of those things influence people to change. The military also strongly influences people to change. In fact, any group you are in - work, school, friends, HN - changes you.
whoosh
It seems one of us isn't thinking. What does your one-word comment indicate?
“some countries” is doing a lot of heavy work to say “basically the Philippines”, which is a gigantic outlier in output per capita and just also absolute volume. China and India produce quite a bit, but not compared to how many humans they have.
It’s usually easier to solve a technical problem than a societal one.
Environmentally-sensitive garbage disposal is expensive. Not everyone can afford it.
IIRC, SK burns spent tires as a fuel source for their cement industry.
It is easier to process a single type trash. Home trash is where burning get pretty expensive because people put all sort of stuffs in there. And I am sure the energy is net negative to.
The main issue of trash has always been separation.
Which also iirc Japan does very well. Sure, the power generated is connected to it's grid and it pales in comparison to their other forms of energy production but it is also a part of their waste management policy.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
This is about dealing with reality.
My mom’s been helping out at a small local shop, and they’ve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didn’t hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
We need a new class of materials that have plastic like properties but don’t take thousands of years to degrade or are impossible to recycle.
I think that degradation of plastic is the larger concern. Storage of garbage is generally an overstated concern, while microplastic pollution clearly show the threat of plastics that break into millions of tiny pieces.[1] Stable plastics that last pose so many fewer problems when it comes to pollutants.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
It would be incredible if they could make plastic that didn't break down. But given the history of plastics, I would have to be very convinced that whatever they do to it isn't making it terribly toxic in ways that we don't measure. I would rather ditch plastics for better materials than have to check that yet another new acronym isn't in my water bottle.
It's keeping it out of the air and water that we need to work on. If we properly trashed our plastic, it would not be floating in the ocean.
We need it to break down properly, or not at all.
Only inorganic materials will last forever. We can reuse metal and glass and ceramic forever but never a plastic.
Eh, I think we just overshot our goals by 100x. We could settle on a plastic that degrades into harmless dust after 10 years, but no less (nor anymore than 100). That's good enough to keep going with all of it.
Do any plastics like that exist?
Almost. There is active research on it. https://www.army.mil/article/245448/army_funded_research_yie...
But then your bottles would fall apart on the shelf because they degraded enough to get a hole in them.
Oh well, at least the planet and its inhabitants would likely be better off.
Sure, but talk to anyone about paper straws and you will probably see the issue with this.
What, that we're collectively unable to deal with relatively minor and innocuous inconveniences for the sake of the planet (setting aside whether or not straws are actually a huge deal)?
That in spite of all the progress humans have made, we're somehow unable just take the lid off and drink out of a cup without pitching a fit?
Apparently, yes :(
I'll take slightly annoying plastic straw over millions of particles of plastic poisoning me, any day of the week.
Surely there's a gap that could be the sweet spot between "thousands of years" and a couple of years
The problem is any idiot can make a bottle that lasts thousands of years. It takes an engineer to make a bottle that barely lasts a year.
Unfortunately, I think it's that either there's a microorganism that will eat your material, and you get a couple of years, or there's not, and you get thousands.
A milk carton?
Most tetra pak like materials and even aluminum cans are actually lined with plastic. Plastic is the greatest material ever, right until it needs to be disposed and then suddenly the biggest upside becomes the biggest downside.
Wood, cardboards, and papers. Unfortunately, they are not as easily shaped and more expensive to make. Figure out how you can mass produce an iPhone, including all the PCBs, out of wood and paper and you will become a billionaire.
Not really, no. For packaging type materials, either something will oxidize and is also water soluble, or it doesn’t oxidize and isn’t water soluble. Not much room in the middle. Making any paper based product last longer takes.. plastic.
Not a surprise given how everything in Japan is wrapped in plastic. Loved everything about visiting the place that was far ahead of the US except for this.
Apparently the total mass of plastic used in wrapping the same volume of goods is lower in japan than in other countries (using more bags, less hard shell packaging).
Video on this, as well as how much is used as incinerator fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6WogV6UEg
In Japan individual crackers are typically wrapped in plastic inside the package, possibly due to the high humidity, possibly for social reasons (or both). Gift packets of for example chocolate also always use individually packed pieces. In the grocery store, if you buy plastic-wrapped on-styrofoam fish or meat and some other foodstuff, the cashier will always put this in an additional plastic bag. Eggs are packed in plastic (in my home country that would be cardboard). And so on and so forth. We bring our own bags,typically, but there's just so much plastic..
I can't help it, sounds to me like cellophane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
Low carbon emissions, but what about cost?
This product seems to solve for a lot of things that have nothing to do with why we use plastic. Plastic is everywhere because it is durable & cheap, that's about it got 80% of applications. This misses the mark even more for the other 20% that cares about things like caustic resistance.
An expensive non-durable product will never replace it. It's nonsensical to say it's as durable as plastic, I assume that's referring to tensile strength, which is not the main property industry cares about. They want a material that will keep their product protected for months or years, it being able to lift a similar amount of weight is irrelevant when you're wrapping bread.
The bag is good, the cup is good, but the straw is a terrible idea.
Why?
They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem there.
They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes: sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a week.
Where is the terrible part?
It doesn't have the same physical properties. Even the idea of that is ridiculous, one physical property the article mentions it its degradability.
"Strength" is also a meaningless metric to compare, it just is not a material property.
Again, they claim the properties are similar to polycarbonate. The properties of polycarbonate are thoroughly understood, and are perfectly suitable for a drinking straw.
So again, what do you base this judgement on exactly? Do you have a sample of the material and can claim they are lying and it's not actually like PC and that it somehow fails when used as a drinking straw? Does it taste bad? Did it steal your girlfriend? Like what?
>Again, they claim the properties are similar to polycarbonate
The claim in the article is "strength" which is not a material property at all. Just a very vague description.
Besides that obviously they do not have the same properties, because the article literally says that it is being eaten by bacteria quite quickly in sea water.
This doesn't make any sense and is not responsive to the points from GP.
Why? Will it get soggy like the regular paper straws?
If it's as they describe... it should not. so a good straw replacement.
If it is as described, won't it harm turtles in the same way plastic straws do? That is, after all, why paper straws became popular following that viral video that went around. Poor structural integrity was the desirable trait they offered.
The "harming turtles" thing was wildly overstated, to start.
Also, ideally not, because the turtles that were claimed to be affected are in the ocean, where the straws degraded in just a few months.
What do you mean it was widely overstated? It is held by the mainstream news as the driver of paper straw adoption. It is not like people gave up on plastics in general over concern for the environment, it was only straws specifically.
Are you one of those "fake news" types?
I think you misread my comment. The worry that turtles were having widespread injuries due to plastic straws was overstated. It started with a viral video. There's no evidence that was anything other than a freak accident.
That's not to say plastics are good, or that marine life aren't affected by them. Clearly they are. Straws are a small factor in that, and I was simply stating that a cellulose based straw that degrades in the ocean is not going to impact turtles, certainly not more than the few rare instances plastic straws harmed them.
Then you misunderstand the situation. People didn't start flocking to paper straws because they actually pose a widespread threat to turtles. It was only done so under feeling good about the idea of helping turtles avoid the hypothetical fate shown in said video. In order to achieve that goal in maintaining the idea of helping turtles, it is necessary for the straws to have poor structural integrity.
Granted, I expect the novelty has already started to wear off. There seems to be growing movement towards returning to plastic straws. And fair enough. You can only worry about turtles for so long before the next viral video gives you something new to worry about. And for that reason, plastic straws may no longer need a replacement (from the irrational human emotion point of view).
Even if it doesn't replace all use-cases for plastics, it seems like it can replace lots of throw-away plastic products. That alone would be good progress. I don't mind cellulose shopping bags, straws, throwaway cups, plates, utensils, etc.
Since this comes from Japan before trying to convert people to use transparent paper that has half the carbon footprint of plastic, why not reducing the massive packaging waste in Japan where everything is packed into 10 layers of plastic for no good reason?
In recent news: Japanese scientists produce plastic which dissolves in seawater within 2 hours.
“The paper sheets become transparent because they are packed tightly with nanometer-scale (one 1-billionth of a meter) fibers. The concentration of these fibers allows light to pass straight through the sheets without experiencing diffusion.”
How do they orient them?
My mom’s been helping out at a small local shop, and they’ve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didn’t hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
I would like you to qualify "didn't hold up well". Can you explain how? Can we get more detail?
Paper straws often dissolve before finishing the drink. Paper bags in shops are often unable to carry even 4kg without breaking up.
Plastics and other oil-derivative, crucial materials should be the main use of crude oil and methane, not energy. Save the oil to make things that don't have an easy replacement. Replace oil burning with solar, wind, nuclear, etc., and use the underground reserve of hydrocarbons for noble causes like medecine, or for the type of investments that add to the net good for our species.
Plastics can be made from pretty much any plant-derived oil. Heat some vegetable oil, and voila, you have essentially plastic gunk and toxic side-products. The root problem is we have corrupt governments around the world in the pockets of big oil who don't care about the survival of the species or the planet long term so long as they advance short-term profits and expanding demand for oil.
I don't remember how often I have seen basically this exact same story. "Material X is going to replace plastics" is not a new story.
Every time they have failed to replace plastics, because it is extremely hard to match all of the great qualities of the common plastic varieties. Since plastics are so common people underestimate what a great materials they really are.
Sounds pretty promising. If this kind of material can really replace single-use plastic, that would be amazing. We use way too much plastic every day. Sometimes just for a few minutes, but it takes decades to break down. If the alternative is actually safe and easy to use, I think people would be more willing to make the switch.
If anyone has tried drinking from the straw, can you confirm there's no paper taste? I can't stand paper straws for this reason, it messes with my nerves like the scratching/screeching of a blackboard.
Are plastics killing us? - by Ugo Bardi - The Seneca Effect
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/are-plastics-killing-us
Wow, I was just wondering about this yesterday! I had read about how some researchers made a sort of glass out of wood and wondered if they could make resilient bottles for beverages out of a sort of maybe polymerized paper.
This is probably like the transparent windows made of wood - the chemicals to make it aren't any better than the ones used to make plastic.
They briefly describe the process in the article, and very different from the "transparent wood" I think you are referring to. I'll try to summarise from my brief understanding.
- Transparent wood takes wood, dissolves the lignin (natural wood glue-ish) with a solvent, and replaces it with epoxy under pressure. It's a pain to make, but is very cool and preserves the wood fibre structure.
- This transparent paper involves dissolving very pure cellulose (long starch) and then allowing it to reconnect tightly (with heat) before drying. It appears to be composed primarily of cellulose at the end and exhibits plastic properties. I presume the chemicals change the cellulose properties to allow this.
"lithium bromide-water" is (apparently, I was corrected) not very toxic and lilley recycled in the process. If this can be scaled and the solvent process can be done safely, then its very clever. It's effectively plastic but using a more "natural" carbon chain, which nature has had a few million extra years to figure out how to break down.
They describe it as paper and compare it to polycarbonate... so my guess is that it is a bit brittle, and cannot nicely replace plastic wrap or plastic bags... but it has some nice properties to replace a group of plastics we don't have very good alternatives to. One open question I have is UV resistance. Most transparent plastics tend to become brittle over time... but I don't know my chemistry enough to know if cellulose has the same issue. Greenhouses would otherwise benefit from it (as they're often made from polycarbonate sheets rather than glass)
I don't know why it "Sounds toxic as s*t". It's a reactive salt. LD50 is ~1gram so don't swallow or get it in your eyes or nose. It seems comparable in hazard to commonly available cleaning compounds like ammonia and bleach.
That doesn't make it safe, but it's not a crazy carcinogen or auto-immune risk, and it literally dissolves in water. It's present in all sea water ~0.1ppm so you can't escape it.
Bromine itself is very toxic, but it all depends on the dose and form (it's used as an anti-algae agent). The article doesn't mention the concentration or if it remains in the end product. I'm not a chemist though, most of my knowledge comes from nilered.
I’m a chemist. Bromine isn’t bromide, and lithium bromide is a simple nontoxic salt. If this is as simple as is described in the news article, then it’s likely a pretty “green” process overall.
Oo! Very nice. I've updated my comment, as i stand corrected.
That's a bit like chlorine gas is poisonous, but sodium chloride (salt) makes things tasty.
Highly different compounds, that just contain chlorine atoms.
Different goals: - Developing transparent wood is about cutting costs - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/transparent-wood-c... - Developing this material is about reducing and eventually eliminating plastic
Can you share what knowledge you have of the materials and/or process that implies this is likely the case?
Still holding out for transparent aluminum.
So like sapphire (Al2O3) :)
Scotty loves him some aluminium oxynitride.
Transparent paper is kind of an old idea. Whether it is commercially viable is the important question.
From TFA it says it's only about 3x as expensive as normal paper packaging, just needs a factory. Implies that at least some people believe it's viable.
Kudos, about time, Exciting news.
hits all the marks for replacing plastic. curious how long it'll take before widespread adoption; my cynical assumption's that it'll be at least a decade. will be happy to be wrong ...
even if its viable, it would come down to cost
Progressively banning plastics from various applications would certainly help.
the cost can be managed by taxing bad plastic and providing incentives to good sustainable plastic, just like BEVs vs ICE
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Up next: transparent aluminum.
On a more humorous note, this ought to make for an interesting store checkout experience. “Would you like paper or… paper?”
Waxxed paper?
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I'm concerned about microplastics too, but I think on the whole plastics have been good for health. Any harm microplastics may cause must be rather small if it hasn't been identified yet, and easily outweighed by the benefits of reducing spoilage and pathogen growth.
I somewhat agree with you. Unfortunately if it does turn out that we need to clean up the plastic pollution someday (because of longer term harms), we're pretty much fucked.
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Is it really biodegradable? Almost all varieties are not. They only fall apart in smaller plastic or need special heated environments. None of them will degrade if you simply throw them „into the woods“.
yes they turn to nothing very quickly. you can actually put them in your food compost. see, you're evidence of the ignorance
Maybe you should check your sources:
*1. Limited Degradation Conditions* - Most biodegradable plastics only break down under specific conditions, such as high temperatures found in industrial composting facilities, which are not widely available[3][4][6]. - In landfills or the natural environment, they may persist for years and even release methane, a potent greenhouse gas[4].
*2. Contamination of Recycling Streams* - Biodegradable plastics can contaminate conventional plastic recycling, reducing the quality and durability of recycled products[1][7]. - They require separate collection and processing, adding complexity and cost to waste management[5][7].
*3. Microplastics and Environmental Harm* - Some types, especially oxo-degradable plastics, fragment into microplastics, which pollute ecosystems and can enter the food chain[1].
*4. Toxicity and Chemical Concerns* - Biodegradable and bioplastics often contain thousands of chemicals, some of which are toxic and comparable to those in traditional plastics[2][8]. - Cellulose and starch-based bioplastics have shown strong toxicity in laboratory studies[2].
*5. High Production Costs and Resource Use* - Production is generally more expensive than conventional plastics and may require significant agricultural resources, potentially competing with food production and increasing carbon emissions[3][2][7].
*6. Durability and Usability Issues* - Biodegradable plastics may not be as durable, limiting their application in some products[5]. - Some products have faced consumer complaints about performance, such as packaging noise or fragility[3].
*7. Greenwashing and Misleading Claims* - Marketing often exaggerates environmental benefits, leading to consumer confusion and a false sense of sustainability[1][6].
*8. Infrastructure and Collection Challenges* - Lack of proper infrastructure means many biodegradable plastics end up in landfills or are incinerated rather than composted[4][7].
In summary, biodegradable plastics face significant challenges regarding waste management, environmental impact, toxicity, and practicality, making them far from a perfect solution to plastic pollution[1][2][3].
Quellen [1] Biodegradable Plastic Problems | BioPak Australia https://www.biopak.com/au/resources/biodegradable-plastic-pr... [2] The False Promise Of Bioplastics and Compostable Plastics https://www.beyondplastics.org/fact-sheets/bad-news-about-bi... [3] Is Biodegradable Plastic Good for the Environment? Exploring its ... https://www.global.dnp/biz/column/detail/20173971_4117.html [4] Why Bioplastics Will Not Solve the World's Plastics Problem https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-bioplastics-will-not-solv... [5] Concept to Compost: Challenges of Biodegradable Plastics R&D https://grantica.io/challenges-of-biodegradable-plastics-res... [6] The Problem with Bioplastics - The Great Bubble Barrier® https://thegreatbubblebarrier.com/the-problem-with-bioplasti... [7] The problem with bio-plastic - Plastic Free Communities https://plasticfree.org.uk/2024/01/31/the-problem-with-bio-p... [8] Biodegradable plastics may bring degradation and toxicity ... https://foodpackagingforum.org/news/biodegradable-plastics-m...