- 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)
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.
Highly different compounds, that just contain chlorine atoms.
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.
That's the point. They had sustainable and clean technology. It was a sweet spot.
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.
Just curious whether I'm missing some connection.
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.
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.
I think it's Glassine?
The main issue of trash has always been separation.
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.
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 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...
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.
Video on this, as well as how much is used as incinerator fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6WogV6UEg
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
How do they orient them?
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.
'waterproof' (fluid proof for many things)
Difficult to shatter (drop safe-ish)
Shows stuff off 'nicely'
- 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
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.
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
Or "plastic".
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.
Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
"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."
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819327/
Etc… just google microplastics.
Depends on the type of plastic used.
Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.
It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
1970-01-01•13h ago
firtoz•12h ago
aDyslecticCrow•12h ago
9rx•10h ago
Brian_K_White•12h ago
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?