The headline is practically a demonic summoning ritual for the naturalistic fallacy. The article is talking about cellulose. We've had cellulose forever. Cellulose is dirt cheap. We are a post-cellulose-scarcity civilization. Extracting it from grapevines ought to be mocked as our century's version of bringing coal to Newcastle.
There's a reason we don't use cellulose packaging for everything and it has nothing to do with grapes.
Hint: moisture exists in the world. Biodegrading in 17 days usually means that it breaks down a lot sooner in conditions we care about.
> Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.
What useful research could we have funded instead?
But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.
Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.
IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.
The whole plastic straw thing is nuts. The old waxed paper straws were fine. The new “paper” straws are coated in PFAS and way worse for your health and the environment than most alternatives.
This article reminds me of that. Cellulose isn’t a new technology, but, like wax paper straws, it’s apparently forgotten arcane knowledge.
You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?
Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.
We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.
You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
I think it’s a valid point.
> What useful research could we have funded instead?
This research seems useful enough to me.
We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.
State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
and even
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene
are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that. One reason we quit burning trash in many places is the presence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
[1] Plenty of others contain oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate or nitrogen such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
(Source: Paraphrasing from my vague recollection of A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and also articles like this one https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-production-pollution-foreca...)
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingeo
I think there's also "biodegradable" plastic which has cornstarch in it which allows bacteria to degrade it, but that's not the same thing?
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
That really should be prosecuted for false advertising. Just because I can physically flush Orbeez down the toilet doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
Wasting produce is much worse for the environment than wasting a bag. After all if you don't litter the bag, throwing it out is pretty harmless.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/2824/fresh...
Either way good on you
The exception is small loose produce like snap peas.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
on the lower end of plastics but might be fine for this application: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/3-Tensile-strength-and-i...
seems comparable to LDPE which i think the common bags are made from.
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
AfterHIA•3h ago
wyre•3h ago
AfterHIA•3h ago
PaulHoule•2h ago
People are making progress in Utah too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_wine
kulahan•2h ago
Modified3019•1h ago