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.
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?
>they 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. Like microplastics, they bioaccumulate.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
I used to reduce plastic mainly for environmental reasons now I find myself doing it for health too.
The more I learn about microplastics and chemical leaching, the more I realize how much plastic interacts with our bodies, not just the planet. Especially when heat, oil, or acid are involved like in cooking or packaging hot foods it's hard not to think twice.
I'm not saying we should panic, but I do think it's worth reframing: health and sustainability aren't separate concerns here. They're intertwined.
Even if alternatives like “transparent paper” aren't perfect, they might still offer meaningful gains for both the environment and our bodies. And for many people, that might be what tips the scale.
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.
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.
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
"(…) 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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..
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
>they 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. Like microplastics, they bioaccumulate.
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.
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.
Disposing not cost that much. Plastic disposing is CHEAPER than it's production.
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.
> super-easy to mold
Or "plastic".
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.
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."
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?
Aka rayon (but foil not fiber).
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Which material has all the useful properties of plastic and doesn't last for an inconvenient amount of time?
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.
> 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
> Correlation is still not causation
Um, a stitch in time saves nine.
Are you just typing random words?
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).
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
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.
You mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A sea-water dissolving plastic : https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...
»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.
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 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 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.
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.
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).
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.
I used to reduce plastic mainly for environmental reasons now I find myself doing it for health too.
The more I learn about microplastics and chemical leaching, the more I realize how much plastic interacts with our bodies, not just the planet. Especially when heat, oil, or acid are involved like in cooking or packaging hot foods it's hard not to think twice.
I'm not saying we should panic, but I do think it's worth reframing: health and sustainability aren't separate concerns here. They're intertwined.
Even if alternatives like “transparent paper” aren't perfect, they might still offer meaningful gains for both the environment and our bodies. And for many people, that might be what tips the scale.
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
But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.
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.
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.
Too much lead.
It actually wasn't poisonous given the circumstances.
They would cook food in lead pots, which made it poisonous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
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.
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
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.
"People changing" and "changing people" are radically different things.
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.
“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.
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.
I can't help it, sounds to me like cellophane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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..
Kudos, about time, Exciting news.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Still holding out for transparent aluminum.
So like sapphire (Al2O3) :)
On a more humorous note, this ought to make for an interesting store checkout experience. “Would you like paper or… paper?”