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Comment by woolvalley | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if all the 'compostable' bio plastics you see in utentsils and some food packaging have the same problems or are safe.

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Most compostable bio plastics are made of Poly-lactic acid (lactic acid is the stuff that gives that burning feeling in your muscles after a workout) from corn.

PLA can compost in industrial sites, but (edit: add a not here) in normal environments, perhaps that is the reason for your quote marks.

So at least the bulk of the material in the bioware is pretty safe, especially when compared against PFA/PFOAs. That's not to say that it's impossible to mix PLA with some other, unsafe chemicals.

IIRC biostarch PLA can be produced from any industrial waste product high in cellulose. In practice this would include for example sugar cane in addition to corn husks. It is often said that they will completely degrade within 14 days in a warm vegetative compost environment. How closely a typical landfill replicates this optimal, aerated environment is questionable. Anyway, they are a lot better to have discarded around the planet than most plastic. The problem is that they are extremely energy inefficient to produce.

Traditional polymers: Oil in, power in, cheap product out, correct disposal and recycling required or planet suffers.

Biostarch polymers: Industrial waste in, huge amount of power in, comparable but more expensive product out (but can be relied on to biodegrade eventually if incorrectly disposed of).

The real solution is better food distribution systems with more efficient and re-usable packaging and cutlery, so that disposal is not required.

Yeah, re-use is always preferable. It often goes against ever-increasing standard of hygiene.

It used to be common to collect used glass bottles and re-use them. That practice still happens in countries like Thailand and Vietnam.

Still happens in America today. I refilled a glass jug at a local brewery today. $5 deposit on a 750ml bottle, can return for the deposit or just leave it in the car and get it refilled at just about any brewery, even some liquor stores, restaurants and grocery stores.

Better food distribution systems would also remove, for example, the need for personal motor vehicles, personal grocery trips, spatially inefficient retail spaces, the non-ideal refrigeration and other concerns deriving from food safety concerns in such spaces, and even individual package labeling.

Yes many of them are made with this junk, a lot of hygiene products have it too like "Oral-B" floss and even things like microwave popcorn bags...

The more people realize the FDA does not care about us and learn to take personal action the better.

Nobody has personal time or money to do the research required. We need some organization to centralize the work and indicate what's safe and what's not safe with enough robustness that unsafe products aren't easily sold to the unwary.

We generally call these things government agencies, but any other body with the same function - private or public - will be susceptible to the same kinds of forces that government agencies are. All we can do is try and build institutions good processes, adversarial audits that ensure processes are followed, and mechanisms to adjust processes when they're found to be lacking.

We generally call the latter mechanisms democracy. It's not great, but it's the best we've come up with.

Well, you'll end up with toxic drinking water with this attitude. I don't know what the right solution is, but saying you don't know enough at this point to throw out your teflon pans and avoid certain products and that you don't want to research things is lazy and ignorant.

Citizen's levying large class-actions suits and making documentaries like "The Devil We Know" are perhaps the best tools we have to stop fascist corruption.

I don't understand what you're responding to in what I wrote, sorry.

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