Seaweed could be the future of plastic [video] | Hacker News Reader

Seaweed could be the future of plastic [video]

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A little looking around points to global plastic production being near 370 million tons. By comparison, global seaweed production is near 10 million tons, wet. Trying to expand seaweed aquaculture 37X is not very likely, and would have many negative ecological effects. Existing seaweed production is already in high demand, and cheap plastics are not a likely endpoint.

Basically, the biosphere is not capable of replacing fossil fuels on the scale they're currently used. Corn ethanol can't replace gasoline, soy oil biofuel can't replace diesel, seaweed plastic can't replace natural gas petrochemical plastic. There's just not enough to go around, and the costs - in area, in fertilizer, in processing energy - are just too high.

There is a solution, it's industrial-scale renewable-powered direct-air-capture-and-reduction of atmospheric CO2, plus water, to hydrocarbons from methane to jet fuel (including the plastic precursors). It doesn't require arable land - a desert wasteland bordering an ocean would be a perfect location.

I don't, the ocean is a big place and we haven't seriously started to farm it anywhere near it's full potential yet (bet we do before long though).

Now granted many areas won't be suitable for seaweed cultivation, but if the demand is there, humans can get really innovative. The thing is, we don't make plastic out of seaweed yet and likely won't until we have to, and maybe never at all.

I do like your other idea better though if feasible. Save the ocean farming for food.

> to hydrocarbons from methane to jet fuel

It's rather backwards to pull CO2 from air - with all energy required - just to make it the jet fuel. Instead, stop running jets - except very exceptional, or some hydrogen-based, move to propellers - most jets are subsonic anyway, and move from regular plastics to biodegradable ones.

This article is about the latter. 37X looks surely tiny comparing to how much we need to scale CO2 atmosphere scrubbing...

Doing the former establishes a cost for doing the latter which can be used to shift the market by appropriate taxation.

Of course, we should stop subsidizing big oil to the tune of hundreds of billions first.

I've noticed that packaging for consumer goods accounts for a sizable portion of waste. This is something that could be curtailed even without innovation taken into account. Some sort of policy decision will be necessary as it will not suffice to deflect responsibility to consumers, especially when that demographic is only growing in the West. We can't outpace growth with shaming.

There is nowhere close to a research consensus agreeing with you - this is a very open question still. There are certainly a lot more reasons to be skeptical of a direct-air-capture industrial solution scaling though.

Any source that does not look at the benefits of a circular economy of kelp farming (producing more fuel and plastic to build the next batch), as well as upwelling tech (bringing nitrogen from the deep sea to the surface) is missing key facets too. It's very plausible large swaths of the ocean with little life currently could be turned into viable kelp farms (great for fish and life) which pay for themselves sinking CO2 by selling excess fuel and plastic. Demand is more likely to be a problem than production. If only we could think of some useful things to do with endless dirt cheap biodegradeable plastic. HMMM

Kelp and biological sources of CO2 drawdown (bamboo on land) are much more cost efficient, environmental and scalable than any industrial drawdown process currently known.

Along with Uluu making seaweed plastics, Australian startup https://greatwrap.co/ is making cling wrap from potato wastes.

I've been using it for a few weeks. It's surprisingly sticky. Almost too sticky at this point. It isn't only for home use, but also for wrapping pallets, with it's being stronger and stickier than average saran wrap, this is probably a better use case.

how do prices compare?

As a consumer, the price of Great Wrap is more than Saran, or other generics. Probably double the price. But I buy cling film about once every 3 years, so do I care if it costs me an extra $5?

For the industrial use, I don't know how it compares, but I'd suggest that at current scale it is probably a few dollars more per pallet.

Biodegrable plastic is a partial solution to discarded plastic, but not discarding it in the first place is better.

Non-fossil fuel inputs to make plastic are good, as they divert money from fossil fuel producers and (if done well) will be capturing carbon from the atmosphere and locking it into plastic.

The bigger points are:

Producer responsibility: make the corporation deciding to use the plastic, pay for the cost of collecting and recycling it.

This then leads directly to reduction in unnecessary plastic usage, efficiency in their use of plastic, design for easy collection and recycling, and a circular economy that contains carbon (ideally non-fossil carbon) in useful products.

People think plastic isn't recyclable, economically or environmentally, but it is as long as you actually try to do so and don't just pretend to do it.

Maybe seaweed has a part to play in that future, but sensible market-based regulations to address externalities is the real 'one neat trick'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...

So we fill the oceans with plastic, then remove the seaweed to replace plastic?

I keep hoping they'll find a way to break down plastics. Having a cost effective plant-based alternative that degrades quicker is great as long as the process in creating it isn't equally as damaging to the environment, but that still leaves a lot of petroleum-baeed plastic.

Even if a way to decompose plastic is found I think we'd still need to gather it so we can process it. People are dumping plastic everywhere at this point and it's really hard to make people's habits to change.

It's also corporations causing like 95% of the issues but then when it comes to responsibility it is always about individuals and not companies.

If we stop burning oil then it will last longer as feedstock for chemical processes.

Climate and plastic pollution are the problems of our time.

I see progress made towards number 1, no progress towards number 2.

I see 1 as an existential threat that can crumble nations, wipe out ecosystems, and kill billions of humans. I see 2 as something troubling that may have small negative effects on humans, and may have bad-but-not-catastrophic effects on certain species of fish.

So by all means, let's keep working on 2, in our free time, while we focus on 1. (metaphorically - I understand lots of people can work on lots of different things)

Beyond environmental damage, plastic is hypothesized to be one of the main drivers behind the drastically decreasing sperm counts in human males. I think we are only just uncovering the tip of the iceberg for the damage that plastic can do with respect to hormone disruption in the human body

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/

yeah, okay, that's a fine example - so, plastic pollution is bad, because sperm counts. But... at the moment, fertility rates due to sperm count pose absolutely no threat to our species, nor do we foresee that changing.

We should absolutely address this! But we don't need to "uncover" or "explore the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to the impacts of climate change - they're big and catastrophic. That's the difference between the two crises.

> I see 1 as an existential threat that can crumble nations

Agree, yet consider this. During early COVID-19 crisis Earth civilization spent some many billions - I think above some trillions actually - USD equivalent fighting this rather little-known problem. Spending this kind of money on climate crisis can substantially improve things.

> I see 2 as something troubling

Plastic pollution is somewhat similar to early COVID-19 - we don't know long-term effects from this type of poisoning of our environment, so I'd err on the side of caution. It's not a good idea to keep microplastics in human organs - we just don't know how it could turn out to be, and we have reasons to suspect that our bodies, not evolved alongside the plastics, don't appreciate that.

I recently learned that open burning of plastic waste produces lots of soot that might have a non-negligible effect on capturing heat from sunlight. So there's some causality between plastic waste and global warming.

So while I don't disagree with the spirit of this video, I've come to distrust Matt and that youtube channel as a reliable source of information.

https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-seaweed-could-be-the-fu...

If you look at the link to his script with his source citations, most are pop science articles, several are marketing/press releases for companies, and at most there's two maybe three things I'd consider a primary source there.

Of those sources, two look to be paywalled content for market research firms, and the lone source that's actually (appears at least) to be a peer reviewed paper, is about seaweed agriclutrue not applications for plastics specifically.

The man's videos are a game of telephone with other people's journalisim as 'sources' -- the message out the end is a stretch at best, and hyperbole or marketing for companies at worst.

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