Could Dissolvable Cranberry Film Replace Plastic Packaging Someday?
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
The article mentions muffin liners as an alternative use case, but those are usually made of thin paper and are already compostable.
However, the bio-plastics made from shellfish leftovers (think: crab, lobster, shrimp) would be appropriate for this.
The problem with petroleum based products (Styrofoam, plastics) is that they are crazy cheap due to our oil based economy. At some point the economics of that industry will change, and with it the prevailing winds on using plastics as building materials.
I would welcome more products being made as sturdy as they used to be. Take for example, pooper scoopers. It's actually quite difficult to buy a scissor-style one made of any kind of metal (there's one which is 80ish USD and made of steel - sort of a vanity product). They're all plastic. They all break, some sooner than others. The one I picked up from my parents' house recently was used from about 1990 to 2003 (and left outdoors since), and performs better than any of the plastic ones we used. It's wood and aluminum, and probably was no more expensive than the plastic ones on offer today. We broke a 25 dollar scooper within a month, and the scooper we inherited will likely outlive yet another dog.
There's nowhere near enough of that and it's a natural resource we are already plundering at brutal levels.
If world fisheries had shown that it was possible to control extraction such that we did not destroy stocks, then this would be a great way to meet a significant (~10%, it seems?) portion of world packaging plastics needs. However, it seems pretty clear that the fishing industry as a whole has any interest in ensuring sustainable production.
This is reflexivity in action [2]. In the first year you start manufacturing this biofilm, your sentiment is true, it is using waste stream. In the Nth year, fisheries are collapsing shrimp stocks, flooding markets with shrimp to extract what used to be a waste stream to eke out ever decreasing margins in a vicious cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)
If well-intentioned government subsidies aggressively push for using the waste stream however (about the only way I see such a biofilm ever ramping up beyond niche markets), then it is very difficult to conceive those policy makers calibrating to the same homeostatic outcome. That's not how the plastics industry works. The demand scale is on such a bonkers level that distorts normal incentives.
I always worry about such reflexivity when these breathless articles come out about alternative production-side solutions to our current plastics production-consumption matrix. It's way more complex and large than most people understand outside that industry.
KSA can pump oil at current rates for 40 years at $20 per barrel.
That'll definitely be enough for global plastic consumption.
Economics itself isn't going to phase out plastics in my lifetime.
But the big complicated supply chain for petrochemicals can break at lower scale. Compare how freaked out the markets have gotten at Meta and Netflix for losing users while still being profitable, and you can see how financing could dry up before the wells do.
I doubt it’s enough to phase out plastics, but it might make alternatives more economically viable.
At $20 per barrel - the economics alone will be tough to beat with some other material.
They’re going to need that magic when the primary export collapses — or if it doesn’t, wet bulb temperatures in the Gulf make it literally unlivable. The $20 a barrel will be even harder to sustain in a protracted civil war, which is where they are headed if they don’t diversify enough.
KSA refines all its own oil.
KSA doesn't need capital. It's a money printing machine - even at $30 per barrel.
Shipping will have some impact. ~40% of global shipping cargo is fossil fuels.
However, my guess is, fossil fuel shipping would get even cheaper, not more expensive.
Anyways. I am sure the boffins are working on the shellfish allergy angle.
Best argument I could come up with.
It could also replace individually wrapped items, such as in a box of cereal bars the individual bars wouldn't need plastic wrap.
Not to mention how nasty the last one is when it takes you 2 months to finish a box... All of them exposed to air? Thanks but no thanks.
If you care about avoiding "processed foods" in other domains and are consuming shrink-wrapped bars with a shelf life of 2+ months: here be dragons!
I store ours in a glass container the refrigerator, where they're individually wrapped in butcher paper. I'd consider them good outside of the fridge (in the paper) for 32 hours, inside the fridge for a week or two. Making a batch takes about 10 minutes + overnight refrigeration, and the recipe is trivial to scale-up/down in size.
They're certainly not as convenient or robust as shrink-wrapped lara bars, but we're not frequently in situations where the diff disappoints, ymmv.
I expect the ones made without processed ingredients like protein powders to be especially in that category. Not that there's anything necessarily bad about that, but it does bug me when folk label products as "high" in protein when all the protein comes from nuts, legumes, etc.
I totally agree re the disappointing macro-nutritional composition of most protein bars. Especially disappointing (to me) is the sugar content and its source (typically rice syrup or corn syrup).
After computing the macros for homemade bars, it's hard to feel like you're getting much bang for the buck with those bars -- it feels like you're better off eating some dried and mixed nuts.
But the main ingredients are creamy natural peanut butter, one of either local honey or local maple syrup, and "old-fashioned" rolled oats.
Stir until combined 200g PB, 135g honey/maple syrup, 5g vanilla extract, 3g sea salt.
To this mixture, add 100g rolled oats, 80g whey, ~200g nuts and seeds (can be crushed or whole, although partially-crushed is a bit easier). I use pecans, pepitas, walnuts, almonds, cashews. Whatever is in the pantry.
Transfer + compress to an appropriate-sized casserole dish (above is good for 8x8) with a large spoon, I usually line it first with paper to make later transfer easier.
Cover + chill for at least 1 hour, then slice with a sharp instrument (I use a pizza slicer, but a chef's knife is great). These proportions yield 12-ish bars. But you can compute the macronutrients for yourself to decide how big a serving should be.
In short, it's pretty similar to granola. Only without baking and without oil. I've found the flavor to vary widely depending on the honey/pb/whey used.
Sometimes, they taste like peanut butter cups. :)
At least for me - when I hike I usually have a box and put all of those items there “raw” - the box protects them from mechanical forces but I don’t need to individually wrap my apples inside that box. Having other edible things have such an edible covering would be amazing actually.
For backpacks and the like you will need something else to keep it clean, same as you would for an apple. May I present to you the lunch box, already used by 100s of millions.
Meh.
When I go shopping, I:
* bring my own bag
* buy oat, rice, sugar, pasta, chocolate etc in bulk (w/ textile bags I bring)
* refill detergent containers in-shop
* buy fruit & veg without packaging
.. and I have no meaningful reduction of my living standard. I know it's difficult to make some sacrifices. But honestly, if we can't as a society be ars*d to do even that, perhaps we deserve to disappear after ecological collapse, and the geopolitical consequences of that.
What I'm saying is, the chance of that happening IS considerably high elsewhere, and in such elsewhere it is imperative that oat, rice, not sugar but pasta, and chocolate, must be denied of life under sterile light of an ultra processing foodstuff factory and somewhat hermetically sealed. Otherwise you wouldn't know what you'll be getting later.
Just something which reason isn't immediately obvious sometimes.
Weird huh?
I use reusable containers for 90% of the stuff I use, especially tools, projects, etc.
I also use glass reusable containers all the time for food, as they don’t soak up weird smells and stains that can’t be cleaned out, and have bacterial problems and leeching issues like reusable plastic containers.
They aren’t practical for anywhere they’ll be exposed to impacts a lot or weight matters, like kids lunches or whatever, so I use plastic ones there.
But I’m under no illusions that any of those make any sense whatsoever for large scale food distribution, and neither should anyone else.
We need to at least start replacing the pallet-wrap with non-petroleum material.
Could make some interesting food items with an edible film though.
It's like that solar road idea: 1000x more expensive, 100x more complex, and requires constant maintenance.
“There’s not a perfect product yet. How can we reduce the cost? How can the formulations and technology more easily scale up through companies?” says Zhao.”
Seriously, we need legally imposed limits on the use of single-use plastic wrapping, a correction of the economics and a change in habits.
Our family consumes two kinds of crispbread. One manufacturer (Wasa) uses paper for its wrapping. The other (FinnCrisp) use a plastic wrapping inside a carton box. That's just absurd.
Other products may not have a single-use alternative, like meat. Consigned containers is a solution here, already widely in use for beverages in many countries.
As long as manufacturers can get away with wrapping stuff in plastic, they will. We need to pressure them into finding alternatives.
As someone else pointed out here, we are paying a high price already for the damage we're doing to the environment (waste collection infrastructure, rising insurance prices, tax-funded repairs after natural disasters). If we folded those costs into the prices of the products most responsible for them, and added some legislation on top, we could change quite a few habits in relatively little time. It just needs someone with guts to make those decisions, which is something in rather short supply, at least here in Germany...
End of rant.
At this point, I think any plastic is a problem, and it needs very serious consideration whether plastic should be used. I'm fine with wrapping sterilized medical equipment in plastic. Crispbread, not so much.
that plastic is not for you not throwing away two cucumbers, is for the supermarket and distribution centers to not throw away pallets of them, it increase the efficiency of the whole logistic chain (which runs on oil)
There should be some cost-benefit analysis — not just “all plastic must be avoided.” That’s a bit much.
Unlike me, my children will never experience their home planet without microplastics everywhere, from the highest peak down to the deepest trench in the ocean. They will have to pay a hefty price for what we and those before us have done to the environment. I think that's a bit much.
Where's the cost-benefit for them of wrapped cucumbers?
Like I said, there are applications where plastic is justified, medical devices for example. Cucumbers, bread, smartphones, cutlery, plants, cereal, rice, potatoes, toys: I think there are plastic-free solutions that we should now absolutely and urgently go for.
International treaties forcing developing countries to get their waste management together combined with targeted investment there would help way more.
[1]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/06/PE22_N035_51.html
[2]: https://waste-management-world.com/artikel/germany-s-problem...
https://www.forkranger.com/plastic-wrapping-of-cucumbers-cle...
Another example: is it better to buy the non-organic, locally produced apple or the organic apple that comes from Argentina? (I'm in Europe).
In the store, I need simple heuristics to make my decisions. My heuristics:
- Is there plastic? -> Pass
- Is it produce from far away? -> Pass, mostly
- Is it non-organic? -> Pass, if there's an organic alternative.
And yeah, sometimes it's a decision between the produce that's organic but wrapped in plastic and that which is conventional but without wrapping and grown locally. That's a head-scratcher every time.
Here be dragons. The instant you invoke cost-benefit you've lost the Overton Window and industry shills duped you.
The most common mechanism used is getting you to uncritically accept the timeframe the analysis takes place within, and the futility of a substantive, quantum qualitative difference. These go hand in hand.
The most common timeframe is "one generation", 30 years, usually framed as "zomg we're being SO nice to deign to accept lesser profits on such a long-ass timescale!".
If I could gift future generations an aquatic and soil ecosystem reverted to pre-anthropogenic methylmercury levels, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But that doesn't get accomplished when cost-benefit is measured in 30 years, but more like 60-90 years with Thanos snap-like policy action, closer to 3-600 years with cheaters accounted for.
Plastics disintegrating into our environment everywhere is the methylmercury story all over again. Industry externalization into our progeny's generations that will functionally last centuries into the future, for the financial well being of only a few hundreds of millions of families globally to afford contrivances with fleeting benefit even to themselves. Even in the "best" cases where instead of blowing the financial gain at the cost of externalization upon a frivolous 1000th Rolex or Nike, they sent Ruòxī and Sam to Harvard, that still doesn't help future generations contending with a deep energy problem of these diffuse materials pervading the ecosystem.
Because that's the real crux: this is an energy gradient problem within a timeline that stretches out for centuries when our civilizational economic planning horizon can't see past 30 years in the mainstream, 100 years in "outlier" use cases. Concentrating the wealth and material benefit of these materials happens within a brief time window set against that kind of timeline, using a specific amount of energy.
Once the material is dispersed into the ecosystem, it takes a lot longer and be much more energy intensive to perform harm reduction than it ever did to wield it in the first place.
We're seeing this pattern repeat increasingly more frequently because our civilization's scale is emerging more such use cases with different materials without considering cradle-to-cradle design. It seems a lot like a Tainter-style complexity collapse vector to me, but that's just my personal observations, YMMV. Actions are an entirely separate thread of discussion.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental... (look at the last graph, with averages).
This is the kind of misguided environmentalism that does a lot more harm than good. It's not fashionable to say so, but plastic is a trivial issue on pretty much every possible count - when you do the math. Trying to "fix" it on the other hand often makes our lives miserable (paper straws) or just plain backfires massively. Growing cranberries takes energy, which for the foreseeable future means oil. Want to bet how much oil is being burned to grow a ton of cranberry film, and compare it with just turning that oil directly intro plastic?
https://www.treehugger.com/europe-s-plastic-recycling-is-get...
“A reasonable estimate [for the amount of plastic produced by rich countries that end up in the ocean] might be around 5% of ocean plastics. In reality, it might be a bit lower because a tonne of waste that is bought and traded is more likely to be managed well than the average tonne of waste in a country.”
But at the same time, it could replace some in some applications and that is worth doing.
Anything that lowers the amount of plastics being used and contributes towards it is a good thing. It does need to replace all and every use of transparent plastics, but even some is good. And I don't believe we can find a silver bullet biopolymer that 1:1 replaces or even exceeds plastic for all usecases rightaway.
Anything that reduces environmental impact is worth pursuing, but many products like this are actually even more environmentally harmful, just sometimes in different ways. It turns out sometimes the best approach for now is reducing and mitigating the impact of plastics rather than eliminating their use at all costs. Sometimes those costs can be too high.
If we standardize on reusable container sizes then they can be returned, washed, and reprocessed back into the supply chain.
They moved to single-use bottles some years ago, using recycled plastic[1], citing that the energy required for the transportation, washing etc of the reused bottles was higher than that of making new from recycled plastic.
A big issue is that a bottle going back to be washed is mostly air, so you get relatively few in a single truck. The new ones gets shredded at the store, thus you get a lot more plastic in a single truck.
So any reusable container would at the very least need to be stackable. However, I think the bottle story[2] here in Norway shows recycling is perhaps better than reusing.
[1]: https://www.coca-cola.no/nyheter-og-kampanjer/i-norge/100--r...
[2]: https://www.coca-cola.no/baerekraft/emballasje/redusertklima...
Very few people demand sterilized shopping baskets in supermarkets, but they will for restaurant dishes, and you’ll notice more wear is present in the latter despite they are more gently handled inside a place.
Not an expert on this matter but I am pretty sure most hydrocarbons can be burnt pretty cleanly in the right conditions.
And for what benefit? Plastics in a land fill are a form of carbon sequestration if the alternative is burning them or fresh hydrocarbons.
IMO the value in replacing plastic use has very little to do with energy/CO2. It's more related to other health/environmental effects (microplastics, etc).
95% of the time, the answer is no
Given the person who I replied to didn't know there was a name for it, I think it was warranted.
Then you'd have a hygiene code violation; the packaging is there for a reason. And what if the packaging gets moist? It's more likely than you think.
At this point the only way to stop plastic products is to subsidize a replacement to the point of making it cheaper than plastic or to make it illegal. Both of which are unlikely to happen now.
When looking at plastic replacements, we need to look at the economics as well as the replacement.
The funny thing is that we are _already_ paying for it with all the trash handling infrastructure - mostly government payed and supported by taxes around the world.
The money is there - imagine paying less for trash, but a bit more for the product - still the same amount of money spent. But now the manufacturer has the incentive to use those new films and _not_ pay for its disposal. As economies of scale kick in, we can have clean environment and pay less for it all (less trash infra).
I just hope people (governments) realize this in my lifetime…
It’s perfectly fine to literally bury alongside everything else.
Plastic is also easier to mold into a variety of shapes, so you get conveniently stackable containers and lids without much extra cost (the same shapes introduce stress points in the glass where fractures could occur).
Plastic can also be made flexible, i.e. as shrinkwrap (which this product would replace in some cases). You aren't going to wrap vulnerable fruit and veg (like english cucumbers) in glass wrap.
Glass can be easier to recycle, but again you're fighting volume and mass in transportation as well as waste management. It's great for things like liquids if you have businesses willing to re-use them, but they also have to expend the extra energy to properly clean and sanitize them before they can be reused.
The last time I bought a soda from a company that would take back glass bottles and reuse them, the flavor could only be described as "soap". I never again wondered why every other company sold disposable aluminum and plastic after that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/21...
> Of all the ideas presented, creating a fibrous film that is edible, no-waste, anti-microbial and water soluble was the one that took off, and Zhao published her first paper on the subject 15 years ago. Since then, she’s continued to tweak and refine the formulation.
This industry is driven by ROI and waste reduction. If this worked, it would've worked long ago.
Find a more ecological alternative and then tax the hell out of the current methods.