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Comment by TrispusAttucks | Hacker News Reader

I am not optimistic about the future of sustainable specialized materials.

It seems very likely that the same structures that give modern high tech materials their unique abilities are the same ones that make them so environmentally unfriendly.

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We are in the middle of a biotech revolution. Figuring out how to scale up bioengineered materials is a likely source of impressive materials.

Nature is full of stuff like spider silk, chitin, bone, phosphorescent materials, sponges,etc.

Scaling things always seems to be the thing that takes from the environment.

I remember reading something about the trillions of chiken bones we discard annually are something of a problem. "The dose makes the poison" seems to apply to the environment as much as it does to the individual.

Curious what the problem is? Animals with bones have existed for hundreds of millions of years. The environment knows what to do with them. PFCs by contrast do not exist naturally in the world and they act as a toxin in the environment.

Never before has there been a time where billions of chickens were killed each year. The dose make the poison.

Around 200 billions chickens are slaughtered each year, not sure how that compare with their population during previous hundreds millions of years.

I can't speak to the actual problems from chicken bones, but scale may be part of the explanation.

We are producing something like 50 billion chickens for slaughter every year. I don't think that estimate includes laying hens or culled males, either. The scale of chicken production is bonkers relative to natural bird populations.

The most abundant wild bird species is on the order of 1.5 billion. They are sparrow-sized and that's not their annual number.

Framed animals dwarf wild mammals and wild birds by mass:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-...

In theory, scale shouldn't be an issue. After all, you need enough farms to produce feed for those animals. It's just a matter of processing those by products into fertilizer and distributing it over the massive area that is used for crop production.

Although industrial farming could be considered an environmental problem, regardless of the chickens.

Replacing those 50 billion chickens with "lab grown" meat, will bring huge changes the next few decades.

The problem is the concentration that nature has never experienced before. Alcohol is natural but in concentrations that required distilling is a poison.

Or in Norway it turned out throwing into fjords pieces of stones that are a by-product of quarry is very problematic. It releases into water copper and other metals within years poisoning plants and fish. Through natural weathering it takes thousands of years to release the same amount.

trillions of kg/yr of anything will effect the environment in some way, since "the environment" is just the emergent properties of all of the things in the earth system and trillions of kg/yr of stuff is a lot of stuff. If you added (or removed) 10^12 kg of water (or literally anything else) to the planet, it would change the environment in detectable ways.

>10^12 kg of water

That's exactly 1 km^3 of water. The Earth has 1,386,000,000 km^3 of surface water.

I don't think increasing the amount of water by ~0.00000007% would be noticeable.

It would probably mess up any km^2 of inhabited landmass.

Sure. And a glass of water can kill you if it goes in your lungs.

But stick to the charitable interpretation, where the water is distributed evenly in the environment, shall we?

If we want to be charitable, then perhaps you’d see that my point was specifically about how the scale was important, and that averaging impact out over the entire globe was perhaps not the correct scale

What does 'discarded' mean here? The end user discards them but that does not require that they are dumped. They can be crushed, composted, used as feedstock for some other process, etc.

So much waste goes to landfill when they could be inputs to other bio processes. The scale of waste is insane.

"This equates to each household in NYC wasting an average of 8.4 pounds of food per week." [1]

Each household could feed a flock of 7 chickens with that household waste.

[0] https://www.rts.com/blog/nyc-waste-statistics-what-you-need-...

That doesn’t make much sense. Every atom of calcium in a chicken bone came from a field somewhere that now has to be augmented with more calcium. The easiest way to supply that calcium is to grind up the chicken bones and sprinkle them on the fields - if you go to a garden center you’ll find tons of products that list “bonemeal” as an ingredient. Since chickens require 3-5x their biomass in food and calcium in their meat is digested, there will never be enough bones to replenish the calcium used to feed them.

I find it hard to believe that the meat industry throws their bones away instead of selling them back to the fertilizer manufacturers that supply their feed vendors. Only chicken bones thrown in the landfill by consumers are lost and these are hardly a problem compared to the volume of other crap we discard.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed. The atomes in the landfill are also still available to be reclaimed.

I think mining landfills is a cool idea in theory, but I've never heard of anyone doing it (the closest is processing old mining slag for more materials).

Depends on the landfill, I guess? I would imagine that most modern landfills are lined with heavy duty plastic sheets to prevent all the toxic crap from leaching into the groundwater. What happens to that stuff? I guess some of it will biodegrade over a long period of time, and I'm sure all kinds of animals will attempt to feed on it, but the vast majority of the bulk is no longer part of the ecosystem. For better or for worse.

In my part of the world we incinerate most of our waste and turn some of the waste heat into electricity. I wonder what happens to the organic matter in that scenario. Most of it probably ends up as toxic ash which is pretty useless?

Natural things usually decay quickly though. Often they involve some kind of biological factory that continuously grows new biomaterial

"Natural" materials can be just as toxic as manufactures ones.

Yes, but it’s less common to have completely unknown effects and from the perspective of pollution they have the desirable property of being broken down quickly when discarded or if bits flake off during normal use. That still doesn’t mean you can’t overload the ecosystem but it does mean that problems can self-correct more.

The natural/synthetic distinction is arbitrary, but you are both right.

The correct approach would be to get more granular and specify that we only want to elininate chemicals, whether natural or synthetic, that do not break down or are toxic.

If you find a natural source of PFAS ("forever chemicals") then it isn't any better.

People want to own a dream. Buy it for life, effective, durable, but also easily compostable! Very cheap, but hand made by workers paid a living wage with fair trade materials imported from pro-LQBTQIA green democracies.

Everything is permitted if its commerce. The right for a business to exist supersedes the right for a human to exist. There is no cause and effect, only commerce. The market is the only thing that exists. Markets will still exist after the end of men.

Given our ever-expanding definition of "environmentally unfriendly" and our ever-contracting definition of "sustainable", I'm actually not sure that anything actually makes the cut in the long run.

Everything "effects the environment" in some way, after all.

This is more or less the argument of various population-reduction advocates. There's simply no way, with current or foreseeable technology, to sustain 8 billion humans AND still have a planet left a few centuries later.

If we want there to be humans in the far, far future, more of us need to start going childfree NOW, and encouraging others to do so, AND working on sustainable ways to have a decent standard of living without eviscerating the Earth.

The problem being that everybody always wants to force someone else to be the one to have no children and a crappy standard of living, while they get to be one of the people selected to remain.

Welcome to the degrowth mindset, where anything that represents technological innovation by mankind is perforce evil and must be stamped out.

> It seems very likely that the same structures that give modern high tech materials their unique abilities are the same ones that make them so environmentally unfriendly.

This certainly seems plausible, but on what basis do you find it likely?

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