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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

There's not enough cork, nor will there ever be, to make a meaningful dent in total plastic consumption (in current terms).

We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Cork has a very small part of the planet where it grows well, and basically everything else valuable grows well there, too...

The Nanocrystalline Cellulose market will be bigger than cork by 2030 probably - and even that is 25 years away from making a real dent in plastic consumption (aggressively).

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To be fair, we don't need it to overtake, or even come close to, the entire plastic industry. It'd already be nice if it, and other sustainable materials, could chip away at different uses of petroplastics.

My point is that Cork is so laughably far away from making a meaningful dent.

It's orders of magnitude away from even taking out 1%.

Would be nice if we could invent a way to produce and 3D print cork in factories.

Like artificial “meats” there’s going to be a lot of artificial things in “printing” “cork” plain old plastics might be better.

I don’t know about printing but there’s various methods for liquifying and expanding cork. E.g. spray cork insulation and moldable cork ski boot liners.

> We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Any material looking to fulfill that demand will start from that position; why would anyone be producing the material if they didn't already have that market? Every new thing starts from zero; plastics were at zero too, at one time.

Cork has been in use by humans for 10,000 years...

It's not a new market.

That confuses the market with the product. Oil has been used for a long time too, but the modern oil market didn't exist until the last ~~150 years. If cork became a substitute for plastics, that would be a new market.

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