Swedish company launches bio-based plastic derived from forest residues | Hacker News Reader

Swedish company launches bio-based plastic derived from forest residues

packagingeurope.com

46 pointssharpshadow16 comments

Paper pulp production leaves lignin as by-product, at least for some processes. Otherwise it is burned as fuel.

Biodegradable plastic bags are made from this (I think) and they have been in stores for many years; for example in fruit/vegetables sections. They are noticeably "less good" than old-style PE bags.

Reading the article (which isn't that good) it seems that Lignin's goal isn't compostability but rather oil independence. On Lignin's site they say:

"RENOL® is proven to be very stable during recycling, keeping its properties during many recycling cycles. RENOL® slows down the breakdown of PE and ABS in recycling processes."

So I think they are looking more at a model of using a substance that is usually burned to make a plastic that can be reused and yes, as somebody else said, fill our ocean with more plastic.

It's a little hard to tell though, lignin.se has some dead links, which doesn't seem too smart for a product launch.

It looks like this is using lignin as the food stock to make traditional plastics like abs and friends. Super cool, but definitely not addressing bio persistence of those plastics

Removing reliance on oil for the creation of those plastics already sounds like a huge leap forward.

Not as good as finding an alternative to plastics all together, but certainly cutting down on drilling and dependence on oil countries. Who knows, maybe once BigOil is out of the picture, policy and solutions to microplastics would be more feasible.

It's also effectively carbon sequestration. Which often gets claimed for plastics, which are generally digging up fossil carbon so even best case scenario is break even, whereas this is carbon extracted from atmosphere by the tree.

Are you saying this new plastic will also clog up our oceans?

> Biodegradable plastics only biodegrade in specific environments and under certain conditions, often generated in industrial composting facilities.

https://scientificadvice.eu/wp-content/uploads/SAM_Summary-F...

Unfortunately, quite possibly. Bio-based plastics are not necessarily any more biodegradable than their fossil fuel based counterparts.

Aren't the plasticizing chemicals also more of a problem than the base material?

The plasticizing chemicals are largely the monomers of the polymers we consider plastics. So they’re not an additive but rather a fundamental monomer in these polymer chains. Eg bpa is per se the fundamental monomer of vanilla polycarbonate, along with vanilla epoxy chemistry.

The frustrating thing is that eg the bpa substitutes that are used in alternative polymer chemistry to create polycarbonate analogues are chemically similar to bpa and have very high probability of demonstrating similar health issues once relevant science / public health research is supported. Though basically every single plastic monomer has been demonstrated itself to be estrogenic in vitro studies. Even when limited to concentrations that would come from leaching via water or alcohols.

I'm kind of surprised that we haven't started integrating the spores of Pestalotiopsis Microspora into plastic products to break them down faster later. They could seal spores between two layers of a bioplastic, then have the non-bioplastic as an innermost layer to protect the bioplastic from liquids, and the outermost layer be a mix of plastics and bio-plastic. This way it will still degrade, but slowly, until degradation reaches the spore sandwich layers, which will then quickly degrade and inoculate the spores to begin growing and consume the rest of the outermost layer and begin degrading the innermost layer. This (in theory) should eliminate nearly all, if not actually all, of the plastics involved.

What's news about this? Aren't bioplastics based on lignin already a thing?

Sounds like their lignin based product is sturdier than the flimsy ones on the market; and they're looking to scale up consumer based uses in a big way.

I don't think there's anything considerably groundbreaking here besides the GTM angle.

What does this material look like? is it like mulch? Or more like moss? They mention lignin in the article, but that is part of the cellular structure of plants.

According to their website (https://www.lignin.se/news/2020/9/6/towards-more-sustainable...) they use a raw material called "Lineo" by Stora Enso.

And if you search for that you find https://www.storaenso.com/en/products/lignin/lineo Which includes a video of different forms of Lineo. Looks like a fine powder?

No mention of price compared to 'traditional' alternatives or simply (recycled) paper bags.

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