Researchers invent 100% biodegradable 'barley plastic'
phys.org
phys.org
Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Very little barley is grown however in the state but I guess there could be if this proves to be competitive with regular plastic. In fact Northern Michigan which has too short a growing season for corn would be an ideal candidate.
No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.
Now everyone has reusable shopping bags they bring to the stores.
The bags are much more rugged than single use plastic bags or paper, and reuse is better than recycling.
However, I think shopping bags are probably not the intended market for this stuff, and the need is more to replace the plastic wrapping that covers food. There have been efforts here and in the UK to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place but there will continue to be places where we still need it for a while
California kinda screwed up by not mandating paper bags, or carving out an exception for them to promote their use.
[0]https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01... - page 14
In New Jersey the problem was grocery delivery companies. Like, yes, if I have a constant stream of any packaging I’m going to dispose of it.
In California, stores giving away free bags seems to have compounded the problem. Banning single-use plastic bags and adding a bag tax seems like the way to go.
That's what California did, and it failed. Nobody is "giving away free bags"...
PS: the best reusable shopping bag I have is a traditional Taiwanese shopping bag a friend brought from there. Light, beautiful, rugged, holds a lot of weight, seems indestructible. A pity they don't sell these here, I live in fear of losing it :D
Frequently the store staff have to double-bag everything with paper because the bags tear so easily. But when double-bagged I can get 5 or 10 uses out of them, which suggests that the bag just needs to be thicker to be highly reusable.
Do you live in California? Nevada? I bet it is somewhere hot and dry. Paper bags are not fun in the pacific northwest, or the north, or deep south ... basically anywhere with moisture in the air. Either you put them down in a puddle by accident, or you get snow on them and it melts in your car on the way home. Either way, the bottom will fall out the moment you pick them up.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c...
By estimated impact: cotton > paper > plastic, but more constructively:
> Ultimately, the single use of any bag is the worst possible choice. The key to reducing your environmental impact is to use whatever bags you have around the house as many times and in as many ways as possible.
By volume I throw away more diapers in a month than an entire lifetime of plastic bags. Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.
Why can't we fight both? Reducing both plastic bag pollution and "real" pollution seems better than just one or the other.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/...
Bottomline, it depends, but for most commons cases it seems worth it to reuse reusable plastic bags.
but you are correct about cloth bags, those are not worth it at all
Banning plastic bags in the US does absolutely nothing for the plastic bags clogging waterways in Asia.
Sometimes people think plastic recycling in the US is shipped to Asia where it ends up in waterways but that's not a thing either. It might get buried in a landfill there rather than recycled, but compressed pallets of plastic recycling aren't getting dumped into rivers. That's not a thing. The bags aren't flying away in the wind or something either. All the plastic clogging rivers -- that's all local consumer littering.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Convention
[1] https://www.invw.org/2022/04/18/rich-countries-are-illegally...
That leaves 35 million tons, and with only 5% being recycled, there's plenty of plastic left to go into 'rivers, oceans, everywhere'.
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-recycled-ju...
I permanently keep two or three in there.
The previous plastic bags may have been reused (ie for small garbage bags). Are consumers now just purchasing equivalent plastic bags for that purpose?
I think there are so many unanswered questions and the benefits can vary by region.
For the grocery store, we have a set of, I guess, 10 or so cloth bags we use. We've used the core set every week for over 12 years. Had a tailor stitch up a hole in one of them once, wash them every few months.
We have a large, cloth Target logo'd bag I stuff in the bottom. It's about 1.5x the size of the normal ones, if I put it on top they inevitably drag it out first and fill it with the milk, juice, bowling balls (both of them), cinder blocks and whatever else is super heavy that we happened to buy that day. "But it fits!" "Yea, and now it weight 50lb!" Couldn't stuff it with cotton balls, stuffed animals, and the Cool Whip.
So, yea, bottom of the bag it goes.
I know there are concerns with cloth, and we wrap notably meats in the light plastic bags to help contain contamination. It's not been a real problem.
We've just started (past few months) using reusable mesh bags for the produce, that's working out ok so far.
It's actually really simple to influence human behavior with pricing!
Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.
Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.
That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.
What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.
You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.
You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.
So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.
So, when you say
> So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic.
I think immediately of NJ's attempt to wrangle this problem.
> While the state’s ban — which, unlike those of other states, also prohibited single-use paper bags — led to a more than 60 percent decline in total bag volumes, it also had an unintended consequence: a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags.
> How this happened is no mystery.
> The massive increase in plastic consumption was driven by the popularity of heavy-duty polypropylene bags, which use about fifteen times more plastic than polyethylene plastic bags.
> “Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials,” the study explains. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”
https://fee.org/articles/new-jerseys-plastic-bag-ban-backfir...
I'm supportive of the goal, but I really do think that making laws that are simple solutions to complex problems really can backfire and be a net negative, so we need to think several steps ahead.
Again: textbook example of perfect being the enemy of good.
I completely disagree with your take. I've seen whole supermarket chains switch from single-use plastic bags to multi-use cardboard crates in their delivery services, and also to paper bags/containers. That's pretty much the definition of the ideal outcome.
So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.
I'm not seeing anything myself, and I cited no anecdotes. I cited a study that found plastic use went up after the ban.
I don't see why caring about plastic bags is mutual exclusive from caring about automobile free cities. I'm 40 and have never owned a car. I'm a big NotJustBikes and StrongTowns proponent. We can for sure debate car dependence and what policies we should advocate for. But this was an article about biodegradable plastics.
Montreal is shutting down a ton of streets every summer to make them walkable, and we've built out an extensive bike infrastructure. All great things! We could make public transportation free.
I don't understand why you insist that we need to solve the "real" problems of pollution before we dare think about other smaller, easier to solve problems. It's not like we're playing a video game where society only has a finite amount of elbow grease to apply to this set of issues. We can reduce plastic bag pollution while also working toward reducing the pollution from automobiles, tire wear, and whatever else you on your own high horse have deigned to be "real problems".
These are not conflicting goals.
"We" are not working on solving those other actual sources of pollution. We're just making people's lives worse. People think they've "done their part" by not using bags, when they haven't done shit.
The Aldi I usually go to has staff that are so ridiculously efficient that there are nearly zero empty boxes on the shelves, and the rolling "box cage" is nearly always tucked away somewhere unseen unless they're actively using it.
This isn't a complaint. It's a nice place to shop, and the stock is always very orderly compared to some other locations.
But GFS? They've got boxes at the checkout. I think the expectation is that the customer is supposed to box their own stuff, but they always do it for me if there isn't a line.
Their hardgoods tend to be tremendously high-quality for the price, too: Stuff is frequently ~half what I'd expect to pay elsewhere for something similar. Their buyers must be stellar.
It meant that when all other supermarkets stopped offering free plastic bags, most of the shopping populace was already used to keeping reusable bags in their cars or purses, so it was a pretty easy transition.
I agree things were easier when they delivered it in bags though.
Is this some sort of deranged lobbying scheme?
Bonus: the KLT system easily offers enough assistance to automated/mechanized handling that the box delivery task doesn't require humans.
Could probably easily have a portal crane style 4-wheel robot to drive the new box from the van to your door, drop it, and bring back an empty box you put out for it.
Well, something about curbs, but the stair dolly (big wheel made of 3 smaller wheels) style drive can probably cope with most.
Originally the KLT boxes were made to elide re-packing and manual box handling in the many-small-supplier-companies car industry of Germany. They differ from the more widely seen euro boxes by having molded features to allow a robot gripper to "plug" into any of the 6 sides of the cuboid and get a solid grasp of the box suitable for (re-)stacking them as long as their nominal load rating is adhered to. Also at least one, if space a short and a long side though, have a slot to hold a DIN A-series piece of (tick/heavy) paper describing the box contents, such that the box won't be contaminated with sticky tape residue.
When they're eventually broken from old age or abuse, they can be recycled cleanly because they are normed to be a pretty specific plastic and to (for interchange at least) be one of that colors (grey and a dark blue).
I have seen a local service, picnic, using a small urban-only electric truck (if not even a tricycle) who's back is just a 120 cm (plus tolerances plus door thing) wide shelf to be used with 40x60 cm euro boxes. If they were KLTs you could just put the box as-is in your pantry instead of doing the "dump onto kitchen table" tactic, I guess.
I don't think so. This is largely dependant on each grocery delivery service, but of you look at it the worst cases are actually just continuing business as usual,which is hardly a regression. In the meantime, some services managed to completely eliminate the use of plastic bags.
As an example, for the past year or so I had a groceries delivery service use their old plastic bags, but they also implemented a charge-back service where they pay you back when/if you return them in the following delivery. This is clearly an improvement. In the meantime I had competing supermarket chains completely switch away from single-use bags to alternatives such as reusable plastic crates and even reusable cardboard crates. Behemoths such as Amazon Fresh completely switched to a mix of paper bags, for example.
Can you cite where this is happening?
I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!
> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out
there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.
It's all about vibes with you people.
Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.
I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse.
IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.
Cents, not dollars, right?
Right, because a business will almost always take the cheapest option possible unless there is direct customer pushback. It turns out consumers are really bad about thinking about long term (think decades) consequences that don’t immediately provide negative feedback.
Which is why we have government, to protect society from risks that may happen over a longer period of time or fall out of their direct control. Think: the EPA.
> If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time.
More interested in learning to make it myself. Daughter and I have been extracting starch from potatoes, and we can reliably ferment to lactic acid. Distillation's trickier, and everything else after that's just bugshit crazy. Have to ferment M. hexanoica, it needs to be fed very specific nutrients to produce capryilic acid, extraction of that will be even more insane, and there seems to be no good source for tin in modern life. I've found a dozen tin scrapping videos on Youtube where you watch them and think to yourself "did they just screw around with soluble lead salts without even mentioning it?".
Also, I've had spontaneous combustion in our compost before. Maybe your compost game's just weak. Be sure to spread grass clippings until they're no longer deeper than about 3".
You want something that is just biodegradeable enough that it doesn't become a forever problem, but not biodegradeable enough that it mixes with food or becomes useless as a food container.
The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.
I buy mine from Costco and they easily last 2-3 days (the amount of time it usually takes for the pail inside my house to fill up). I take care not to dump wet items in, though not exhaustively so, e.g. coffee grounds are OK, sauce and liquids go down the drain.
Plastic Bags were banned here in Germany (Maybe EU?) so now you can get either Paper Bags or Plastic Bags made from recycled plastic water bottles. To be quite honest: The paper bags suck because they are fragile and the recycled bags are expensive.
Most people won’t shop enough in their life to pay back that organic cotton bag - reusing twice a week, it will take you 200 years before you break even.
1: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... - see section 6.3 for reuse numbers
In India and other countries where sugarcane is grown, people use bagasse (a byproduct of crushing sugarcane for making sugar) for various purposes.
Not using trees will only incentivize people to re-allocate land that was used for the cultivation of trees to the cultivation of something else that is higher demand, and thus profitable.
The only way that not using paper will save trees is if we stopped all forms of cultivation/farming.
Seems like it caught on in road deicer? I remember seeing ice melt sold with it up in ontario: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/01/beet-juice-deicer/
I feel like in the 80's when there was a big "paper kills trees" moral panic the plastic companies took advantage of that to market plastic, and paper companies started recycling their products and developing fast-growing pulpwood species to plantation farm sustainably. And now we could absolutely go back to paper with fewer ill effects. It's probably better for the planet because even if your paper bags end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch something will decompose them into their organic constituents very rapidly and they won't agglomerate into rocks on beaches somewhere.
Definitely a tricky thing to get right.
But the more I experiment with 3D printing, the more obvious it is that the problems include:
- separating this stuff out in the first place so that you know what can be composted
- parts fixed with non-biodegradable glues
- dyes, pigments, plasticisers that aren't biodegradable either
- difficulty reusing manufacturing waste
Industrial 3D printing is going to be a bigger and bigger part of our plastics use over time, because it enables products to be iterated long before you reach the kind of economy of scale that supports injection moulding. This also cuts down on waste; shocking amounts of plastic goes directly to landfill because of high-scale unsold inventory.
So a significant development would be actually improving the chances of reusing waste. But it's only a small part of that problem.
I love such things, but they need to be same or better on most if not all aspects than current ones, not in fashion: better for nature - check; but in these rather common situations they are much worse and can be actually hazard to humans - check.
I'd be more than willing to use a more degradable plastic for something that needs to get a chilled product from the meat department to my home.
Bottles don't carry themselves to solar-powered furnaces. If we assume that they did (and plastic oceans in the pacific demonstrate otherwise), then we could target the much-easier problem of making plastics that are stable when dumped in a landfill.
That way the lifespan of the contents wouldn't be limited by the bottle - minimising food waste - but we'd retain the ability to get rid of the bottle safely without huge landfills.
Depends on how much you dig I guess?
I wish.
That stuff doesn't biodegrade in natural conditions, only in commercial compost.
Just like sand goes through the whole process without breaking down.
and more all barely used.
how about we go back to what we used before single use plastic? waxed paper wrappers, small wicker punnet baskets for fruit burlap sacks for vegetables, infinitely recyclable glass and metal beverage container.
Of course they are way more expensive than buying a roll of plastic bags, but I bought them one by one and made plastic bags basically obsolete (other than for freezing bread, as that does not fit in my freezer containers) in my house hold over the course of a year or so. And I expect them, based on experience over the last year, to hold for at least another 2 years without needing to reapply the wax layer or buying new ones.
Also really annoying and impractical to, you know, actually use.
Want to fix plastic abuse? Find a way to get rid of third world satchets.
Barley used.
FTFY
The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.
I had a close relative admitted in hospital for 2 weeks and I saw them use and throw so much plastic like I have never seen before; think 100 gallon bucket of plastic. I am not discounting the benefits plastics have brought to medicine such as hygiene, but I am concerned its environmental impact.
I also understand that industrial plastic waste is probably an order of magnitude greater than that in medicine.
But I am curious what sort of test a biodegradable/sustainable plastic would need to stand for it to replace traditional plastics.
I don't think it'd be easily possible to easily replace plastic tubing, particularly the clear aspect.
I understand the benefit of not having plastic in landfills and not making it from fossil fuels! My question is "when could I depend on something using this plastic?"
In fact, most plastics don't actually do that well over time (some exceptions of course) and aren't that durable. Quite a few types of plastic degrade under UV light for example. Of course not enough to fully degrade but they become brittle, get ugly, etc. If it stayed in one piece and just sat there not changing, plastics would actually be less of an issue. The issue is that they do degrade and gradually turn into micro plastics. Which end up in animal and human tissue causing all sorts of issues.
Wood and other biodegradeable materials are available. Plenty of products already on the market, not just for cutlery but things like product packaging, too. Companies exist all over the planet, like BioPak from Australia, WoodAble from Chile, Sulapac from Finland, Hunufa Compostable from Vietnam, etc.
Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down. Most just use regular cheap plastic and some still use Styrofoam.
I think a bioplastic that actually biodegrades in average municipal landfills at a minimal cost markup vs current plastics, that say 40% of restaurants adopt voluntarily (or by regulation), will be more impactful than the boutique reusables we currently see but only at like one restaurant per thousand.
I don't ever see places like Walmart or Costco switching to wooden bowls, for example. But bioplastics that look and feel the same and only cost a few percentage more? Maybe. Especially if encouraged by local regulations, similar to plastic bag bans.
Restaurants can be perfectly sincere (and branding isn't incompatible with sincerity), but they have tight margins. It's their customers who really have the choice, and there are very few customers willing to pay extra for the eco stuff. It reminds me of this evergreen Onion article:
https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-...
Culturally, I don't think customers would accept a choice on the matter either, like I've never seen a place offer "you can have the plastic box for free, or buy the sustainable wooden one for $2". In lieu of that, I used to bring my own reusable tupperware to the restaurants for takeout, but got a looooooot of strange looks and comments about that. What I'd really love to see is more of a "borrow a tupperware, bring back a tupperware" model where they just loan you containers. I'd only ever seen that on college campuses, not in the real world.
Anyway, none of that is really the point. There's nothing wrong with fancy sustainable/reusable dishware, but something that's incrementally better and not much more costly than regular plastic is much more likely to see widespread adoption. I think the gradual phase-out of styrofoam to plastics is one such example, and cheap bioplastics of the less-biodegradable kind are more common now (though not everywhere), paperboard boxes with some wax paper/foil lining are popping up, some places are doing away with bottled plastic water in favor of water in milk-like cartons... gradual incrementalism seems to work better than revolutionary approaches in that industry.
Or, as you say, let people provide their own container. In any case, if you charge people for the externality you will likely end up with less of it.
In Sweden, the take-away food I tend to buy is always packed in a cardboard box or paper containers. Even the drink straws are cardboard in hamburger places. The drink cup is cardboard with some sort of biodegradeable (?) plastic surface inside. Basically all of that gets recycled into the cardboard bin.
Plastic food packaging is not so easy to find, at least in places I tend to visit. Even the dip sauces are packed in tiny cardboard containers. I guess some places still use styrofoam packs, but I have not visited those places in many years.
I don’t know quite how it’d work with this kind of plastic, but maybe someone will come up with an indicator or rule of thumb that helps. Like how you don’t eat food out of a dented tin can.
The trick will be producing a plastic that is stable enough for use but can break down once it is no longer needed. This would be useful to replace a lot of plastics that are not used long term and are used in dry environments. It probably would not be good to store liquids.
I would think places where wood is, or could reasonably be, employed might also work. Table top game tokens, for example. Uses where environment factors (rain, contact with the ground, etc.) typically aren't relevant.
> I think it's realistic that different prototypes in soft and hard packaging, such as trays, bottles and bags, will be developed within one to five years,"
It sounds like the environmental triggers for degradation are naturally occurring microbes.
I hope we keep supporting and funding these projects and solve the scale issue!
It might be a step backwards to consider cars single-use.
I'm not sure many people would be happy coming back to their car to open the door to a plastic blob on their floor.
If a material only biodegrades at 60 C, then it for practical purposes it doesn't biodegrade.
[Edit] And letting other people accrue all the debit. If you look at the plastic pollution that the west exports to the Carribbean, or the Far East for "recycling" it's fairly horrifying.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interacti...
Otherwise it'll just be another feel good eco-friendly fad that'll be adopted by wealthy people in California and fade into obscurity.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/AUTO/?uri=celex:5...
[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2022_396
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...
https://www.treehugger.com/pros-cons-corn-based-plastic-pla-...
As a person with an extreme gluten allergy, I freaked out and had to return it before even trying.
If any plastics manufacturers see this, and you use barley, wheat, or any other gluten containing material (like rye), please also include a "Certified Gluten Free" seal when your processing plant has been verified to be safe. Otherwise I can't use your product.
Wheat-based plastic is made from wheat straw, not wheat grains. The straw has no gluten to start with and it sure as hell doesn’t after the chemical treatment required to plasticize it.
There are some first studies which show that yes, some of those biodegradables do contain gluten and yes, they do contaminate their contents in doses that are above the threshold for a person with cealiac disease. The latest issue of the DZG magazine (German Cealiac Disease Society) reported on it.
Not to exaggerate, but there's a sort of low-key "trauma" associated with celiac. I used to have nightmares where I'd eat bread or something without realizing it (should I throw up? do people think I'm faking it? why didn't I remember to check if it has gluten?). There are these gluten-free burritos in the gluten-free section. The other day, I got one out of my freezer and only after opening the package and seeing the burrito was a bit browner than usual and thinking "is this spoiled?", then I thought "wait, is this not gluten-free?" and verifyied the package...didn't say gluten-free. Next time in the store, I found they have non-gluten-free burritos beside the gluten-free ones, in the freezer marked gluten-free.... They often do this in the gluten-free bread/etc aisle, too, right next to the gluten-free stuff. And recently they stopped adding green "gluten free" labels on the price tags which were handy when strolling down the aisles, so now I'm back in "turn every package around to check for allergens" mode. Anyway, just saying I understand OP's knee-jerk reaction.
Interesting times might be ahead actually. As the world moves away from meat and plastics (which is great, don’t get me wrong!), the glue-iness of gluten seems to play a central role.
There are the biodegradable plastics on the one side, which in contrast to their contents don’t need to be marked as containing gluten (at least in Germany and at least for now), and on the other side, 90% of the stuff I see in the „vegan replacements of originally-non-vegan food“ aisles are based on wheat; which isn’t a problem while it‘s only a partial slice of the market, but might get interesting for cealiacs if one day those products replace the originals completely.
Going off-topic almost never happens here, and I'm very sorry I went off-topic for such a trivial selfish reason.
The above source does continue: "...there can be a risk of ingesting airborne gluten, which is usually caused by flour. It is also important to remember not to prepare gluten-free foods in spaces where there is a risk of airborne gluten, as particles will settle on the food, making it unsafe for those with celiac disease to eat." [1] Perhaps you meant to imply something more in this line, that say the sawdust from cutting plywood could be a potential problem if food is nearby?
In the same spirit as your apology, let me apologize for assuming that your original advice was sarcastic commentary about people who are gluten-free rather than genuine though ill-informed advice.
[1] https://www.beyondceliac.org/gluten-free-diet/cross-contact/....
I heard that a researcher investigated many bioplastics and other better plastics and found that none of them improved on this issue. They did in fact face enmity when enquiring about the matter. I don't have a source for this unfortunately.
I'd be very interested to see if this barley plastic improves on the issue.
I don't find the name suitable because the most common types of bioplastics don't break down that easily if tossed into nature. The process can take many years and some of it continues to pollute as microplastic. Specialized facilities are needed to break down bioplastics. And even then, a very limited part of them can be recycled, with the rest ending up as waste," says the researcher. """
In China where you can get door to door delivery for a single cup of bubble tea that includes, a plastic cup, lid, straw, and spoon, plastic holder to keep the cup upright , thermal bag to keep the bubble tea cold , and another bag for the delivery guy to hand carry. It’s fucking bonkers the amount of waste they produce.
I think people should seriously ask themselves, if they are not for some form of deregulation in their own country, why are they fine with buying things produced without that regulation from other countries?
If USA and Europe banned all imports of goods produced in economies with lower regulation than theirs, then China's bad labour and environmental practices will become mostly inconsequential, as their production volume would be mostly inconsequential. Furthermore, if USA and Europe had reasonable domestic regulations, they would not need to buy so many goods from China to begin with.
Another way to think about it, the greatest beneficiary of environmental regulation in the west has not been the environment. It has been non-western countries where the regulation does not apply.
Germany shuts down their nuclear power plants, and as a result, you get war in Ukraine, and Germany anyway ends up buying nuclear power from France because it's become somewhat unfashionable for Germany to keep bankrolling Putin's aggression.
If we could get people to dispose of their waste in a landfill always and forever, this might work, but in practice people treat the world like an open sewer.
Totally ignoring the rights to safety people with severe gluten and nut allergies have.
We won’t tolerate this. We won’t stand for it.
People with life threatening allergies and potential to get injuries (crohns) will not allow this to become standard practice
Most labelled gluten free food is not gluten free. Its just under a specific threshold. It still makes many people very ill if they eat it.
They already do this in many sweets by using sugar from wheat because it’s cheaper to produce but it makes many people with gluten allergy extremely ill.
They separate out the sugar but it’s contaminated.
A single molecule of gluten or nuts from cross contamination can make people with these allergies very ill.
Wrapping all food in our society with this stuff will lead to great suffering and danger for many. At least initially until the problem is acknowledged and fixed like in the cases of asbestos, tobacco etc
I hate it with a fiery passion when environmentalism is disconnected from numbers.
For instance, take petrol-powered cars. It took building cemented roads, petrol stations, petrol distribution networks, supertankers, boats, trucks, car companies, refineries, etc. Cities are built for cars, with large roads while space is at a premium and could be used for something else. All that was 100x more expensive than horses and came with a new set of problems.
Another topic: plastic "feels" cheaper, but it's because some costs are not factored into the price, for instance in environment and health. I am not endorsing the following report, just citing it as an example of this idea: https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?3507866/These-costs-for-plas...
And the downside is twofold. First, there's actually a pretty decent correlation between how expensive something is and how harmful for the environment. If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive. The 1 cent plastic bag may be made from oil using energy from burning coal, but it's actually much cleaner because it used only a fraction of the man-hours. Whenever you hear claims that "it's a lot more expensive but it's green", the first guess is somebody didn't factor in everything.
The second downside is that bans are taking choice away. If you think there are negative externalities, and you have a good enough argument - by all means, tax those plastic bags until you compensate. If there are still objections to people buying the more expensive plastic bags, those objections are most likely ideological, not practical. Which yes, I still continue to hate with a fiery passion.
This style of energy accounting makes no sense to me. Humans are going to use up resources and create pollution, regardless of what their specific source of income happens to be. More artisanal cotton bags means less of something else, in some broad sense, but that says nothing about the environmental accounting of the other side of the margin. The ratio of workers making luxury goods vs. mass producing cheaper substitutes for those goods will have little to no bearing on how many humans happen to exist, birth rates are clearly dominated by other factors.
I want to share a podcast you may be interested in, because it's dicussing how to price nature from an economic perspective:
Pricing Nature is a limited-series podcast from the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Carbon Charge. It tells a story about the economics, politics, and history of carbon pricing, which many argue should play a critical role in any national climate policy. We feature conversations with carbon pricing experts from government, academia, and civil society. To learn more, visit our website, pricingnature.substack.com.
Single use plastic is destroying the environment.