Mechanically strong yet metabolizable plastic breaks down in seawater
science.org
science.org
So when they make takeout containers out of this it's going to be coated with... something. I am suspicious of all these coatings they're slapping on compostable food containers these days.
You've likely been eating or using food grade petroleum products your whole life.
Apparently soybean wax works well: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7435775/
Though not for hot foods. It'll only work up to 50°C.
People survive because it's not 50°C all the time in those hot places. And the wet bulb temperature is lower, so sweating works (just about) to regulate body temperature. Mostly air conditioning and shelter, though.
> According to a study recently published in Nature Medicine, more than 60 000 people died because of last year’s summer heatwaves across Europe.
It's not necessary for your home food storage to be able to survive temperatures that you can't. If it happens to the food in your home, it will happen to you too.
> no one can use any object in such a climate, because they'd die.
By the way, I know you can survive that heat because I did. No air conditioner. It was excruciating and I don’t wish it upon anyone. Well, maybe on climate change deniers, it would probably do them some good to suffer through it to believe the science. They probably wouldn’t but at least they wouldn’t be able to move to make it worse, either.
> More than 1,300 people died during this year's Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...
“In a locked vehicle, a dark dashboard, steering wheel or seat can often reach temperature ranges of 180 - 200 degrees F, which then warms the air trapped inside a vehicle.” 194F is 90C.
And that’s Florida, other parts of the globe have higher outdoor temperatures which result in higher internal temperatures.
Ever seen a car on fire? I have.
Ever seen a car on fire caused by heating from the sun? Well maybe not. But I have seen an egg get cooked on the roof of a car as a demonstration.
London isn't famous for hot weather, but that may change soon, and not because of global warming: The design of a new skyscraper in the city is melting cars and setting buildings on fire....
<https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-me...>
Only one of several examples. Also the Vdara hotel in the somewhat more probable location of Las Vegas, NV, the Nasher Sculpture Center and Museum Tower, both in Dallas, TX:
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-buildings-attack-...>
90C seems completely believable for hot climates.
Also leftovers are a thing.
Are you familiar with glass? Leftovers are a solved problem.
This is exactly what a lifestyle change looks like. I'm sorry, but there are exceedingly few such necessary changes which will introduce more convenience into your life. Most of them will be at an inconvenience.
Our problem was letting ourselves get conditioned into normalizing unsustainable habits. A large amount of plastic waste needs to be eliminated, and if you can't be bothered to bring your own leftover containers to a restaurant, maybe you should be getting smaller portions.
But yeah less takeout is an okay choice too. Like, I love the taste and texture of meat, I'm designed to, but I abstain from eating it because of the environmental and ethical impact of the global meat industry. It's a sacrifice, one I'm often ridiculed for down here in the Southern US as well.
Assuming I have a car. Let me just carry some glassware around with me on the train just in case.
Actually, all of this and you have a car? Talk about prioritizing convenience over long-term sustainability. Consider using public transit instead; this is exactly what a lifestyle change looks like.
1. I don't have a car, and I try to leverage buses, trains, etc. when I can. Or I just walk.
2. My current city, which I have recently moved back to temporarily, is notorious for its lack of walkability or adequate public transit. Not every city is like San Francisco. Many cities in the south are explicitly designed to make things difficult for poor people, and to segregate them.
My advice was for people who do have cars. If you don't, it is not difficult to carry something around in a bag if you regularly eat out and take home leftovers. I felt no need to be exhaustive, the advice is easily modifiable to other situations.
In your rushed attempt to paint me as a hypocrite, all you've done is get an egg on your face. It sounds like you're the one who needs to change your lifestyle, and be less presumptuous.
They're good enough for transport, though they do degrade pretty fast (they'll get leaky after a day or so).
Just like them labeling a container with a plastic lid as ‘biodegradable’.
I don't understand why our civilization has still not replaced almost everything with bamboo (though technically the bamboo is grass, not wood). It grows fast (and an order of magnitude better sink for CO2 than trees) and seems to be very usable as bamboo utensils demonstrate for example.
If we could unify enough to make collective demands about food packaging, and push for aggressive banning of most plastics in the food and retail industry, something might actually change.
Until then we can expect for things to get irreparably worse, as we trade immediate convenience for posterus generational suffering.
Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section. They can either be brave and take your poorly sanitized glass bioreactors, or just give you bleached and prepackaged salad in transparent dinosaur juice and forget about all what I'm saying. The latter is arguably the better option for basically everybody.
I've also worked on organic neighborhood farm, where people would come to our location, grab vegetables with their hands and place them into their own cloth bags. We used plastic for items that went on store shelves, but everything else we tried to avoid them. We delivered vegetables to restaurants in cardboard boxes (which probably had thin plastic linings on them).
Steps can be taken to massively reduce waste in food service; the problem is no one wants to change their lifestyle. They'd rather get takeout 3-10 times a week than visit a local organic farm or start/find a cooking co-op.
> Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section
I don't eat meat and my only real risk of E. coli is from storebought greens. It's a non-zero risk, and I would prefer to get my greens from a farm, but they are hard to find in my state. Our own organic farm was the constant target of police and DEA raids, as they were convinced we were drug-producing hippies. The state DEA agent spit on the driveway once and bragged about how confiscating and selling the farm would pay his salary for years. So there is a real challenge here, it's not just on us. It's also on our government officials.
Besides, we can make hemp plastics, biodegradable plastics, etc. But there's no money in that as long as cheap single-use plastic is pervasive in the industry. What I can say with certainty is our current way of doing things is irresponsibly unsustainable, and we are failing in our duties to consider posterity. I'm watching my generation turn into an even more entitled bunch than the baby boomers when it comes to convenience at the sake of posterity.
There is an increasing use of paper takeout containers. Awful.
> This approach can be extended to polysaccharide-based supramolecular plastics that are applicable for three-dimensional printing.
(So, they haven't done it yet, but are thinking about it.)
I want to go in the other direction, plastics that simply don't break down, ever. Plastic laundry baskets with handles that keep being handles. Slick looking rubbery objects that don't turn into a sticky mess. We never thought of plastics as a pollutant because we thought plastics wouldn't break down. Make it so.
This is their site: https://colorfabb.us/filaments/materials/pha-filaments
Really? I think that putting more nutrients in the water is almost as bad as having plastics floating around. The Baltic sea for example, have dead zones caused by agricultural runoff.
Surely, the best would be to not put more stuff in the water?
so if some major fraction of present production of that shit that shouldn't go in the water can be eliminated, and satisfied by an alternative that is not a persistent accumulating poison, i'll take it
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
Someone should send this link to Trump and Elon Musk so America and the EU can slap some actual serious and economy-breaking tariffs on those countries. I know that sounds snarky and drastic and funny and off-topic, but we seriously need actual serious politicians that just get shit done. We've tried the "reasonable politicians" approach so far, maybe it's time to bring in people that are unpalatable but actually willing to break shit and blockade some actual evil people and countries around the world in order to make positive change.
A lot of damage is done in the name of real problems, associated with high frustration, leveraged politically.
I do not think moderate quantities of nutrients are a problem, and very likely has benefits.
Agricultural runoff is mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, which are limiting factors (hence why we have to supplement them in agriculture).
In general, this particular stuff is significantly different.
The article mentions sodium hexametaphosphate [0] and guanidinium sulfate [1], which have phosphorous and nitrogen respectively. Those are both common in fertilizers and are implicated in algal blooms.
[0] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hexasodium-hexamet...
[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Guanidinium-sulpha...
However for existing plastics in general--mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen--it's less of an issue. Just because a material can be metabolized doesn't necessarily mean it's a rich source of energy, or that the chemicals in it will unlock some limiting-factor that was holding back a population-boom.
Just to prove it's possible, consider lignin, another C/H/O polymer and the core component of wood. It was ecologically un-digestible for a long time until something (fungi) evolved to dismantle it efficiently. Yet even now, its breakdown is a slow, low-margin process that occurs in the background.
____
Side note: The long delay between the evolution of trees and the evolution of something to eat wood has been suggested as a cause of coal formation, but it is disputed. [2]
[0] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hexasodium-hexamet...
[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Guanidinium-sulpha...
I don't know about the US, but in my country butter is packaged in waxed paper, which is fully biodegradable.
It's almost like we're going to have to reduce our consumption or something. Maybe we don't need 200 different kinds of cereal and 300 different kinds of coffee available every single day.
I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
Unlike different kinds of plastic, water is 100% recyclable and doesn't come from nasty petrochemicals in the first place.
Remember: "Reusable" containers also have an environmental cost. Each container will be used, on average, X times. Then it will break, or otherwise end its useful life, and end up in a landfill too.
Don't assume that a "reusable" container is better for the environment: My house is full of free, pristine, reusable water bottles that are gifts, souvenirs, ect. My kids go through about 2 reusable water bottles a year, each.
I think you're making a lot more assumptions than you think:
For example, glass vs glass: My single-use glass container may be recyclable, but the fancy glass reusable one isn't.
Aluminum: Aluminum cans are highly recyclable. Is your metal reusable water bottle recyclable?
Plastic: Ooooh, I won't go there.
Well maybe not at Whole Foods, I've never been in one, but at Walmart it's four wax-paper wrapped sticks in a cardboard box.
I don't think I've ever seen anything other than wax paper or foil, with only tubs of butter, rather than sticks, in plastic.
And removing them clearly didn't increase the price of sticks of butter by $5.
> Since EPA released its investigation, we have learned the disturbing fact that the fluorination of plastic is commonly used to treat hundreds of millions of polyethylene and polypropylene containers each year ranging from packaged food and consumer products that individuals buy to larger containers used by retailers such as restaurants to even larger drums used by manufacturers to store and transport fluids.
[1] https://blogs.edf.org/health/2021/07/07/beyond-paper-pfas/
- has to be affordable, or people will refuse to buy it. The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
- has to be at least as performant as what it's replacing, or people won't want to change. The general public is not going to buy an inferior product in the name of sustainability.
- has to be more environmentally friendly than what preceeded it, or it has no benefit.
If you can find a more environmentally friendly material that is able to replace plastic, achieve its physical properties, at the same cost, then patent it and you will be very wealthy. And will have outplayed the billions (probably a lowball) being dumped into this by governments, universities, and private companies around the world.
Also, the reason most of these articles hype their own work up is because the name of the game in academia is grant money. If a funding agency doesn't think your work is impactful, they'll give it to someone who is. That's why articles rarely describe their incremental work as just being incremental.
The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.
Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...
I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.
I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.
The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.
The number one economic role of government is mitigating externalities that arise from free trade, often through the restraint of that trade.
This is the "I know you're struggling but the economy is actually doing great" but applied to environmentalism.
Why not just pass a law requiring everyone to be good?
I also believe plastic and PFAS coatings are used in packaging largely because they are assumed to be the only suitable materials. However, in earlier times, there were many clever and cost-effective solutions.
I didn't think plastics are used because they are considered the only submittable suitable material, but they are definitely the cheapest and easiest to use. You cannot injection mold wood to be the exact shape and size with a snug fit for something you are packaging.
About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed.
Good guesses, but wrong as it happens.
The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900.
Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated.
Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>)
Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers.
I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently.
This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above:
"How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York. October 2003.
<https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NYTra...>
The NYT article above also confirms "ash cans".
More or less, yes, but I think it deserves more nuance. Most of the general public is stuck trying to make ends meet, and regard the environment as a problem to be solved by their government and rich corporations.
If you take away their plastic bags and straws, they will make do.
Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics. What justification do you have to go back to that? No one has one.
We need sustainable plastics production. Maybe from agricultural waste or something. Not a transition to a "Glass-and-steel Age". There's no way around that.
Really? And are the two things causally connected in the way you imply? In that period infant mortality was falling which has a dramatic effect on mean life expectancy but is probably not all that greatly affected by disposable plastics.
Also life expectancy in Norway was 72.8 years in 1950-1955. When, if ever, was it only 36.4 years? I'm quite that plastic packaging was rare or non-existent in Norway and the rest of Europe in the early 1950s and life expectancy is certainly not 145.6 years now that it is ubiquitous.