Japanese scientists create new plastic that dissolves in saltwater overnight
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782
More research from Takuzo Aida, which is quite impressive to read how they got there:
Also has stress-strain curves of the material, and behavior when used in glued together boxes for packaging.
Generally, if it actually gets made in quantity, seems like it would be an improvement for somewhere like Japan. Last time I read about Japan on this type of subject, it was examining the outlets of metropolitan streams, and the huge quantities of trash that people just wash down to the oceans. (Notably, from the perspective of considerate people trying to figure out ways to keep the beaches clean and deal with the upstream polluters).
Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.
> In this case, the team found that applying hydrophobic coatings prevented any early breaking down of the material. When you eventually want to dispose of it, a simple scratch on the surface was enough to let the saltwater back in, allowing the material to dissolve just as quickly as the non-coated sheets.
> Derivatives of parylene can be obtained by replacing hydrogen atoms on the phenyl ring or the aliphatic bridge by other functional groups. The most common of these variants is parylene C, which has one hydrogen atom in the aryl ring replaced by chlorine. [2]
https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/7...
At the same time, it’s these exact same properties of plastics which make them non-biodegradable and resistant to being broken down by the human body’s immune system and waste removal processes. The advantages we developed them for are also the disadvantages we’re trying to replace them for.
In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer. Something that’s indestructible while it’s in use but can be decomposed and recycled instantly with the push of a button. This is a paradox!
Things like sandwich containers/wrappers shouldn't even be plastic to begin with. A salad container should probably not have a lifespan of much more than a week or so. A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid.
I'd love to see more alternatives pop up in the short term, whether it's natural wax paper, banana leaves, hollowed out shells or gourds, some type of thin wood, etc. But plastic is just so cheap and ubiquitous it's a hard thing to convince a company to do.
As someone who once received a beverage in just such a disposable cup and then left it in my car overnight I have to say screw this idea.
Full Disclosure: I eat in my car.
Unfortunately, less toxic until its found that they aren't, like PFASs.
Glass would also be much more susceptible to storage temperatures. Liquids susceptible to temps below freezing could be bad for glass containers without enough room for contents expansion.
I wonder whether the coating itself is made from something terrible. In principle, though, there's your "push of a button": throw the plastic bottle in a trash compactor, break through the coating, now it dissolves in the sea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia
...and I hope by "we" you mean the owner and not the corporations pushing planned obsolescence aggressively, because that's exactly what they're going to do with things like this.
Before the invention of plastics we didn't have that. We had paper, metal, wood, and glass containers for food. They were either water susceptible (paper, wood, and metal) or expensive to manufacture and heavy (metal and glass) or even brittle and somewhat dangerous (glass but also metal with sharp edges).
We still use paper and some metal for a lot of food packaging today, but it's always mixed with plastic. Plastic bag inserts, plastic coating on paper packaging, plastic film to act as a barrier between the food and the paper, etc. Even the lowly paper coffee cup is coated with PTFE to make it waterproof!
Other glasses have much higher melting points than that, with fused silica melting at 2200C!
A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and is more impact resistant, we'd be halfway there.
Also, if we could easily melt down the plastic without degradation, that would be nice as well.
Also, if we could easily dissolve the plastic in a solvent that wasn't highly toxic. That would be great too.
Basically if we could make the containers out something that makes it easy to reshape and reuse, we could convince more people to collect most of the waste. It would be more valuable as an input to many different crafting or manufacturing processes.
But also, wood is kind of polymer, and chemical is pretty similar to plastic, and there are a lot of different kind of plastics out there, they are all pretty different, so it's a bit hard to generalize in this area.
Currently we put supermarket-made perishable salads in a plastic container, we wrap the container in plastic, we put a plastic strip lid on it, and we put the oil and nuts in two separate plastic wrappers inside the plastic container. That is ludicrous insanity for something that perishes in a couple of days max.
The product is coated in hydrophobic forever chemicals which protect the material ‘long enough’ before the core is compromised.
https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/7...
The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE.
Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.
I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.
It's encouraging to see smart people attacking this hard problem persistently, delivering new solutions, and inching us closer to a real breakthrough with each iteration.
I would understand if it reduces plastic pollution, but how could it reduce usage?
Creating a material in a lab is far from mass production and field testing.
They addressed that issue, it's in the article.
then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material
By analogy, we can imagine sheets of this material where nearly all the mass is the degradable plastic, and a thin film of coating is enough to preserve it adequately for its purpose in the product where it’s being used.
This will be perfect for IV bags!
It's really not the first time something game-changing has been invented, only for it not be heard of ever again.
Without fairness, there’s really no easy way to talk about strategy.
I don't get how this phrase has got ao much traction from the people who are in support of various social safety net programs that are specifically designed to benefit those who don't pay their fair share.
If you and I split a pizza and I pay for none but eat half, is that fair? Even if I'm poor and your rich, that's not fair.
It might be right, it might be good but it's certainly not fair.
In the context of politicians rallying their base, it's meant to insinuate the actual antithesis of it's normal meaning. Furthermore, it's a subjective word that means different things to different people so politicians can appeal to everyone's internal definition of fair, which is usually making everyone that makes more money than them pay more.
It's a political slogan. It adds nothing to the actual discourse but it does get people out to vote!
I guess the only "intentionally obtuse" part of my comment was the "I don't get how this phrase has got so much traction..." part.
The "ultra-wealthy" and "corporations" pay plenty of taxes, they just pay it significantly different than you do so that if you want to compare W2s, it looks wrong but that's another disingenuous tool to con you into voting.
It's chemically quite distant from traditional plastics.
The ocean may not care about some extra sodium and phosphorus... and then again, if we made enough, maybe it would... but I'll graciously assume for now it wouldn't, but the other places this would inevitably end up breaking down would probably not appreciate the resulting mess. I have to imagine any quantity of this in a fire near humans would be a fairly substantial problem of some sort. I don't know exactly what would pop out but it's got some awfully "exciting" feedstock going in to it with that sodium and phosphorus.
[1]: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#sectio...
The ultimate problem with these dissolving plastics is that they are still plastic after they dissolve, it's just that they are invisible microplastics instead of visible objects. They largely aren't captured at WWTP and end up in the water supply.
It's called paper. I've used paper products with a hydrophobic coating (which means plastic, consumers don't like wax coatings that much) for decades. They don't solve the problem, because the plastic coating still fills us with microplastics.
Maybe it cuts down on how much plastic is produced and thrown away, but we could have done this 20 years ago!
There's no conspiracy thwarting "game changing" research to maintain some status quo, though there ARE often political factions who push for maintenance of the status quo.
This is marketing. The people who write this stuff are marketers and they usually don't understand the research in the first place!
This is why, despite everyone insisting that there are hundreds of "This will revolutionize batteries" that everyone complains never materialize, we have actually seen them materialize as lithium batteries like doubling in capacity over a decade. The marketing material overpromised, though the research was fruitful.
Because it's marketing.
No, that's an AI image. Which is not itself a problem, but it's also useless garbage because neither the AI, nor the person generating it, appear to understand what is actually happening, and consequently the image is literally worse than useless. Image has what appear to be benzene rings, although the AI is clearly crossing that concept with neurons, but sodium hexametaphosphate has a fairly different shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate that I would expect an artist to pick up on... and of course the cross-contamination of the neuron concept is just wrong.
And even by strictly non-scientific standards, the ocean having two distinct surfaces, one below another, is just unsightly and obviously wrong. Alternatively, this plastic really does rip holes in the ocean's surface and directly expose The Murky Depths to the surface world in a geometrically anomalous manner, in which case for C'thulu's sake we should probably never manufacture this stuff in any quantity.
I won't go so far as to say AI image generation shouldn't be used here, but this is a nominally educational context. It needs to be screened by someone who can make sure it actually means something other than "you are a dummy who can't handle too much text in a single block so here's some bling to stab your dopamine receptors so you can bear the terrible drudgery of continuing to read".
[1] https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_...
Edit: If you can't get past the fact that AI image generators are not equivalent as an artistic medium to different types of paint, think of it this way: if I describe something to an artist and have them paint it, is the resulting image my impression because I prompted the artist, or is it the artist's impression of what I described? Clearly it's the artist's impression. So just because an "AI artist" prompts an AI app, that wouldn't make it the prompter's impression; it's still the AI app's impression. And an AI app's not an "artist" itself by virtue of being a computer program and not a human (as you yourself admit by attempting to liken it to a tool such as paint).
I just made a similar reply, but I disagree with this. The artist iterates with their prompts to the AI tool to get what they wanted. So when they stopped tweaking the prompt, they were satisfied with the result to be their impression
"Yes, but is it not the intent of the artist to be ignorant and lazy?"
It is possible to repeatedly iterate AI art gen and get what you want, but that's not what happened here. And even so, it's not at all the same thing as drawing a picture: "iterating on what you want" is equivalent to curating art, not creating it. In the US you can copyright curation and that extends to curation of AI art - the US Copyright Office correctly said that tweaking prompts is the same thing as tweaking a Google Images search string for online image curation. But you can't copyright the actual AI-gen pictures, they are automatically public domain (unless they infringe someone else's copyright).
The US Copyright Office has, in fact, granted at least one copyright registration for an image created with the use of AI generation.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
No, it doesn't. It describes artwork done on Invokeai, one of the popular hosted web frontends for Stable Diffusion (and some similar models), with a process very much like what many AI art hobbyists use (whether with hosted frontends or locally-hostable ones like A1111, Forge, ComfyUI, or Fooocus.)
I think it's best if I log off and ignore your replies.
Stable Diffusion is a series of models, not a service. There are various services (including the first-party Stable Assistant service from StabilityAI) and self-hosted frontends that use the models, most of which (including Stable Assistant) support considerably more interaction than simple text-to-image.
Is that actually true? What I’ve read is that AI can’t be credited with the copyright.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copy...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-copyright-office...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...
See the other reply for a half-counterexample, but the major difference is the specific software is more like generative PhotoShop, and the final image involved a lot of manual human work. Simply tweaking a prompt is not enough - again you can get copyright for curation, just not the images."
Of course AI can't be credited with copyright - neither can a random-character generator, even if it monkeys its way into a masterpiece. You need legal standing to sue or be sued in order to hold copyright.
Yeah the intern is now an "artist" but I think lumping them together is muddling the discussion.
But after I’ve iterated with them N times, fixing their various misunderstandings of my impression, eventually the PM’s impression impact approaches zero, and it’s clearly representative solely of my impression.
Sufficient iterations and prompts against the model, and you can’t really say it’s the AI’s fault the result is erroneous. The first pass, sure, but not the 100th.
Except I guess in the aspects where you can’t fix the PM’s/AI’s understanding. Then you could say their impression isn’t fully removable
So your example makes no sense.
The question is whether their understanding still contributes to the end product, not who does the mechanical action of entering data or drawing images.
Because nothing of consequence can be done in a single pass.
The number of passes/reviews is directly tied to error rate. If the PM/AI is able to produce my impression at 100% success, then great, there’s no further work to do.
The only thing learning matters for is with sufficient learning, they might reach a state where they no longer need to be reviewed, because they’ve sufficiently learned to not inject their own interpretation of things into it. They are now a straightforward extension of my own being, and have generated their documents as I would have done (had I the requisite mechanical time/skill/interest for producing whatever is in question).
Both terms are acceptable to use; this argument is fundamentally about how lazy you should assume these users to be. So argue about that directly.
I'm not a materials scientist so I can't comment on this specific topic but based on my experience with pop science reporting errors and misinformation often come in multiples. The author has a "Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing". RIKEN's press release is already written for a general audience and in English, so there isn't a good reason not to read the original source instead.
where are we disagreeing?
If the point was purely aesthetics, maybe they could at least use Midjourney or that new Ghibli style transfer thing instead of what looks about as good as old Dall-E? It's ugly. If the point was to convey information, they could have done that better with a 30-second pencil sketch, which would have also taken less effort than the AI-generated thing.
The people using this stuff want plausible deniability. If there's a problem with the slop, the computer did it, not me.
Screening it is contrary to that, so they won't do it.
It actually very much looks like the kind of ads for chemical companies you see in Japanese airports. (A funny contrast to the UK, which has decided it doesn't need to have an economy anymore so literally every ad in the London subway is for a musical.)
What's your source for that assertion? The image has AI-isms and is suspiciously similar to a much less AI-looking image that someone else in the thread linked to in a PDF regarding the research. You can say it looks like a human could've done it, but that's not any less "winning an argument in your own head" unless you've got evidence of what human drew that image.
At most the bubbles could be, but I think they're just stock art.
You need to tune your detectors.
And the neural net crossover is just wrong. Really, really wrong.
This is nominally educational content. Any way in which it is wrong is something that people can and will pick up on and form incorrect assumptions about which they will carry forward. It's not enough that it is vaguely sort of, if we're generous, isn't entirely wrong. That's not the bar for human work either.