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Comment by nonelog | Hacker News Reader

> Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast.

They addressed that issue, it's in the article.

I don't think they really did? A single scratch to cause it to break down doesn't seem like it would really be a scalable solution for any kind of mass produced material like this. Would cause chaos if any individual container went bad in a shipment, so it's not really addressed I feel. OP's concerns still stand.

The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application, and identifying applications that are tolerant to failure of the plastic or not exposed to salt water.

>The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application

then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material

If the hydrophobic material has different properties than the plastic, they can complement each other. For example, soda cans have an inner coating that eliminates a soda pop-aluminum interface, preserving flavor and protecting the structural integrity of the can.

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.

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