Not sure if that thing could be used as food packaging, since food has salt and water.
Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.
Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.
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.
> 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...
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...