Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> grapevine

The headline is practically a demonic summoning ritual for the naturalistic fallacy. The article is talking about cellulose. We've had cellulose forever. Cellulose is dirt cheap. We are a post-cellulose-scarcity civilization. Extracting it from grapevines ought to be mocked as our century's version of bringing coal to Newcastle.

There's a reason we don't use cellulose packaging for everything and it has nothing to do with grapes.

Hint: moisture exists in the world. Biodegrading in 17 days usually means that it breaks down a lot sooner in conditions we care about.

> Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

What useful research could we have funded instead?

View on HN

The argument, which doesn't seem insane, is that this film is useful because it is particularly optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose. I agree 17 days is too short, but that seems like an interesting opportunity for future research. I would highlight that the number is 17 days when buried in wet soil, not sitting around on a shelf. Cardboard will break down when buried in wet soil, yet we use it extensively in packaging without issue.

> which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose

You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?

Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.

We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.

> optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose

You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane

Or movie / photographic film?

That's cellulose acetate, though (or, previously, nitrate.) Cellophane is just cellulose. It's like the difference between drinkable ethanol and ethyl-acetate nail polish remover, or between morphine and heroin. Clearly related but significantly different substances.

Cellophane is still used to refer to LDPE grocery bags in former soviet immigrant diaspora

Yeah I know this usage from older people when I was a kid, they referred to any clear thin wrapping as cellophane where to me it was just plastic. My father told me that cigarette packs are kind-of environmentally friendly because they are made up of nothing but paper, tobacco obviously, cellulose acetate for the filters, and cellophane for the wrapper. Recently I got interested into whether they still use cellophane instead of plastic, so I did some * * * science * * * by dunking a wrapper in water (and yes, it did soak up some water) and burning some (it burns cleanly like paper with grey ashes, unlike plastic which stinks and leaves behind hard black tar). So apart from the printing colors, it looks bio-degradable, with the other reservation being that especially the filters will spend a really long time underground before becoming integrated.

The article explains why grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.

> What useful research could we have funded instead?

This research seems useful enough to me.

> grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.

We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.

State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.

Another day has come around here since, I've slept over this argument, and I still find it genuinely anti-scientific and smug. As for the coals to Newcastle, did you know that there are steam engines that want to be fed particular types of coal, not any type, to run well (I think I learned that from YouTuber Cruise the Cut)? So there's a point to made that sometimes bringing coals to Newcastle is exactly what you want. Other than that we need much more research in all kinds of cyclic processes that we can utilize to make our activities more sustainable. Right now much too much material is on a one-way trip to the landfill or the incinerator, and how to continue mining and farming is solely left as an exercise to the future reader, with no hind- or foresight, at all. Traditionally people used all kinds of wrappings and containers, many of them suboptimal from a modern POV which we now have replaced with all kinds of plastic which is littering the planet, land and water alike. A solution will not be simple or easy, but if cellulose from grapevine can be part of it, that's probably a good thing.

You know, I'm sure if biodiesel/bioethanol can be a thing, then extracting cellulose from grapevine can make it too. It's just a matter of marketing it correctly ;)

The point is that it’s like finding research into how to acquire air. It’s everywhere - just go collect some. Who needs this?

I think it’s a valid point.

So... what's the reason? :)

We don't have a good mechanism for waterproofing cellulose without various complicated industrial processes. Finding a way to do that would be interesting research.

But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.

Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.

IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.

In fairness, those industrial waste streams are mostly produced by “recycling” facilities for consumer waste.

The whole plastic straw thing is nuts. The old waxed paper straws were fine. The new “paper” straws are coated in PFAS and way worse for your health and the environment than most alternatives.

This article reminds me of that. Cellulose isn’t a new technology, but, like wax paper straws, it’s apparently forgotten arcane knowledge.

It's interesting to me that you think the point of greatest effectiveness is exactly where I'd say realistically all hope is lost, the oceans being so vast of a surface and volume. This is end-of-pipe thinking where I believe we should really start at one of the many points earlier in the process: industrial consumption of materials and industrial waste management are such points, and as you say protection of waterways from pollution. Given how lousy mankind has proven to be when it comes to collecting and effectively re-using plastic waste while avoiding concomitant pollution of water and air and material down-cycling, the real mistake lies in the sheer enormous tonnage-per-year and its growth of plastic. This volume of production should have never happened in the first place. But of course it has so there's a place for ocean cleanup efforts. But to state that "the best investment [...] would be automatic cleanup mechanisms" while denigrating research efforts to produce better plastic-ersatz to me sounds like futuristic techno-boondoggle-babble, not unlike that crazy 'hyperloop' thing. Automatic ocean cleanup robots! Yaay! LA to NY in under 30 minutes! Yaay! Colonies on Mars! Yaa---wait wot?? People can't even cleanup after themselves or avoid throwing their trash into the next river, but no problem, we'll clean that up in no time AUTOMATICALLY?? C'mon give me a break.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com