I would kill for this for when I’m buying fresh produce at the shops. Right now I just raw dog the produce into my basket as putting 4 apples into a plastic bag to ease the weighing and transport home seems like a selfish thing to do to the environment, but something that starts to break down soon after that sounds great.
cm2012 29 minutes ago [-]
People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.
tw04 16 minutes ago [-]
>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
rablackburn 11 minutes ago [-]
At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
positron26 21 minutes ago [-]
Can't imagine this survives napkin scrutiny. A ten mile drive isn't using nearly as much hydrocarbon mass as 10k plastic bags. While most of the plastic hopefully winds up in a landfill, most of the gasoline is water and carbon dioxide by the end. It's tires versus bags. While tires shed, the mass lost in 10min is definitely quite a bit lower than 10k bags or the fraction that escapes the waste pipeline.
latexr 3 hours ago [-]
Why don’t you bring plastic bags from home? They are very much reusable, you don’t have to throw them out. They are also quite easy to fold into small shapes and keep on you, or your car, or whatever. I have plastic bags which have endured for literal years. I also decided early on that if I forget to bring a bag, I either do without or have to go back to get one. You start remembering really fast after a few times of forcing yourself to go back.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
lstodd 1 hours ago [-]
This. HDPE lasts. So reuse it.
Cardboard not so much, but where I live one can just take how many boxes one can haul off various shops and they will just thank you.
ehnto 40 minutes ago [-]
You can bring your own, non-plastic bags. I do wonder if maybe some cultures just don't have this and so the deprecation of plastic bags has left everyone quite confused.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
geerlingguy 18 minutes ago [-]
Reusable shopping bags have been a thing for a long time, but I think for many, they never went back to them after stores banned them as a Covid mitigation.
ehnto 43 seconds ago [-]
Oh interesting, I don't think we had that ban where I live. We had many, many restrictions, but not that one.
nielsbot 4 hours ago [-]
I quit using bags for produce--I just put the produce in my basket or cart and then straight into the checkout bag on my way out of the store.
The exception is small loose produce like snap peas.
It's crazy, and how fast "glazed" became commonplace.
lunarboy 1 hours ago [-]
SAME. It kills me inside when people wrap things like fruits and potatoes in plastic that have natural peel they'll remove before eating anyways
ehnto 37 minutes ago [-]
Japan is wild for this, but also pretty good at recycling plastic in general.
Bananas are often wrapped individually for sale. You buy a box of biscuits and they're often individually wrapped in plastic etc.
gleenn 8 minutes ago [-]
Japan recycles but also a whole bunch of their waste is incinerated. I think they super-heat it to reduce emissions but guessing that also costs energy which also secondarily causes emissions.
sitharus 2 hours ago [-]
I've been doing that since before anyone cared, it just seems wasteful to use a bag for a handful of things. I use bags if I buy more than a few of something, or if it's something with dirt on like potatoes.
nerdponx 3 hours ago [-]
Bring a cloth bag to put the apples in after checkout.
ericmay 1 hours ago [-]
We have been using linen bags from Rough Linen and have been pretty happy with those.
weaksauce 4 hours ago [-]
the places around here are using compostable plastic bags. not sure what it's made of but it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag. one downside is they are green tinted and harder to see what is in there but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it... assuming it's not a plastic that degrades into microplastics.
mook 3 hours ago [-]
> it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
jfim 3 hours ago [-]
I'd assume those bags would be okay considering they break down after a few days of holding compostable materials, and frequently make a mess in the compost bin. The "compostable" cutlery is definitely not compostable under normal household situations though.
yellowapple 3 hours ago [-]
> See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
That really should be prosecuted for false advertising. Just because I can physically flush Orbeez down the toilet doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
My understanding is most manicipal compost facilities can handle them - the vast majority of manicipalities don't have a facility at all. They are expensive. A home pile won't compost them, a pile at manicipal size is likely a health hazzard and so not a good option.
throw101010 4 hours ago [-]
Most of these at least in my region are made from cornstarch. They decompose well/without "microplastics" but only under correct conditions.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
I think there's also "biodegradable" plastic which has cornstarch in it which allows bacteria to degrade it, but that's not the same thing?
ars 4 hours ago [-]
> but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
kjkjadksj 4 hours ago [-]
I just threw one of those into my compost pile last month and it’s still there. No clue how long it’s supposed to take.
weaksauce 3 hours ago [-]
yeah I mentioned municipal compost because they can get the compost temperature way higher than we can at home scale. It should break down in the big compost piles they have
vkou 4 hours ago [-]
Compostable plastics don't compost if you just throw them in a compost heap, you need to compost them in high-temperature conditions.
hedora 4 hours ago [-]
I’d guess paper would work fine for that purpose, except that it’s harder for the checkout person.
squigz 4 hours ago [-]
Why not use a fabric bag?
Either way good on you
koolala 3 hours ago [-]
Would be nice to have bags like that with their weight printed on them that machines trust.
bschwindHN 3 hours ago [-]
Where I live they have scales that tare at the beginning as part of the process of using your own bag.
koolala 2 hours ago [-]
Do you write down the result? How is the process connected? Smart produce scales log weight => Smart checkout scales compare weight to produce logs?
worthless-trash 56 minutes ago [-]
Write down -what- result.
You put the bag on the scale, it then sets this amount to 0.0
You put the product on the scale, (say 500g of apples), It shows 500g.
You remove the bag, it takes off 4g, you add the bag it puts on 4g.
There is no need to write down the result.
blamestross 4 hours ago [-]
Ironically i only use the produce bags to wrap raw chicken and beef in an entirely different section.
ars 4 hours ago [-]
The plastic bag also prolongs the life of the produce, which is the main reason I want it.
Wasting produce is much worse for the environment than wasting a bag. After all if you don't litter the bag, throwing it out is pretty harmless.
jay_kyburz 3 hours ago [-]
we use these fresh and crisp bags. They sound like a gimmick but they really do work. We reuse a bag for months until its full of holes and not doing its job well anymore.
It's a miraculous thing corporations have done convincing us that we're the ones polluting the environment.
polalavik 1 hours ago [-]
I grapple with this all the time. my wife is very eco-conscious and will scrub out a deeply moldy glass jar just to recycle it (whether the recycling system works is a separate issue here). On one hand there is some truth to the fact that if we all just work together to do the right thing the world is a much better place to live in. Sometimes i don't want to do this (scrub gross shit out) because i'm lazy, other times it feels futile. or maybe its just that the latter is a good excuse to be lazy.
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
parineum 28 minutes ago [-]
Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for.
The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them.
The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them.
If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.
milch 4 minutes ago [-]
Every person I know that works "back of the house" says the amount of plastic that you don't even see as a consumer is at least 10x of the final consumer packaging
exabrial 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah that’s the problem. Plastic solves a logistics problem, not a structural problem.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
loktarogar 5 hours ago [-]
It doesn't _only_ solve long-term logistical problems. Plastics are used for things like takeout containers, drink cups and straws, amongst others - things that are only needed for a short time.
PunchyHamster 5 hours ago [-]
All of those need to hold hot and wet things for long enough without contaminating them.
loktarogar 4 hours ago [-]
Agree, but I don't see any mention of that in the article, so I don't have enough information to argue for that.
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
lazide 4 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure 17 days is far too short for most serious uses.
kortilla 4 hours ago [-]
Who cares. If 50% of the usage is short term stuff like takeout, grocery bags, etc then this wipes out that waste.
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
If even 5% of the time it fails, no one will buy it for those purposes.
3 hours ago [-]
yellowapple 3 hours ago [-]
What contaminants would result from cellulose-based plastics like in the article? I'd guess probably things that'd at worst make the hot and wet thing taste bad, no?
exabrial 5 hours ago [-]
Is your shipment of drink containers stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a month? No problem! They’re plastic
loktarogar 4 hours ago [-]
My point is it doesn't have to be a complete solution to replacing plastic to be able to have some benefits to replacing some plastics.
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
exabrial 4 hours ago [-]
Bro I’m not agreeing with it, single use plastics are ridiculous. The failure in replacements continues to be what problems they solve for the supply chain.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
loktarogar 3 hours ago [-]
Again, not all replacements need to replace 100% or even 10% of plastic use to be able to have an a positive impact. There's space for a short-life plastic just like there's (currently) reasons for long-life plastics
kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago [-]
They used to make it work with waxed paper. There's no reason why that can't be used for a large proportion of food packaging again.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
I assume that anything sold today as waxed paper has plastic in on it, but I don't really know.
senthil_rajasek 4 hours ago [-]
I want my produce wrapped in this plastic not the forever plastic. Maybe the bio-degradable plastic has it's use cases for other special purpose packaging with a very short self life.
red369 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know much about this area at all, but it seems like it would be neat to have a plastic that stood up well to heat and moisture, but you could leave it soaking in some petrol/diesel/oil liquid, and it would melt into that and leave you with something still useable.
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
ars 4 hours ago [-]
> it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
Most disposable plastic is not PVC. Because Chlorine prolongs the life of the plastic, it's specifically used on things that you don't throw out.
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
Municipal waste has a large fraction of waste from demolished buildings which includes wood, concrete, bricks, all sorts of stuff. PVC is a significant part of that waste because it is used for siding, floors, etc.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
ars 2 hours ago [-]
How is PET not a hydrocarbon (for the purposes of burning it)? It's (C10 H8 O4)n the oxygen makes it not technically a hydrocarbon, but it will burn just fine and cleanly.
Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.
lstodd 47 minutes ago [-]
Hah.
We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.
That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.
kragen 19 minutes ago [-]
Environmentally speaking, shipping it off to a landfill would have been orders of magnitude better, releasing thousandths or millionths of the pollution that you released by burning it. Most polyester resins are aromatic, so incomplete combustion can produce a wide variety of quite toxic substances.
yellowapple 3 hours ago [-]
> It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
kortilla 4 hours ago [-]
How do these systems handle the extra crap on the plastic?
par1970 4 hours ago [-]
So do we already do this? And if not, why not?
ars 50 minutes ago [-]
We sure do, Sweden imports trash (actual trash, not recycling) because it's a huge part of their energy source.
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
lazide 4 hours ago [-]
Petrol is really quite harsh and includes cancerous chemicals like benzene in sizable quantities. It’s not something you can soak something in and then use to expose to food.
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
4 hours ago [-]
danpalmer 3 hours ago [-]
I already use cellulose based bags for my compost waste, and they only stay reliable for about 3 days of usage after something is put in them. This makes them a huge pain to use. I think they also degrade quite a bit (i.e. shorter lifespan in use) after just a few months because each new roll of bags seems better at the beginning.
dml2135 1 hours ago [-]
I found that using bags for compost isn’t really necessary at all. I just dump the container out each night and clean it along with my dishes. It’s nice this way because then nothing is ever actually rotting in my indoor trash.
Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.
jpalawaga 1 hours ago [-]
I put my bags + compost in the fridge freezer, which prevents smell and also prevents the bag from biodegrading before I can take it out.
I recommend this approach in general.
radium3d 33 minutes ago [-]
As an owner of 30 trees, mainly oak trees, why the heck don't we do this with leaves...? I throw away 3 bins FULL of leaves every week and I can't even keep up. They drop leaves year round.
kleton 5 hours ago [-]
The major innovation of this paper seems to be a rayon process that uses less harsh chemicals than the current viscose and lyocell processes.
gerdesj 4 hours ago [-]
This is a novel material with a set of properties and a production "story" that looks rather cool - recycled vines.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
seems comparable to LDPE which i think the common bags are made from.
55555 56 minutes ago [-]
If I’m not mistaken this is ecologically basically a paper bag that looks like a plastic bag. Remember when we all switched from paper bags to plastic bags to save the environment? The environmental issue isn’t plastic bags, it’s that you don’t reuse them.
yardstick 3 hours ago [-]
What about paper bags? In the UK retailers have to charge for single use plastic bags. Clothes retailers hand out strong paper bags for free, and charge for plastic.
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
3 hours ago [-]
user1999919 2 hours ago [-]
you could innovate to zero emissions but if the culture is hostile to it or angrily doesn't give a crap because 'culture' - then its worthless
AngryData 5 hours ago [-]
That is neat, but not breaking down quickly is why we use it so often and why we find it so useful. We already have and use a ton of cellophane, but stores and producers avoid it in favor of plastic because plastic doesn't meaningfully degrade in the store or warehouse even if climate control conditions are shitty.
cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago [-]
Vitis riparia (wild grapevine endemic to the whole eastern side of North America, grows like a weed all over extremely disease resistant and cold hardy) and hybrids with it also produce gum arabic from their spring pruning wounds: https://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2015/dec/grape/
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
quotemstr 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
542458 5 hours ago [-]
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.
DemocracyFTW2 5 hours ago [-]
> optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose
Cellophane is still used to refer to LDPE grocery bags in former soviet immigrant diaspora
hedora 4 hours ago [-]
Or movie / photographic film?
kragen 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
quotemstr 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rafram 5 hours ago [-]
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.
quotemstr 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Arch-TK 5 hours ago [-]
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 ;)
kulahan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
foota 5 hours ago [-]
So... what's the reason? :)
quotemstr 5 hours ago [-]
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.
hedora 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SubiculumCode 3 hours ago [-]
Biodegrades into what? Microplastics?
Havoc 3 hours ago [-]
Now just ship it before oil industry wakes up and lobbies this to death
rlue 5 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical that new materials like this will meaningfully drive down the demand for virgin plastic packaging. The problem is not just the absence of good alternatives; it's the fact that plastic is the fossil fuel industry's backup plan for the global transition to cleaner energy sources.
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
This is why I'm constantly asking: why aren't we planting vineyards in the Wasatch Front? Silicon Slopes didn't work out but can we at least farm some effing grapes?
wyre 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t know SLC very well but I’d guess it’s a combination of water consumption, and a bad value:land ratio because the wine won’t be good.
PaulHoule 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think there are good or bad wine growing regions as much as there are places where people have figured out how to make good wines. The Finger Lakes had a bad reputation once but people figured out Rieslings and some more affordable whites that reputation changed. More recently it was famous for soda-pop sweet wines like Red Cat but I've had some dry reds lately that weren't as bad as what I had 20 years ago.
Here in Oregon, vineyards and especially hop yards are being taken out, demand for alcohol overall is down, and same goes for the related tourism.
kulahan 5 hours ago [-]
Despite there being many great breweries in that region, most people shy away (initially) from a state run by a prohibition-style religion. Probably illogical, but definitely real in my experience.
userbinator 4 hours ago [-]
Great, just what we needed as companies are pushing even more aggressively for planned obsolescence. "Biodegradable" just means "self-destructs automatically so we can keep selling you more".
zrobotics 3 hours ago [-]
For plastic packaging that you immediately throw away? They aren't pitching making tools or car parts out of this plastic.
userbinator 3 hours ago [-]
Give it enough time and lack of opposition, and they'll... find a way.
Rendered at 03:43:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
Cardboard not so much, but where I live one can just take how many boxes one can haul off various shops and they will just thank you.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
The exception is small loose produce like snap peas.
https://www.target.com/p/lotus-original-reusable-produce-bag...
Bananas are often wrapped individually for sale. You buy a box of biscuits and they're often individually wrapped in plastic etc.
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
That really should be prosecuted for false advertising. Just because I can physically flush Orbeez down the toilet doesn't mean it's safe to do so.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingeo
I think there's also "biodegradable" plastic which has cornstarch in it which allows bacteria to degrade it, but that's not the same thing?
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
Either way good on you
You put the bag on the scale, it then sets this amount to 0.0
You put the product on the scale, (say 500g of apples), It shows 500g.
You remove the bag, it takes off 4g, you add the bag it puts on 4g.
There is no need to write down the result.
Wasting produce is much worse for the environment than wasting a bag. After all if you don't litter the bag, throwing it out is pretty harmless.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/2824/fresh...
I'd argue that even thinking about the idea of recycling and eco-conscious behavior is something only the already wealthy (with respect to the rest of the world) can do. There are plenty of developing nations where consumption and pollution run rampant and unchecked and unregulated which do tons more damage than me throwing 1 glass jar into a semi well managed landfill.
I mean theres just so many facets to this - does recycle work, does collective action work, or are corporations the real devils here doing much more bad than the collective at large?
i feel that the only way to change anything is through government level policy (which also feels futile), but individual actions do little without policy+propoganda to disseminate the right message and change collective behavior.
The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them.
The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them.
If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.
Are your Twinkies stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a week? No problem!
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
You can have local manufacturing processes so that it doesn't have to get stuck in a truck in Texas for a month.
And there'll still be uses for the long lived plastics. You don't have to use one plastic for everything - like we don't today.
Building a box that can last for centuries when you're only going to use it for 25 minutes and toss it is pretty wild if you think about it.
Unless you want to eat at Applebees, a small, locally sourced, organic, etc restaurant owner can’t conjure up a supply of biodegradable containers. But your local joint can order 5000 of them and keep them in a back room in less than ideal conditions for a year at minimal costs.
Not saying it’s right, just trying to draw attention to reality
As I write this, it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature. Perhaps there's something a little less far-fetched that people are working towards?
That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.
So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.
It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene
and even
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene
are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that. One reason we quit burning trash in many places is the presence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride
which produces HCl which eats the incinerator. [1] Sure you can build a chemically tougher incinerator and add lime but practically stripping toxins from incinerators is a function of building a stripper tuned to whatever toxins are expected to be in the particular waste and frequently adding something that reacts with them. You can't really "burn up" heavy metals and certain other poisons and those either go up the stack or are part of the ash that has to be disposed of.
A technology you hear about more than you hear about real implementations is "chemical recycling of plastics" through pyrolysis which implement more or less controlled combustion and captures petrochemical molecules that can be used either for fuel or to make plastics and other chemicals: these manage to capture or consume most of the products but some of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are produced when you burn plastic are practically drugs that cause cancer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
[1] Plenty of others contain oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate or nitrogen such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon
In any case incinerators can handle the chlorine - it's so reactive that it's actually very easy to filter.
> You can't really "burn up" heavy metals
There are no heavy metals in plastic, and very little in consumer waste as a whole.
> are "solid hydrocarbons" but most plastics are more complex than that
But those 3 you listed are the vast majority of the thrown out plastics.
In a consolidated municipal waste stream heavy metals are a concern because they concentrate in the ash which has to be carefully stored. This kind of system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
is supposed to encapsulate heavy metals into slag particles that aren't very mobile and can be incorporated into roads, building aggregates and such but people have struggled to make them work, part of it is that the syngas plant and whatever uses the syngas and cleans up the syngas and/or the products of using the syngas is a chemical factory that depends on the inputs having a certain composition and the composition of a municipal waste stream is not at all constant.
PET is a major thrown-out plastic that's not a hydrocarbon, it's also the most recycled. Polystyrene, funny enough, is easy to chemically recycle but not through pyrolysis, it's the sort of thing you might even demo in a high school chemistry class if styrene wasn't so carcinogenic. It's never caught on because expanded polystyrene is hard to handle, transport and bring back to a chemical factory large enough to efficiently consume.
Your point about building waste is valid, but I think most of that stuff goes in dumpsters and can be directed to a different wasting handling.
We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum.
That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.
In relation to directly burning oil for fuel, yeah. In relation to other disposal methods, there's still the pretty major downside of being dependent on a non-renewable resource, in addition to…
> (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)
Greenhouse gas emissions are still an issue, though, no? Or do the incinerators capture that?
A large amount of plastic recycling is burned, but always in secret, because when people find out they freak out, because they mistakenly think that making some new plastic out of it is somehow better.
Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.
Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.
I recommend this approach in general.
If those parameters meet the requirements for a material that you need to use then cool. Use it. I don't see any attributes in this article, which is fine but "stronger than ..." is a bit weak.
The biodegradeable thing is probably going to be key if this stuff can hold hot liquids without poisoning the imbiber or can make plackey bags without falling to bits within seconds.
> These films exhibit a transparency of 83.70–84.30% mm−1 and a tensile strength of 15.42–18.20 MPa. They biodegrade within 17 days in soil at 24% moisture content. These films demonstrate outstanding potential for food packaging applications. Our research approach of repurposing agricultural byproducts to create high-value products helps reduce plastic waste, conserve the environment, and provide economic benefits to farmers.
on the lower end of plastics but might be fine for this application: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/3-Tensile-strength-and-i...
seems comparable to LDPE which i think the common bags are made from.
Supermarkets charge for plastic bags. Paper bags for fruit and veg work well. They also provide quality reusable bags that cost a small amount (£1 or so), and people actually reuse them.
Combined with the high sugars in the fruit and this cellulose things, overall an extremely useful plant.
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?
You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
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.
> What useful research could we have funded instead?
This research seems useful enough to me.
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.
I think it’s a valid point.
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.
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.
That is: in preparation for a decrease in global demand for energy from fossil fuels, the industry is ramping up production of plastic to compensate so that it can maintain profitability (instead of, you know, just slowing down the extractive capitalism). Plastic production is set to triple over the next few decades as new facilities are built to support this transition.
(Source: Paraphrasing from my vague recollection of A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, and also articles like this one https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-production-pollution-foreca...)
People are making progress in Utah too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_wine