Transparency isn't the reason we use so much plastic. We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products. Or it will stick around in various components without needing to worry about rain and such.
What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
Let's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
What are paper packs? I can't think of anything that could be qualified of "paper pack" and be currently in use as a replacement for a "plastic container".
I know I don't want to use paper BAGS because they break super easily when carrying goods but that doesn't seem to be what the article is talking about.
That's not entirely true. I throw away a lot of cardboard packaging with a plastic window glued into it. Obviously this can't replace all plastic, but it can certainly replace some.
Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
Curiously, a lot of tape is made from "cellophane", which is chemically similar to paper. The windows on envelopes are typically made from it. Not sure about cardboard boxes but you can make cellophane pretty strong.
Nobody likes plastic because it lasts "thousands of years". People care about storing food products well. If we can do that without lasting thousands of years that seems like a pretty good win.
Good at storing food products and lasting thousands of years are very closely related.
The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree.
The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point.
I haven’t really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I didn’t really use to do that previously anyways, but now I don’t even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect them in a separate bag.
> That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
Or that governments care enough to create laws and incentives for people to collect it.
Besides, there are many places that don't have as much plastic as others in their environment, so clearly it's possible to avoid in some way. Have to figure out how and why, but I'm guessing the researchers kind of feel like that's outside the scope of their research.
THere’s a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit isn’t lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesn’t need to either.
The plastic doesn't need to last for thousands of years for our actual use, but the properties that make it last for thousands of years are also what make it desirable for our use: fully waterproof, impermeability to microbes, etc.
Yep, plastic has a lot of benefits. But I genuinely don't think the translucency is that much of a selling point. If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
We would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why don’t we have plastic that degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.
Until the last coal fired power plant is decommissioned, the rational way to "recycle" plastic is to burn it. There's you're "not common trigger:" the temperature in a coal furnace.
Currently, plastic packaging is measured in the tens of millions of tons per year, while coal is measured in the billions of tons.
No, burning it is not "rational", it is the very opposite. We talk so much of carbon sequestration, and then "rationally" try to release all of the already-sequestered carbon back in the atmosphere.
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products.
We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
Reading the thread so far I feel everyone one is missing the biggest reason why plastic. Not to negate the technical uses and requirements mentioned especially yours, which are incredibly important…
And of course that reason is economic.
Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating.
At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs.
Regarding that lifecycle:
I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
Singular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute.
In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
There isn't one replacement for plastic. Hence also we can't expect every single replacement to address every single use of plastic. Transparent paper is fine.
We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.
Sometimes. Its plasticity of use means that we use it for for a lot of single-use products. The Clive Thompson Wired article I’m reading right now starts with “a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.” Of course, the problem is that it’s optimized for cost sans externalities.
The article is unclear on what this actually is. Pure cellulose? Cellulose acetate? Cellulose based plastics have been around for a century, but making them is apparently too expensive for packaging. [1] Is this new stuff cheaper to make?
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
Glass. You are talking about glass. It is re-usable and recycle-able. It just has the unfortunate property that if you break it, the resulting shards will slice people up pretty badly, so it is far less safe for transport logistics. Not to mention heavy.
Ideal would be a material that has all the properties, but biodegrades after a reasonable period (what is reasonable depends on the usecase of course).
We use plastic for a wide range of reasons depending on the application & one of them is transparency. The alternative in the case tends to be glass which ticks a lot of your boxes (rain proof, etc.) but is heavy & brittle.
It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
Also something that doesn't slowly poison you over time like what plastics (microplastics) do with microplastics. There's almost no way to get rid of those from our body except breastfeeding, but in that case, it's actually even worse, since usually people don't breastfeed for fun.
Exactly. The specific properties that make plastic useful in industry are the exact same properties that make it an ecological problem. You cannot realistically replace plastic without first accepting an inferior product, trying to make an equally good product will lead you to a new ecologically problematic product.
People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything.
The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.
I have a hard time using "balanced" and Roman in the same sentence.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
The viscose process used to produce cellophane is highly toxic. The lyocell process is safer because the chemicals used are less volatile. But both require a lot of fine chemicals (carbon disulfide or N-methylmorpholine oxide or, recently, 1,5-diazabicyclo[4.3.0]non-5-enium acetate). This is why cellophane is typically used in small amounts and rayon likewise.
By contrast, lithium bromide is a stable salt and is basically as cheap as the elements used to produce it, so it can be easily scaled up and recycled.
"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."
It’s funny how we’ve all just become desensitized to the idea that some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean and rather than work on that problem, we work on creating better garbage.
> some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean
And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.
Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.
If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.
> Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the ocean
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
The Ocean Cleanup is probably the most impressive and inspiring humanitarian / climate endeavor around right now. Been following them for a long time, their PR is really good. Actually showing the places before and after, showing the trash they take out, explaining how the tech works, being transparent about the struggles and whatnot. Really, really well orchestrated, I always feel a spark of hope after I see something from them.
> Its really hard to change people without using threats or force.
People change all the time. We are much different than ~10 years ago, before the rise of the far-right in the West. We are much different than 100 years ago.
People get much more exercise, eat healthier, are better educated ... so much as changed. Another new thing is people love to embrace nihilism rather than hope and progress - almost nobody embraces the latter these days.
“some countries” is doing a lot of heavy work to say “basically the Philippines”, which is a gigantic outlier in output per capita and just also absolute volume. China and India produce quite a bit, but not compared to how many humans they have.
My mom’s been helping out at a small local shop, and they’ve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didn’t hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
I think that degradation of plastic is the larger concern. Storage of garbage is generally an overstated concern, while microplastic pollution clearly show the threat of plastics that break into millions of tiny pieces.[1] Stable plastics that last pose so many fewer problems when it comes to pollutants.
It would be incredible if they could make plastic that didn't break down. But given the history of plastics, I would have to be very convinced that whatever they do to it isn't making it terribly toxic in ways that we don't measure. I would rather ditch plastics for better materials than have to check that yet another new acronym isn't in my water bottle.
Eh, I think we just overshot our goals by 100x. We could settle on a plastic that degrades into harmless dust after 10 years, but no less (nor anymore than 100). That's good enough to keep going with all of it.
Not a surprise given how everything in Japan is wrapped in plastic. Loved everything about visiting the place that was far ahead of the US except for this.
Apparently the total mass of plastic used in wrapping the same volume of goods is lower in japan than in other countries (using more bags, less hard shell packaging).
In Japan individual crackers are typically wrapped in plastic inside the package, possibly due to the high humidity, possibly for social reasons (or both). Gift packets of for example chocolate also always use individually packed pieces. In the grocery store, if you buy plastic-wrapped on-styrofoam fish or meat and some other foodstuff, the cashier will always put this in an additional plastic bag.
Eggs are packed in plastic (in my home country that would be cardboard).
And so on and so forth. We bring our own bags,typically, but there's just so much plastic..
This product seems to solve for a lot of things that have nothing to do with why we use plastic. Plastic is everywhere because it is durable & cheap, that's about it got 80% of applications. This misses the mark even more for the other 20% that cares about things like caustic resistance.
An expensive non-durable product will never replace it. It's nonsensical to say it's as durable as plastic, I assume that's referring to tensile strength, which is not the main property industry cares about. They want a material that will keep their product protected for months or years, it being able to lift a similar amount of weight is irrelevant when you're wrapping bread.
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What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
Or "plastic".
"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
I know I don't want to use paper BAGS because they break super easily when carrying goods but that doesn't seem to be what the article is talking about.
Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree.
The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
I haven’t really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I didn’t really use to do that previously anyways, but now I don’t even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect them in a separate bag.
I’d say it’s all about some sort of an incentive.
Or that governments care enough to create laws and incentives for people to collect it.
Besides, there are many places that don't have as much plastic as others in their environment, so clearly it's possible to avoid in some way. Have to figure out how and why, but I'm guessing the researchers kind of feel like that's outside the scope of their research.
Currently, plastic packaging is measured in the tens of millions of tons per year, while coal is measured in the billions of tons.
We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
Most fruit only lasts 1-2 weeks and comes in plastic trays, wrapped in plastic film that last hundreds of years after
And of course that reason is economic.
Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating. At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs.
Regarding that lifecycle: I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
Depends on the type of plastic used.
Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.
This sounds like something that'd be very cheap and flexible. I've drunk out of plenty of paper cups before.
So maybe this is a transparent paper cup. Which is possibly useful somewhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
Glass. You are talking about glass. It is re-usable and recycle-able. It just has the unfortunate property that if you break it, the resulting shards will slice people up pretty badly, so it is far less safe for transport logistics. Not to mention heavy.
It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions
You mean like a "forever chemical"?
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People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything.
The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
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If we had plastic that is not transparent and biodegraded in a year, it would be perfectly fine, as it would cover almost all food packaging cases.
But, unfortunately, we use plastics for everything these days. I saw even some cars are now made of plastic (Bezos's Slate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celluloid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads2426
Apparently they wanted to create a material that:
1. is transparent,
2. can be made thick enough,
3. and is purely cellulose-based.
Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
I think it's Glassine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate dates back to the 19th century; tough enough to be used for films and eyeglass frames.
Production involves some chems: "cellulose [pulp] is reacted with acetic acid and acetic anhydride in the presence of sulfuric acid."
Acetic anhydride is restricted in some countries because it's used in making heroin.
If only AI/LLM can summarize most research papers like this correctly and intuitively I think most people will pay good money for it, I know I would.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
Just curious whether I'm missing some connection.
By contrast, lithium bromide is a stable salt and is basically as cheap as the elements used to produce it, so it can be easily scaled up and recycled.
And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.
Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.
If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/industrialised-countries-are...
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
[0] https://theoceancleanup.com/
People change all the time. We are much different than ~10 years ago, before the rise of the far-right in the West. We are much different than 100 years ago.
People get much more exercise, eat healthier, are better educated ... so much as changed. Another new thing is people love to embrace nihilism rather than hope and progress - almost nobody embraces the latter these days.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? I’d love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Video on this, as well as how much is used as incinerator fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6WogV6UEg
This product seems to solve for a lot of things that have nothing to do with why we use plastic. Plastic is everywhere because it is durable & cheap, that's about it got 80% of applications. This misses the mark even more for the other 20% that cares about things like caustic resistance.
An expensive non-durable product will never replace it. It's nonsensical to say it's as durable as plastic, I assume that's referring to tensile strength, which is not the main property industry cares about. They want a material that will keep their product protected for months or years, it being able to lift a similar amount of weight is irrelevant when you're wrapping bread.