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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Researchers develop âtransparent paperâ as alternative to plastics
Beijinger wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
Are plastics killing us? - by Ugo Bardi - The Seneca Effect
URI [1]: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/are-plastics-killing-us
NotAnOtter wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
Low carbon emissions, but what about cost?
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.
yoko888 wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
I used to reduce plastic mainly for environmental reasons now I find
myself doing it for health too.
The more I learn about microplastics and chemical leaching, the more I
realize how much plastic interacts with our bodies, not just the
planet. Especially when heat, oil, or acid are involved like in cooking
or packaging hot foods it's hard not to think twice.
I'm not saying we should panic, but I do think it's worth reframing:
health and sustainability aren't separate concerns here. They're
intertwined.
Even if alternatives like âtransparent paperâ aren't perfect, they
might still offer meaningful gains for both the environment and our
bodies. And for many people, that might be what tips the scale.
leereeves wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
I'm concerned about microplastics too, but I think on the whole
plastics have been good for health. Any harm microplastics may cause
must be rather small if it hasn't been identified yet, and easily
outweighed by the benefits of reducing spoilage and pathogen growth.
constantcrying wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
I don't remember how often I have seen basically this exact same story.
"Material X is going to replace plastics" is not a new story.
Every time they have failed to replace plastics, because it is
extremely hard to match all of the great qualities of the common
plastic varieties. Since plastics are so common people underestimate
what a great materials they really are.
7speter wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
Wow, I was just wondering about this yesterday! I had read about how
some researchers made a sort of glass out of wood and wondered if they
could make resilient bottles for beverages out of a sort of maybe
polymerized paper.
hereme888 wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
Even if it doesn't replace all use-cases for plastics, it seems like it
can replace lots of throw-away plastic products. That alone would be
good progress.
I don't mind cellulose shopping bags, straws, throwaway cups, plates,
utensils, etc.
Leo-thorne wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
My momâs been helping out at a small local shop, and theyâve 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 didnât 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? Iâd love to hear
how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or
anything sensitive to moisture.
wolfi1 wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
I can't help it, sounds to me like cellophane.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
Huxley1 wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
My momâs been helping out at a small local shop, and theyâve 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 didnât 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? Iâd love to hear
how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or
anything sensitive to moisture.
smolder wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
I would like you to qualify "didn't hold up well". Can you explain
how? Can we get more detail?
smolder wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
Transparent paper is kind of an old idea. Whether it is commercially
viable is the important question.
junon wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
From TFA it says it's only about 3x as expensive as normal paper
packaging, just needs a factory. Implies that at least some people
believe it's viable.
smolder wrote 16 hours 42 min ago:
Plastics and other oil-derivative, crucial materials should be the main
use of crude oil and methane, not energy. Save the oil to make things
that don't have an easy replacement. Replace oil burning with solar,
wind, nuclear, etc., and use the underground reserve of hydrocarbons
for noble causes like medecine, or for the type of investments that add
to the net good for our species.
ekianjo wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Since this comes from Japan before trying to convert people to use
transparent paper that has half the carbon footprint of plastic, why
not reducing the massive packaging waste in Japan where everything is
packed into 10 layers of plastic for no good reason?
oddmiral wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
In recent news: Japanese scientists produce plastic which dissolves
in seawater within 2 hours.
bosky101 wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Kudos, about time, Exciting news.
fastball wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
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.
amelius wrote 47 min ago:
There's a lot of food in plastic that will expire long before any
plastic/paper will biodegrade.
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all
under most human living conditions
You mean like a "forever chemical"?
codingdave wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
> 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.
NotAnOtter wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
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.
wizardforhire wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
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 importantâ¦
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 weâre
all worried about the lifecycle costs.
Regarding that lifecycle:
Iâm 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 isnât 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.
jkestner wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
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 Iâm
reading right now starts with âa plastic bag might be the most
overengineered object in history.â Of course, the problem is that
itâs optimized for cost sans externalities.
dragontamer wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
This is cellulose, which is for many practical purposes just paper.
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.
Animats wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
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?
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
Zigurd wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
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.
tsimionescu wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
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.
hollerith wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
If the plastic to be burned substitutes for coal or oil, it is
carbon neutral. Isn't that what the Scandinavian countries do
with their trash as an alternative to landfilling it?
Not burning the plastic risks its turning into microplastics,
which will tend to interfere with the physiology of all plants
and animals.
tsimionescu wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
It's not carbon neutral, it still adds to the problem. We need
to replace our carbon emitting power generation with renewable
energy, not burn our trash to keep emitting the same. And trash
can just be buried, it doesn't need to be burned.
There's a lot of talk generally of running carbon sequestration
technologies and how important that will be. Burying plastic
waste is exactly doing that, without spending the extra power
to actually extract the carbon from the air.
Zigurd wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
It won't make a significant difference compared to burning coal.
tsimionescu wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
That's like nicking a vein while you have a arterial hemmohrage
- sure, it won't make a big difference, but it also doesn't
help in any way. We need to stop burning coal, oil, and methane
- and replacing any of them with plastic would not be helpful
in the least.
az09mugen wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
You mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A
sea-water dissolving plastic :
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...
atoav wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
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).
3cats-in-a-coat wrote 13 hours 35 min ago:
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.
littlestymaar wrote 14 hours 20 min ago:
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.
_ink_ wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
> 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.
diggan wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
> 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.
KronisLV wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
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 havenât really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I
didnât really use to do that previously anyways, but now I
donât even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect
them in a separate bag.
Iâd say itâs all about some sort of an incentive.
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
Also, in bigger cities(Oslo in my case), even if you throw
empties in public trash cans, they get fished out by various
types of poor people who walk around all day collecting them.
Though I tend to leave them next to the trashcan as long as it's
not too windy, just as a nice gesture to the less fortunate. Or,
often you'll see one of them as you finish your drink and you
just hand them the bottle. Of course, I'd prefer a society where
people didn't need to do this to get their next fix or meal or
whatever it is, but it is sort of neat that utrash sorting can
just naturally emerge in a society once the trash is imbued with
monetary value.
One wonders why we don't do this with larger categories of
garbage that needs to be sorted. I suppose bottles and cans are
fairly easy to semi-automate given their fairly standardised
shapes. But that just feels like an implementation detail.
Hnrobert42 wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
In the poorer districts of Ho Chi Minh City, like Q4, Go Vap,
etc, it is similar yet different. Each evening, folks set their
garbage bags directly on the curb. At night, other people rip
open the bags and scatter the trash in the street looking for
anything salvageable. Finally, around midnight, city employees
walk the streets pushing wheeled bins and sweep up the trash.
When it rains, the trash is carried to clog drains, causing
large-scale flooding.
Not a great system for many reasons, not least of which is
relying on truly poor people. But they are remarkably efficient
at extracting value from the waste stream.
Automated recyclable separation is hard and fascinating.
Magnets for ferrous metals. Something about non-ferrous metal
and eddy currents for aluminum. Infrared cameras and mechanical
arms to detect and separate types of plastics. Blower systems
to extract paper. Tumblers with various sized holes (like those
coin counting machines) for other separation. (Source: Not that
great. I just watched a few Youtubes.)
padjo wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
Yep same scheme started in Ireland recently, just a transplant of
the German system it seems. Some people complain but it has
massively reduced waste and litter.
extraduder_ire wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Ireland's had a tax on plastic shopping bags for years, which
basically eliminated them as a form of litter. The bottle
deposit scheme is doubly clever by making collected litter have
an actual cash value, don't think it would have worked without
that.
diggan wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
> 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.
AKA "Container-deposit legislation" (or "Pant" as we call it in
Sweden and maybe also Germany?). Seems to work very well, and you
also have a ton of people collecting cans that others throw in
the environment, as they'll get money for it.
Kind of wish we had it here in Spain too, as the environment and
the sea ends up with a lot of cans and glass bottles. Seems like
such an obvious idea to have nationwide.
pineaux wrote 5 hours 1 min ago:
"Statiegeld" in the netherlands. It already exists for at least
as long as I live.
junon wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
Pfand in Germany, yes.
raphman wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
Yeah, in Germany pretty much all cans and bottles require a
deposit (single-use plastic bottles: 0.25 â¬) and every shop
selling cans/bottles with deposit is required to take them and
similar bottles back.
Most supermarkets have a reverse vending machine that take cans
and bottles, crushes single-use ones, and returns a voucher for
the deposit.
Some videos of these machines in action (not sure whether there
are people on HN who have never seen one):
- [1] - [2] -
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWqwu63eTPQ
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlfDavzHq7I
URI [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozVpMDDawnw
lucideer wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
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.
cbmuser wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
»We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.«
Depends on the type of plastic used.
Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging
and itâs biodegradable.
LoveMortuus wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
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.
cbmuser wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
No one was ever harmed by incorporating plastics. And id your body
canât make any use if it, it will leave your body through the
digestive system.
iamflimflam1 wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
Sadly thatâs not the case: [1] [2] Etc⦠just google
microplastics.
URI [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
URI [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819327/
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 16 hours 14 min ago:
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years.
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.
dyauspitr wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
We would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten
years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why donât we have plastic that
degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.
paulmooreparks wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
A use case is already stated in the article:
"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."
bccdee wrote 17 hours 50 min ago:
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.
ghushn3 wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
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.
constantcrying wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
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.
Ray20 wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
The problem with plastic is not that nothing can be done with it
after disposal, the problem with plastic is that it harms the
environment during use.
There is no problem with the fact that a plastic bag does not
deteriorate for thousands of years after use: you just throw it
in the trash, and it lies in a pile of garbage for thousands of
years, absolutely harmless and with a near-zero impact on the
environment (because the areas of garbage dumps are tiny both
relative to the environment and relative to other human impacts
on the environment)
Propaganda about the harm of plastic bags is designed for
complete idiots, whose idiocy borders on a clinical diagnosis.
The real problem is with other products of plastic, which break
down while in use, polluting the water and air with
microparticles.
Car tires, synthetic fabrics, paints and paint coatings and
various exterior finishes, sidings and so on. All of this, even
with the slightest wear, whether from mechanics or ultraviolet
radiation, pollutes the environment throughout the entire use.
Against this problem, plastic bags are completely harmless even
if we start using them ten times more and throwing them away ten
times more often. And this problem cannot be solved by changing
the method of disposal or recycling. Only by stopping the use.
The fight against plastic bags and all this stuff about recycling
plastic is literally a joke how drunk man searching for something
under the streetlight that he lost somewhere else in the park.
Only he searches for it at someone else's expense, actively
spending the allocated funds on alcohol and large-scale media
projects on the need and importance of the search under the
streetlight
cbmuser wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
Have you ever heard of Cellophane?
namibj wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
Aka rayon (but foil not fiber).
fastball wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207115
2muchcoffeeman wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
THereâs a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something
like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit
isnât lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesnât need
to either.
fastball wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
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.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 16 hours 12 min ago:
Yeah but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those
properties. It's not even the case that all those properties are
necessary for all actual cases of their use.
thaumasiotes wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
> but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those
properties
Yes, it is. Lasting for thousands of years is the same thing as
(1) impermeability to microbes (mold / insects / etc...) plus
(2) failure to react with local chemicals. Those two things are
the things we want, and if you have them both, you last for
thousands of years, because there's nothing to stop you from
doing that.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
Correlation is still not causation, so since pollution is a
real problem we need to keep researching alternatives
thaumasiotes wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
> Correlation is still not causation
Um, a stitch in time saves nine.
Are you just typing random words?
fastball wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
Which material has all the useful properties of plastic and
doesn't last for an inconvenient amount of time?
benrutter wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
I think the answer to this question (with emphasis on "all")
is clearly none that we know of. Plastic is really hundreds
of different polymers, each with different priperties and
uses.
If a new material can take the place of some of those, that's
a win. We don't need to replace plastic wholesale with a
single new thing, there's no rule against using multiple
targeted materials, we've just got used to material science
being all about one material for recent history.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
There are many uses of plastic that can be easily replaced
with cornstarch, bamboo, or leaves. Food packaging can be
with aluminum or glass, granted those last thousands of years
too but the point is theyâre more easily recyclable and we
can make a circular economy around them.
jibal wrote 17 hours 7 min ago:
You're just repeating yourself, while ignoring that your sweeping
generalization has already been refuted.
fastball wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
I don't think so. I was clarifying my point which seemed
misunderstood by 2muchcoffeeman and didn't contain much of a
sweeping generalization (more a statement of fact about the
nature of plastic).
Gigachad wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
Thereâs quite a lot of packaging thatâs mostly cardboard but with
a transparent plastic window to see the product.
MyPasswordSucks wrote 19 hours 30 min ago:
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.
card_zero wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
> super-easy to mold
Or "plastic".
dpacmittal wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
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.
andrepd wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a
few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly.
Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it,
then it looks cheap.
Ray20 wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
Disposing not cost that much. Plastic disposing is CHEAPER than
it's production.
bell-cot wrote 10 hours 9 min ago:
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly
a social thing.
If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send
cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed
for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid
litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really
drive up the disposal cost.
tsimionescu wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
Note that burning plastic is one of the worse things you
could do with it - probably even worse then it ending up in
the ocean. Global warming is the single biggest threat to our
current civilization, and, for all its faults, plastic traps
carbon. Burning it releases it back in the atmosphere, where
it does far more damage then if you just bury it.
bell-cot wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
In a world where one 787 (full of tourists?) burns 5 tons
of fuel per hour, and one big container ship (full of stuff
outsourced to where labor is cheap and environmental
regulations are pretend?) burns 120 tons of fuel per day,
I'd figure that "but plastic traps carbon" is 99.997%
performative pretend environmentalism.
tsimionescu wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
The goal is to reach net 0 carbon emissions. We can at
least theoretically power some of these things with
renewable electricity. We can't replace plastic with any
otheratetial in many uses - so finding a way to dispose
of plastic waste while staying at net 0 emissions (if we
ever get there) is going to mean that burning it is not a
solution.
bell-cot wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
The goal is get every last drop of unwanted water out
of the Titanic. We can at least theoretically spread
heavy canvas over some the huge gash in the bow, so you
are focusing on a leaky water cooler in the stern.
tsimionescu wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
No, I'm just saying that we shouldn't start taking
buckets and pouring more water in. The default
behavior is to store garbage in landfills. Let's
leave it like that, rather than burning it to produce
even more CO2.
smolder wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't
represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics
that we consider such a great and long lasting material so
disposable.
BurningFrog wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
We produce uncountable billions of plastic bags. What
specifically is the huge cost?
ben_w wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
Environmental. Those billions of not degrading bags end up in
places that harm the ecosystem.
BurningFrog wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
I think they overwhelmingly end up in landfills, where they
have no material effect on any ecosystem.
I'm no chemist, but they don't really react chemically with
anything in nature, as I understand it.
I know it feels dirty and unnatural that they just lie
there, but in practical terms I don't think they do any
substantial harm.
ben_w wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
"Overwhelmingly" may be correct everywhere, or it may be
limited to just developed nations â I visited Nairobi a
decade ago, and that city varies wildly from "this is
very nice" to "this slum appears to have been built on a
landfill and the ground is accidentally paved with
plastic that was repeatedly trodden into the dirt".
However, even in developed nations, the quantity is large
enough that the remainder is an observable issue: around
the same time as my visit to Nairobi, 10 years ago, the
UK introduced a minimum price for plastic bags (then 5p,
increased in 2021 to 10p), to reduce bag usage, because
it's just so easy to just not care enough about free
things to make sure they end up in landfill (or
recycling):
URI [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/singl...
hollerith wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Most plastic breaks down into microscopic pieces, which
get everywhere including in the human brain in alarming
amounts. They get into the human body through food and
water.
You haven't seen any reports about this? "Microplastics"
does not ring any bells?
>[plastic bags] don't really react chemically with
anything in nature
Almost no one denies that "forever chemicals" are toxic
to humans even in tiny concentrations even though they
are very much chemically inert. By "forever chemicals" I
refer to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (used
in the production of Teflon, Gore-Tex, etc) or more
precisely the chemically-stable compounds into which they
break down. Just like forever chemicals, microplastics
bioaccumulate.
card_zero wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
By what mechanism are PFAs harmful to health? Is it
because they are not, in fact, chemically inert? Or
else how.
ben_w wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
Nothing made of atoms is truly chemically inert, not
even noble gases. It's just more or less reactive,
and when/how.
But even if it was literally un-reactive, sometimes
it's enough to just be in the way. Imagine folding a
protein, or assembling a structure of RNA origami*,
but some big lump of un-reactive molecule is in the
middle â the ultimate shape is different, leading
to different biochemical results. Grit in the gears.
Or even just heavy: deuterium is chemically identical
to hydrogen, but still has a lethal concentration**
because it is twice the mass.
* [1] ** Replacing 50% of the hydrogen in a
multicellular organism with deuterium is generally
lethal, unless this is a widely believed myth that's
about to get a bunch of debunking
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_origami
yread wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
Collecting, sorting and burning is not that expensive
tsimionescu wrote 7 hours 7 min ago:
Burning is much worse than burying plastic - as it releases
much of its mass as CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, and
likely other pollutants as well.
infogulch wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Burn it with plasma gasification to reduce it to the simple
molecules to eliminate all the pollutants. CO2 is a much
smaller and easier to manage problem than plastic waste.
nick__m wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Incomplete combustion is much worse, no question there. But
burning in facility design for that is really clean.
Climate change won't destroy life on earth, the very worst
case according to the IPCC is a billion death by 2099 but
nature won't care. Sure some species will disappears but
looking at bikini atol, 40 to 50 years after the disaster
the remaining one will fill back the newly open ecological
niche and the intense genetic pressure will assure that
they will eventually diversify.
Since we don't know about the effects microplastics
accumulation long term effect, the worst case is that at
that there exists some threshold that make higher life form
impossible, maybe that threshold doesn't exist but maybe it
does. Since humanity won't stop using something so usefull,
without plastic millions of peoples would die every year
from cause like food poisoning and lack of medical advanced
medical care, so cleanly burning the plastic is the ethical
choice. As grim as it sounds preventing the possible death
of everything is better than preventing a billion death.
And note that I don't suggest that we ignore the 3R, we
should still reduce and re-use the plastic and recycle the
kind that are truly recyclable but between the landfill and
energy producing plastic incinerator, the ethical chois is
clear.
tsimionescu wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
I didn't say destroy life, I said destroy our
civilization. With current global warmig trends,
countries like Bangladesh will be rendered virtually
uninhabitable by the end of century, leading to gigantic
mass migrations that will likely lead to wars and other
issues.
BurningFrog wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
For CO2 purposes it's no different than burning oil. You
can burn trash to generate electricity too.
At 5 grams per bag it's also hard to get any real volume of
the emissions.
One of my pet theories is that we vastly overestimate the
environmentally impact of things we personally touch.
People lose sleep over their single use Starbucks cups,
while things many orders of magnitude worse happen out of
sight.
tsimionescu wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
I'm just saying that plastic waste shouldn't be burned,
regardless of how much or little we produce.
ddoeth wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
In 2021 there were 51 Million tons of plastic waste
produced in the US [0], which is about 150kg per person.
Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per
person and year, definitely not insignificant.
I'm not saying that big corporations are not responsible
for a huge chunk of the emissions, but getting away from
using so much plastic is not hurting.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1339439/plas...
BurningFrog wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I
am) talking about plastic bags.
I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.
> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2
per person and year, definitely not insignificant.
Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately
13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75
ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags
even affect the last decimal of that number.
Tronno wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
How can burning 150 kg of mass create 750 kg of mass?
jmb99 wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
The oxygen is not contained in the 150kg of plastic,
itâs pulled out of the atmosphere. Youâre
actually âburningâ substantially more than 150kg
if you include all the reactants.
bornfreddy wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Burning takes oxygen from the air so it makes sense
that the released mass would be higher. Every 12g of
C is tied to 32g of O to get CO2. However I would
expect the number to be around 500kg (quick
calculation) max.
lmpdev wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
This is probably the most important comment ITT
The tricky part is how do we even begin to model that with a
somewhat comprehensible parameter? Without near perfect
traceability across all nations in the world, we can only use
sledgehammer methods like a âplastic taxâ - which youâll
find very difficult to pass outside of more developed
jurisdictions like the EU
ozim wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
I think few cents do represent it. Production alone per piece
is more like really small fraction of a cent.
pineaux wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
Came here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs
somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would
factor in the impact on the environment it would probably
cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic
bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
Ray20 wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
I think still less than a cent. I mean you just put plastic
bag in a garbage pile, and that's it. Near-zero utilization
costs with near-zero impact on the environment.
jplrssn wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
If it were that easy there wouldn't be a garbage patch
the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.
algorias wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
This is a problem with the (lack of) environmental laws
in many countries. All things considered, landfills are
really cheap.
tsimionescu wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
That consists to a great extent of maritime generated
garbage - plastic fishing nets and plastic thrown off
of vessels, and of course lots of "recycled" plastic
that was being shipped to China and ended up dumped in
the middle of the ocean.
Ray20 wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Putting your trash in a local garbage dump is EASIER
and CHEAPER than putting it in the garbage patch in the
Pacific, so stop doing that right now.
zulu-inuoe wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
Incorrect. If I throw my plastic bags out on the road
it's much easier. It'll find its way to the Pacific
eventually
grufkork wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking
out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or
mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
mjevans wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Plastic likes:
'waterproof' (fluid proof for many things)
Difficult to shatter (drop safe-ish)
Shows stuff off 'nicely'
Priced inexpensively (damage to the commons is not factored in...)
fastball wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
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.
masklinn wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
> 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.
- any sort of housing window and display protection, I have at
least half a dozen within easy reach not including actual
computer displays
- transparent food packaging is important to both identify the
product and ascertain its state (especially at the store e.g.
berries)
- viewing liquid levels at a glance is extremely useful
verelo wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
Itâs almost like we just gave up on making glass less breakable
when we found plastic
nine_k wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
A plastic bottle is not just less breakable. It's also way
lighter weight than glass, and harder to dent and pierce than
aluminum.
thaumasiotes wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
More importantly, and unlike glass, if you do break plastic,
it's not dangerous.
cma wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
Also needs to be robust to salt and acid, aluminum cans have a
plastic lining.
kyriakos wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
Part of the reason that a lot of drinks in aluminium have
short shelf life. Acidity eventually makes aluminium leak
into the drink.
saagarjha wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
On a very long timeline, sure
Henchman21 wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
I'm haunted by a story I read once, about East German beer
glasses that were unbreakable. They developed them because of a
serious shortage of raw materials as I recall. I would be happy
to buy two dozen and pass them on to my family when I die. But
that's the problem, isn't it? The lack of sales. Just ask Pyrex,
I guess?
bnc319 wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173177
Henchman21 wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
Aha! I'd forgotten where I'd read it, but it makes sense it
was here. Thank you!
JumpCrisscross wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
âThe paper sheets become transparent because they are packed tightly
with nanometer-scale (one 1-billionth of a meter) fibers. The
concentration of these fibers allows light to pass straight through the
sheets without experiencing diffusion.â
How do they orient them?
ExMachina73 wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
Still holding out for transparent aluminum.
jarretc wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
So like sapphire (Al2O3) :)
speedylight wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
We need a new class of materials that have plastic like properties but
donât take thousands of years to degrade or are impossible to
recycle.
1970-01-01 wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
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.
stavros wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
But then your bottles would fall apart on the shelf because they
degraded enough to get a hole in them.
jjulius wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
Oh well, at least the planet and its inhabitants would likely be
better off.
saagarjha wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Sure, but talk to anyone about paper straws and you will probably
see the issue with this.
jjulius wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
What, that we're collectively unable to deal with relatively
minor and innocuous inconveniences for the sake of the planet
(setting aside whether or not straws are actually a huge deal)?
That in spite of all the progress humans have made, we're
somehow unable just take the lid off and drink out of a cup
without pitching a fit?
junon wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
I'll take slightly annoying plastic straw over millions of
particles of plastic poisoning me, any day of the week.
malux85 wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
Surely there's a gap that could be the sweet spot between
"thousands of years" and a couple of years
1970-01-01 wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
Wood, cardboards, and papers. Unfortunately, they are not as
easily shaped and more expensive to make. Figure out how you can
mass produce an iPhone, including all the PCBs, out of wood and
paper and you will become a billionaire.
stavros wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
Unfortunately, I think it's that either there's a microorganism
that will eat your material, and you get a couple of years, or
there's not, and you get thousands.
lodovic wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
A milk carton?
justsid wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
Most tetra pak like materials and even aluminum cans are
actually lined with plastic. Plastic is the greatest material
ever, right until it needs to be disposed and then suddenly the
biggest upside becomes the biggest downside.
deadbabe wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
The problem is any idiot can make a bottle that lasts thousands
of years. It takes an engineer to make a bottle that barely lasts
a year.
SubiculumCode wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
1970-01-01 wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
It's keeping it out of the air and water that we need to work on.
If we properly trashed our plastic, it would not be floating in the
ocean.
bastawhiz wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
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.
aDyslecticCrow wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
We need it to break down properly, or not at all.
1970-01-01 wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
Only inorganic materials will last forever. We can reuse metal
and glass and ceramic forever but never a plastic.
jona777than wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
On a more humorous note, this ought to make for an interesting store
checkout experience. âWould you like paper or⦠paper?â
JBlue42 wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
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.
zdw wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
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).
Video on this, as well as how much is used as incinerator fuel:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6WogV6UEg
Tor3 wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
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..
pupppet wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
Itâs funny how weâve 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.
jibal wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
This is about dealing with reality.
petesergeant wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
âsome countriesâ is doing a lot of heavy work to say âbasically
the Philippinesâ, 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.
brookst wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
Itâs usually easier to solve a technical problem than a societal
one.
fooker wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
> 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. [1] [2] [3]
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...
URI [2]: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...
URI [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
URI [4]: https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/industrialised-countries-are...
samlinnfer wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
It's not about recycling, their regular garbage goes into the ocean
too (after they dump it into their rivers).
cantrevealname wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
> 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.
james_marks wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
There are people working that angle as well[0], and they focus on
prevention for this reason. We need all angles.
[0]
URI [1]: https://theoceancleanup.com/
junon wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
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.
phyzix5761 wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
Its really hard to change people without using threats or force.
Easier to change their environment.
mmooss wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
> 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.
jibal wrote 17 hours 2 min ago:
"People changing" and "changing people" are radically different
things.
mmooss wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
Yes; many of those things influence people to change. The
military also strongly influences people to change. In fact,
any group you are in - work, school, friends, HN - changes you.
jmknoll wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
What makes you think that people eat healthier and get more
exercise?
In the US at least, Obesity is on the rise, people eat more meat
than ever before, and life expectancy is basically flat over the
past decade.
mmooss wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
And they smoke a lot less. Of course it depends on your
starting point, but compared to all of human history before 50
years ago, the trend is clear.
petermcneeley wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
URI [1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
lisper wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Environmentally-sensitive garbage disposal is expensive. Not
everyone can afford it.
iszomer wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
IIRC, SK burns spent tires as a fuel source for their cement
industry.
hippari2 wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
It is easier to process a single type trash. Home trash is where
burning get pretty expensive because people put all sort of
stuffs in there. And I am sure the energy is net negative to.
The main issue of trash has always been separation.
iszomer wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
Which also iirc Japan does very well. Sure, the power generated
is connected to it's grid and it pales in comparison to their
other forms of energy production but it is also a part of their
waste management policy.
fitsumbelay wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
hits all the marks for replacing plastic. curious how long it'll take
before widespread adoption; my cynical assumption's that it'll be at
least a decade. will be happy to be wrong ...
tonyhart7 wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
even if its viable, it would come down to cost
slt2021 wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
the cost can be managed by taxing bad plastic and providing
incentives to good sustainable plastic, just like BEVs vs ICE
Affric wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Progressively banning plastics from various applications would
certainly help.
kazinator wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
Old is new again? [1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celluloid
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
scythe wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
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.
saagarjha wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
Huh, I somehow never made the connection to cellophane being
cellulose-based. I just thought it was plasticâ¦
cloudbonsai wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
Here is the original paper from the researchers: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads2426
kazinator wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Celluloid (nitrated cellulose with camphor) is not the only
transformation of cellulose into a plastic. [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate
kazinator wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
A decently transparent (for the purposes) cellolose-based material
is a wet cotton T-shirt.
cbmuser wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.
phire wrote 19 hours 46 min ago:
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 think it's Glassine?
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassine
albert_e wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo
albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through
paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from
getting fused to the previous page.
euroderf wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
Glassine has been around forever. Useful for philately!
iancmceachern wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
There are also transparent rolling papers
teleforce wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
Great summary of paper akin of TL;DR.
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.
bookofjoe wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
The Wall Street Journal recently started putting a 3-bullet-point
AI generated summary at the top of each story.
90s_dev wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
I genuinely wonder if the Romans actually had peak technology all
things considered & balanced.
saagarjha wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
I'd take modern healthcare tbh
90s_dev wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
Meh, a longer life isn't necessarily a happier one.
hollerith wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Did the ancient Romans have transparent paper, celluloid or
cellophane?
Just curious whether I'm missing some connection.
vkou wrote 19 hours 52 min ago:
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of
theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very
unfortunate if true.
phire wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
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.
90s_dev wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
> They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to
make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
That's the point. They had sustainable and clean technology. It
was a sweet spot.
breischl wrote 57 min ago:
They also mined by tearing apart mountains, and threw
noticeable amounts of lead into the air doing it.
> Roman-era mining activities increased atmospheric lead
concentrations by at least a factor of 10, polluting air over
Europe more heavily and for longer than previously thought,
according to a new analysis of ice cores taken from glaciers on
France's Mont Blanc.
A lot less than modern technology manages, but a lot more than
nothing. And that with a much smaller population. [1]
URI [1]: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-...
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruina_montium
wredcoll wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
Aside from the, you know, literal slave labor required to power
things, they also burnt down most of the trees within reach of
the cities.
phire wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
They were mining coal and using it for both heating and metal
working.
They also deforested large sections of Europe for fuel
(especially to make charcoal for smelting iron), building
materials and to clear land for crops. They didn't really
practice much in the way of sustainable forests, unless they
ran into local shortages of fuel wood.
astrospective wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
Too much lead.
90s_dev wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
It actually wasn't poisonous given the circumstances.
e44858 wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
They would cook food in lead pots, which made it poisonous:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweeten...
margalabargala wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
Could you elaborate? Just because it was less poisonous than it
could have been, does not make it non-poisonous.
90s_dev wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
I dunno I read it somewhere that some other thing in the
pipes formed a protective layer that prevented the lead from
actually seeping into the water or something
fuzzer371 wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
Same thing happened in Flint Michigan, the lead pipes
weren't the issue; They stopped treating the water a
certain way and the slight acidity in the water caused
(iirc) some sort of calcium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate
layer to be washed away until the acidic water started
leaching lead into the water.
ihodes wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
"(â¦) 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."
aDyslecticCrow wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
Sounds similar to cellophane. But the process to make it is very
different. Maybe it has some new properties that cellophane doesn't.
giantg2 wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
This is probably like the transparent windows made of wood - the
chemicals to make it aren't any better than the ones used to make
plastic.
fitsumbelay wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Different goals:
- Developing transparent wood is about cutting costs - [1] -
Developing this material is about reducing and eventually eliminating
plastic
URI [1]: https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/transparent-wood-c...
aDyslecticCrow wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
They briefly describe the process in the article, and very different
from the "transparent wood" I think you are referring to. I'll try to
summarise from my brief understanding.
- Transparent wood takes wood, dissolves the lignin (natural wood
glue-ish) with a solvent, and replaces it with epoxy under pressure.
It's a pain to make, but is very cool and preserves the wood fibre
structure.
- This transparent paper involves dissolving very pure cellulose
(long starch) and then allowing it to reconnect tightly (with heat)
before drying. It appears to be composed primarily of cellulose at
the end and exhibits plastic properties. I presume the chemicals
change the cellulose properties to allow this.
"lithium bromide-water" is (apparently, I was corrected) not very
toxic and lilley recycled in the process. If this can be scaled and
the solvent process can be done safely, then its very clever. It's
effectively plastic but using a more "natural" carbon chain, which
nature has had a few million extra years to figure out how to break
down.
They describe it as paper and compare it to polycarbonate... so my
guess is that it is a bit brittle, and cannot nicely replace plastic
wrap or plastic bags... but it has some nice properties to replace a
group of plastics we don't have very good alternatives to. One open
question I have is UV resistance. Most transparent plastics tend to
become brittle over time... but I don't know my chemistry enough to
know if cellulose has the same issue. Greenhouses would otherwise
benefit from it (as they're often made from polycarbonate sheets
rather than glass)
kurthr wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
I don't know why it "Sounds toxic as s*t". It's a reactive salt.
LD50 is ~1gram so don't swallow or get it in your eyes or nose. It
seems comparable in hazard to commonly available cleaning compounds
like ammonia and bleach.
That doesn't make it safe, but it's not a crazy carcinogen or
auto-immune risk, and it literally dissolves in water. It's present
in all sea water ~0.1ppm so you can't escape it.
aDyslecticCrow wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Bromine itself is very toxic, but it all depends on the dose and
form (it's used as an anti-algae agent). The article doesn't
mention the concentration or if it remains in the end product.
I'm not a chemist though, most of my knowledge comes from
nilered.
delibes wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
That's a bit like chlorine gas is poisonous, but sodium
chloride (salt) makes things tasty.
Highly different compounds, that just contain chlorine atoms.
billyjmc wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
Iâm a chemist. Bromine isnât bromide, and lithium bromide
is a simple nontoxic salt. If this is as simple as is described
in the news article, then itâs likely a pretty âgreenâ
process overall.
aDyslecticCrow wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
Oo! Very nice. I've updated my comment, as i stand corrected.
mjamesaustin wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Can you share what knowledge you have of the materials and/or process
that implies this is likely the case?
1970-01-01 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
The bag is good, the cup is good, but the straw is a terrible idea.
Brian_K_White wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Why?
They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem
there.
They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it
takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not
merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes:
sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a
week.
Where is the terrible part?
constantcrying wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
It doesn't have the same physical properties. Even the idea of that
is ridiculous, one physical property the article mentions it its
degradability.
"Strength" is also a meaningless metric to compare, it just is not
a material property.
anigbrowl wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
This doesn't make any sense and is not responsive to the points
from GP.
firtoz wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Why? Will it get soggy like the regular paper straws?
aDyslecticCrow wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
If it's as they describe... it should not. so a good straw
replacement.
9rx wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
If it is as described, won't it harm turtles in the same way
plastic straws do? That is, after all, why paper straws became
popular following that viral video that went around. Poor
structural integrity was the desirable trait they offered.
junon wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
The "harming turtles" thing was wildly overstated, to start.
Also, ideally not, because the turtles that were claimed to be
affected are in the ocean, where the straws degraded in just a
few months.
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