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Corn-Based Plastic
SolemnDragon writes "CNN.com is offering up an article about the new corn-based plastic-like product being used at Wild Oats Natural Markets. The product looks like plastic, works like plastic... and then turns into compost. Dubbed the 'corn-tainer,' it's being used to serve foods, etc. Available only in the Pacific Northwest stores (of course) or you can make your own at home. And here's more info on Bio-plastic from MSU." Our older story.
will it be usefull for storing things for long periods of time, say you wish to store something in a bag (non-food) and leave it for years (lets say like pictures) will the bag decay on you? Will I need to use classic plastic to store non-food stuff?
I thought that pens with the barrels made of a corn-based plastic have already been on the market for a few years... I remember seeing them in a few stores...
Just do what these guys are doing and recycle all the carbon and metal and such to make new oil and metals etc.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Well, the best legal use of hemp would be paper (like the type the U. S. Constitution is written on) that holds up well over time. Then again, hemp paper + illegal hemp product = more high?
...will this stuff be edible?
The plates and embal to the food served, under the 1994 olympcs in Lillehammer, was made of potatos.
Where have this gone?
Why dont the use this at McDonnalds (a biker gang for Carl Barks fans?)
If Ronald dont care about the enviroment he must clearly see the practical
an economic advantage of this product.
"we're all out of (freedom/french/*um like whatevah*)fries, but we have some lovely fried cups"
@ who acctually shuld had posted this anonymsly, and no heading for the bed
Cargill and Dow have had a comercial Corn based platic for years. It enviromentally safe, degrades when when Heat, Mosture, and Darkness are applied. However, because of the way our Ag system works, petro based platic is still cheaper.
Like the title of your post says, it's economics, and to a greater extent, politics. Forget the environmental argument, compelling as it may be to some people. I'm more interested in reducing the country's consumption of petroleum for both economic reasons (It's largely an import-only product at this point) and political reasons (We tend to import it from people who don't particularly like us).
Those two considerations alone are, I think, enough to provoke a restructuring of our farm subsidies to make these plastics considerably cheaper in a very short period of time.
the US already ass-produces corn...ever wonder why if you buy soda in europe it contains sugar, but buy in the US and its pumped full of corn syrup?
we're talking major subsidies to farmers.
not really sure if this is a good thing.
However, using hemp rolling papers won't affect the THC content of your smoke, because it's got pretty close to none in it. The paper is made from those stems you didn't need, and it's made from hemp plants that were bred for big fibrous stems, not big tasty buds or leaves. As the label for one brand of hemp-based clothing says "Sorry, but you can't smoke your shirt."
It's possible that using hemp rolling papers will make the contents burn faster or slower or hotter or less hot than dead-tree papers, but you really ought to be smoking from a bong or some other device that'll cool the smoke and reduce lung irritation. However, selling devices that improve public health by reducing the harm caused by illegal substances is illegal in many states, so you're not allowed to print out this message on hemp-based paper with soy-based ink to roll joints in.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the bords in our computers where made instead of whith glass and petrocemicals but with plant fibers and plant based plastics we would be able to by degade them whene they where nolonger usfule. It would simplify the extraction of the presious metals that are in them. No longer would the computer reciling firms in asia nead to us toxic cemicals but instead they could use vibrating screens and magnets .
correct, however, the first stage of the system that masticates everything removes metal from stuff you put in it. it removes everything that is not made of carbon and returns it to you at the end. so you can throw entire computers in and get clean materials out. read the article...it talks about just that.
infact thay say it can handle any human waste except toxic waste from nuclear plants.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Where I work we already receive freight packed using loose foam "sausages" made from starch. If you put them in a cup of water they dissolve back into a starchy goo. This has got to be alot better in terms of landfill volume than the old non-destructable last a million years packaging.
Now if only someone can find a way to stop them 'exploding' out of an overfilled box when I open it they will make a fortune.
Last time I looked, Cargill makes a SHITLOAD of money off pesticides, fertilizers, animal feed chemicals, and so on- just check out their website if you don't believe me. We're supposed to believe they're working on stuff that will eliminate/reduce demand for those products?
What's Cargill going to sell, information booklets? Patent the compost process? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
AFAIK, it IS edible, as long as you use edible inks if you print anything on it (it is transparent), and is also meant to save the hassle of opening the wrapper before eating. "The easier it is to see the 'Easy opening' sign, the longer it will take fighting with the package in order to open it".
-- But, hey, will they have to print the nutritional value of the package ?
We had something like this at my college. It was a grain based plastic-like material for disposable flatware (forks, spoons, knives). The material was billed as a replacement to plastic utensils and would fully biodegrade in landfills within 30-45 days. The material was also very bitter, overly flexy/soft, and became limp when heated to the temperature of hot food. Hopefully, this material is entirely different
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
It still takes shitloads of energy (read: oil) to grow corn (think farm equipment, shipping, cleaning, processing, etc), so all we're doing is moving the pollution from one place to another.
Producing ethanol from corn requires burning double the amount of gasoline already used in cars, according to a study conducted by UC Berkeley professor Tad Patzek and his freshman seminar of nine students. Source Daily California 6/10/2003
...to know that michael meant to say "from the orville-redenbacher dept."
Corn keeps coming up in the news, with more and more uses. There is a corn-based fuel that's gaining popularity in Minnesota, especially among street rodders. Apparently it has a little more zip than gasoline, and hey, renewable energy (plus the by-products are still useful as animal feed). Corn is the most cost-effective solar cell we'll ever have.
But you know, in a hundred years, when our great-grandkids all drive corn-powered cars and use corn-plastic products, the alternative-energy quacks will just whine about Big Corn keeping them down.
...
Henry Ford and His Magic Beanstalk
From the article:
By late 1937 Ford's research laboratory, under the direction of youthful, self-trained Robert Boyer, had developed a curved plastic sheet Ford hoped would replace steel in automobile bodies. A few weeks later the magnate called in reporters, jumped up and down on the unbending sheet and triumphantly exclaimed, "If that was steel, it would have caved in." He added "Almost all new cars will soon be made of such things as soybeans" and that the most prosperous era in American history was "just around the corner" because industry was opening up a "whole new field for agricultural by-products."
My GF is allergic to corn and corn products. If she was ate deli food that was packaged in this it could cause a severe allergic reaction.
Are these things marked as a corn product?
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Using hemp would be nice, but there are some problems. First of all, you need someplace to grow it. With genetically modified crops, we can grow more food per acre, and thus free up farmland to grow hemp. However, there is currently controversy over GM foods, so I don't know if we can definitely count on that happening. The alternative is to cut down forests in order to make way for hemp-farms. This is counter-productive to the goal of saving forests.
On top of that, hemp is not nearly as useful as trees (note: this is a general statement, some trees are probably better for certain uses than other trees). Hemp has usually been used to make rope and sacks. However, wood from trees goes into building homes, furniture, and other structures along with the pulp we use for paper products (a lot of the the wood the makes paper is actually waste from mills that produce building materials) and is a cheap fuel source for developing/poor people.
Hemp would compete with other crops for manpower and machinery because it is a seasonal crop. Harvested hemp would have to stored under weatherproof conditions while trees usually can be left outside with the elements. Hemp doesn't work with existing mills, so new, specialty mills would have to be constructed. Basically, we would need an infrastracture change in order to accommodate large-volume hemp production.
Recently, I became a proponent of sustainable forestry (this is also where I got all that hemp vs. trees info). If people want to save forests, replacing what forests produce with other materials isn't the way to do it. If a tree has no value (can't turn it anything that can be sold), then trees will be cut down and replaced with something that will make money. If you want trees (and forests) to exist, then there has to be a demand for them. This seems like simple economics (glad I took that class) and seems logically correct (glad I took a Practical Reasoning class, too).
As long as care is taken to make sure a forest is replanted after logging, forestlands can be sustained.
I don't think you are very involved with the logging industry. In B.C., where I live, one of the largest paper-producing areas of the world, wild, old-growth forests are being pulped at a massive rate. These are, indeed, "random" trees, and it is not at all absurd. Pulp mills dot B.C. and provide employment for many people in many small towns, like the one I grew up in.
The cutblocks in some of B.C.'s wild forests (not the tree "gardens" you mention) are big enough to be seen from space.
However, in the southern U.S., there are tree plantations like what you're talking about. But sadly, compared to Canadian pulp production, they are nothing. I say "sadly" because really, how absurd is it to pulp wild forests for paper and diaper fill when a variety of plants (all you need from the wood is the cellulose) would fit the bill? These plants, such as hemp, could be grown in present farming areas and would provide a boost to local farmers. And they would not require further deforestation.
While in college, I went to an Agriculture College Open House at the University of Illinios at Urbana/Champaign and they had this stuff there at the time. This would have been around 94 or so.
They even had packing peanuts made of the stuff that they handed out for people to eat (it was very very bland, but edible). I figure you could live off of it if you got trapped in a UPS truck or something.
Anyway, I think it's a neat idea. At the time, the packing peanuts were cost effective (and were going to roll out in a company someplace. I saw them a few years later) but the harder stuff wasn't yet. But they had examples of stuff molded out of it.
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
The most interesting environmental question is whether carbohydrate-based plastics are a net greenhouse gas sink. Oil-based plastics pull carbon out of the ground, and put it back into landfills.
Carbohydrate-based plastics actually pull CO2 out of the air as plants grown (good), but if they do decompose, the carbon is released as methane gas, which is actually a more powerful greenhouse warming gas than CO2 (bad).
In the future, we may move from plants to GM bacteria that have hyper-efficient photosynthesis / chemosythesis and cellulases for materials prodcution.
About 12 years ago I ran across some pens made of 100% corn "plastic", so I bought a bunch of them for gifts.
Of course, they were a "hit" as gifts because they were so unusual.
But they were quite a bit more flexible than petrochemical based plastic pens, so writing with them was kind of weird.
And the BIG drawback with them was...
If you lived in a humid environment, they would self destruct. Like in, get gooey, and sticky, and holes melting in them.
Neat idea, but waaay too bio-degradable for an object that needs to be around until it's empty of ink.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks