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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?
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.
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
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."
...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.
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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.
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.