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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.
but it was corny, so nevermind
Banaaaana!
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?
cr0n?
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...
I wish we were as forward looking on legal products from hemp, which I would also consider a good thing.
(Not a troll promoting or encouraging illegal drug use.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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
Finally! I'm rich! I have never owned a computer, tech stocks, etc... but I have been farming corn for the past 50 years! Finally!
Getting too much pr0n?
That's a-maize-ing!
That's one way to compile your kernel.
Hey, guess what I managed to cobb-le together.
Make plastic or make tequila...tough choice.
Lastly, I am Cornholio...do you have TP for my bunghole?
Bio degradable better for the environment blah blah blah.
Nobody's going to use it except in a few niche markets unless it's cheaper to mass-produce than good ol' synthetic plastic. That will take a long time to achieve.
Actually, even if it did replace plastic, I'm not sure it would be better for the environment. Now you need to mass-mass produce corn. Agricultural run-off can be pretty destructive, too, not to mention the effects of irrigation on natural waterways. TANSTAAFL.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
.
They coat it with sugar, stamp it into interesting shapes, and call it "breakfast cereal".
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
Since glass is just melted sand, couldnt glass just be ground up into fine sand?
If we could use corn plastic in computers, could we use kernels for Linux?
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.
We have natural resources like corn, tapioca (which can also be used to make plastic bags), and even banana fibre, which can't be pulped down but can be made into superstrong paper and card, yet we create still plastics which don't biodegrade and cause harm to the environment....
I say bring on the corn-based replacements for all petroleum products. Then the US would start to rake in all those dollars that currently go to OPEC.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Disney uses a product like this at all of their theme parks. When you get "plastic" utensils at a restaraunt in the park, it's actually this stuff.
:)
Great for the environment considering how much garbage Disney generates.
Feel free to interpret that last statement any way you wish
This kind of thing was described/foretold/requested in the book "Cradle to Cradle" , by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, which after reading the /. review I bought and read. (BTW, here is
their
company)
An interesting read. Lots of propaganda, but lots of really good ideas, and a few real results, too.
Other related links
here
and
here.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
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
but Classic Plastic will be outlawed due to its effect on the environment. It will then be discovered that it can act as a halucinegen. America will declare war on plastics, and the libertarian party will be ignored for standing up for our right to buy and use plastics.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
Glass is easily recyclable though. You can crush it up into course particals and use it as aggregate in concrete and asphalt paving, or just melt it down and make new things out of it.
Plastic is a bit trickier, mainly because there's so many different types of plastic, it makes sorting a nightmare. Some products even use 2 or 3 different types of plastic in one unit! (eg: Tic-Tac dispenser uses a polystyrene container and a polypropylene lid)
different "types" of glass are mostly just heat treatments. eg: tempered/safety glass.
A plastic that dissolves in a special chemical would make it easier, especially if that chemical could be retreived after use. Dump all the plastic garbage in a big pot, add chemical, dissolve type X plastic, drain chemical and recover, add different chemical to dissolve type Y plastic, repeat...
I've also seen plastics (especially expanded polystyrene, like coffee cups) that have glucose in their polymer chains, which means bacteria aide in decomposing the material while it's in the landfill. No idea what happened to this stuff though...
=Smidge=
Gives a whole new meaning to cornholing.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
couple of years now Earthshell has been making biodegradable containers for a while, McDonalds already uses them. And so does the National Park Service.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
In case you're wondering why plastic is bad, visit the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. They have done cruises into the Pacific Ocean and found tiny pieces of plastic that outnumber zooplankton 6 to 1. Plastic "nurdles" or little unprocessed beads of plastic are the number 1 beach polluter in southern California. They sorb hydrophobic toxins (DDT, PCBs and the like) and then poison the critters that eat them.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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's also much better tasting than the alternative, Plastic based Corn.
Disclamer: IAAMS (I Am A Materials Scientist)
Pretty much, yes. Except that I think sand is crystalline and they add some stuff (soda, lime, etc) to make it melt easier. Anything ceramic (and that includes glass), is basically a synthetic rock. Why would you want it to degrade? What is glass poisoning? Anyway, glass is recycled a lot easier than plastic, and recycling is preferable to decay. Just sort it by color and melt it down.
Actually I think aluminum takes longer to decay than glass does because aluminum forms a protective oxide on the surface that is not as water sensitive as silica (glass) is. Even so, aluminum is great because it is actually profitable to recycle aluminum since it costs a lot less to melt down old aluminum than it does to refine new aluminum from bauxite.
The other point is that neither aluminum nor glass produces anything toxic as they degrade. Many plastics release nasty toxic compounds as they degrade and so you don't really want them to break down.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
BOOOOOM!!
Is it fascism yet?
...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. --
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)
Yes and no. Glass is not just any fine sand, but silica sand, which is not something you want to breath. (the grains are sharp and do bad thing to the lungs) Most of your everyday sand has lots of things other than silica, which reduces the danger. Of course glass can also be made into more glass.
Sometimes biodegradable is preferable, especially in locations where water is not in abundance and where other issues take precedence, ike some cleaning agents in the water. Certainly some are not harmful, but unless you pass laws then there will still be people who buy the cheapest detergents and not the most environmentally friendly.
It's also been noted, in certain locales and for certain materials, that recycling is WORSE than biodegradable and simply disposable... sometimes the process makes a bigger mess than just leaving it. That's not to say this will always be the case, but it is now.
Unfortunately true environmentalists (like myself) have trouble convincing extreme environmentalists that sometimes they are actually working contrary to goal of having a clean planet - they have a kneejerk reaction to everything without considering the real long term effects.
There are no generic statements about recycling and reuse that apply to everything, everywhere.
I have seen this plastic corn based material before, and I think it's a GREAT approach to our disposable lifestyles. While I agree with you in principle (I really dislike disposable plastics, like pens and razors, for example, but I don't have a problem with the plastic being used for durable goods - like car dashboards or computer components), we have to take the world for what it is today and massage things in a way that people aren't inconvenienced. If things become even the least bit harder, a large number of people will not accept it. People are generally lazy, it's a sad fact. Not everyone, not all the time, but often enough.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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