Slashdot Mirror
"Liquid Wood" a Contender To Replace Plastic
Ostracus recommends a Christian Science Monitor piece on the 40-year quest to find a replacement for non-biodegradable plastic. One candidate, written off 20 years back but now developed to the point of practicality, is a formulation based on the lignin found in wood. And it turns out there is another strong environmental reason to put lignin to use in this way: burning it, which is its common fate today, releases the carbon dioxide that trees had sequestered. "Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. ...[R]esearchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive."
Pardon my ignorance, but aren't we trying to REDUCE the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Maybe it's better than burning plastic, but this seems backwards to me.
What they meant (but phrased poorly) was that by extracting the lignin from the wood, the CO2 is kept sequestered inside the lignin, rather than being allowed to escape back into the atmosphere (which is what would happen if the wood were burned or allowed to biodegrade)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
We *can* create oil, even out of plain CO2 if necessary. We do have the chemical knowledge for that you know.
Making any plastic will be still as easy as it is today : you buy some type of oil-derivative at the store, and polymerisize it. Easy enough.
It will however, be a very costly thing to do indeed : it requires loads of energy. Right now that energy has simply been put in oil long ago, and making most plastics is in fact an exotherm process.
We will still make plastics. Producing them, however, will stop producing energy and start massively costing energy.
So that leaves multiple scenarios open. If we do get fusion operational somehow, for example, plastics will likely be as abundant as they are today, at least for a while. Even if we don't nuclear power is probably cheap enough to provide all those "specialty plastics", maybe even at comparable prices. The mass-market plastic will be the only thing disappearing.
My guess is, we'd replace it by another extremely useful and versatile substance we so massively used before the oil started to get so widespread : Iron. It's only marginally more expensive than plastics (mostly due to the mines' labour cost, there is more than enough iron in the ground to coat the entire earth with it several times). Instead of buying your salami in cheap plastic packaging you'll simply buy it in a can.
For the benefit of the curious reader, here's some more information on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that you (and the summary) mention.
My reading of this vaguely written sentence is that lignin is currently being burned. If instead used as a petroleum replacement in plastic-like materials it would not be burned -- at least not until it hits the post consumer trash incinerator.
Is lignin extracted from wood in any other industries besides paper production? Would the paper industry be able to supply enough lignin to replace even a fraction of the plastic currently being produced? Even if it did, sounds like that would simply shift the burning from lignin in the wood fiber to petroleum products.
At the paper mill where I recently worked, the lignin was not burned just for the pleasure of it. The quicky skipping a couple dozen steps process is as follows... The lignin is extracted from the wood pulp by a cocktaail of sodium family chemicals casually referred to as liquor. When loaded with nice potential energy filled lignin, the liquor is referred to as black liquor. The black liquor is piped to the recovery boilers where the lignin burns out leaving nice clean white liquor and a lot of high pressure steam. The white liquor is in closed loop system and goes back to pick up more lignin. The high pressure steam is used on the actual paper machines and drives turbines to provide nearly one hundred percent of the electrical power needed by the entire mill.
Remove the lignin by another process so that it can be used to make 'liquid wood'. Now where will the mill get its high pressure steam? Burning petroleum products just like it does now when there is an upset condition in the supply of black liquor. Lots of natural gas. Lots.
Not only that, but the biodegradability of such a substance is over-played as well. Take a drive down to the local landfill, dig down quite a bit and you will find that many biodegradable substances that have been there for 20+ years have not really biodegraded at all. This is caused by the fact that the biodegradability of a substance is often dependent on the oxygen available to organisms to breakdown the substance. Thus, if you pack the trash too tightly, you create an anaerobic environment where organisms are less efficient at breaking things down.
What we really need is a better method of disposal, not necessarily creating new kinds of substances.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Okay, so we're going to grow trees to make "lignin plastic" and then the stuff is going into landfills where it will biodegrade and will release CO2. How is this better?
This is better because in this case the product is "Carbon Neutral", as in it is releasing CO2 that the plants had used to grow. When we use petroleum products, the CO2 released is from carbon that was taken out of the cycle and buried deep underground... Now eventually it would even out in a few millennia... The Earth had handled this carbon before... But the Earth would not be the climate that we as humans are used to... The ecosystem using that much carbon had far more plant growth... As such much, much more Oxygen in the air. Which in turn can support much larger animals. Especially insects.... A warmer, oxygen-rich, swampy environment.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Ocean-Plastic-Landfill-Algalita1nov02.htm
Didn't we have this (plastic made from wood) over a century ago?
It's called cellophane.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
To be perfectly honest, I'm against biodegradable products in areas that demand environmental resistance. I'd hate to have a biodegradable roof, for example. ;)
Still, my shampoo being biodegradable is for the best.
To get to the parent's point, biodegradation is essentially rotting, a slow form of combustion. Life forms, just like humans, eat whatever, break down the hydrocarbons and exhaust it as H2O and CO2.
So if the idea is to prevent the release of CO2, the prevention of rotting is a good thing. One CO2 sequestration method often talked about up here is a couple of different plowing methods that tends to keep CO2 in the ground. They're talking about being able to sell them as carbon credits. Some already are. Thing is, those very methods are also good for soil fertilization and preservation, so they're just good business practices depending on the soil; many were already doing it.
I don't read AC A human right
rust though, specifies iron.
And do you really think that just because it's done in a organism/cell that the reaction is any less energetic? Improperly stored grain/hay can get so hot that it ends up combusting from the heat of rotting.
At least according to Wikipedia, cellular respiration is a form of slow combustion.
I don't read AC A human right
Although lingin-based plastics may be something new, bioplastics are by no means new.
By pure and honest coincidence, I have a disposable cup made out of a plant-based bioplastic sitting on my desk that I got from a restaurant along with some take-out earlier today.
It's virtually indistinguishable from a normal plastic cup, and actually looks a bit nicer than your typical disposable drinkware -- the crystal-clear bioplastic is sturdy and has a nice 'shine' to it. It's biodegradable, and contains no oil-based inputs, although you'd never guess it by looking at it or handling it.
The manufacturers of the biopolymer claim that it can be adapted to all sorts of other products, at what seem to be fairly reasonable prices (~$1/kg). What's not to love?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Or at least were. During the Devonian period these plants spread rapidly across the land and created the first forests.
However I don't know of any source that claims that these seed pods are the primary constituent of coal.
First of all the largest bulk of ancient coal deposits were laid down during the Carboniferous period, which followed the Devonian. These periods are all 10's of millions of years long and certainly bacteria evolved to eat lignin on a shorter time scale than that. In fact it is actually fungus that do most of the eating of wood anyway.
It is also not true that coal was only formed in one or a few specific geological periods. There are coal deposits which formed in every period from the Devonian on through to relatively recent periods in the Cenozoic Era. LOTS of coal formed in the Carboniferous and a lot of it is now high quality coal.
And anyone that has seen what sorts of stuff is in coal deposits will know that the vast majority of it was all sorts of different plant materials. There are leaves, trunks, roots, branches, etc all in the coal and in some places there are whole FORESTS turned to coal where all this stuff is still quite plainly visible. So maybe fern seed pods are a decent part of that, I don't know, but it is a lot more complex than that and even a modern forest could turn to coal in the right conditions.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson