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"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."
Once upon a time, when woody plants first evolved, there was nothing that could break them down. As a result, dead trees piled up hundreds of feet deep all over the world until bacteria evolved that could finally eat the stuff. This went on for long enough to leave the huge amount of coal that is still buried today.
I would hope that some form of bacteria will develop the ability to eat various forms of plastic, as that's the only way that trash island is ever going away...
If these substances contain much carbon, that sounds like a good thing from a global warming perspective. Maybe we should change our goals and embrace this.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
We already have transparent aluminium. It is commonly known as saphire and your wrist watch 'glass' is made from it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You bring up an interesting issue that's often misunderstood or intentionally ignored by people arguing for a cause using CO2 emissions as their only back-up. If your only goal is to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, you need to:
1) Support our managed timberlands
2) Argue that the trees should be felled as soon as they stop producing ounce-for-ounce as much lumber as could be produced on the same footprint by fresh-planted trees
3) Demand that the trees are treated and used as lumber (rather than paper) and land-filled after use. Or, preferably, preserved and land-filled immediately rather than being trucked around for construction.
The carbon is trapped in the wood, sealed to prevent short-term release, and imprisoned in a landfill. Hey, we can put a park on top =).
This is, of course, a stupid plan, but friendly in terms of CO2 emissions. There is a balance there that's often overlooked by tree-huggers and owl-slashers alike.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Actually he's absolutely correct, thinking of a metabolic process as a slow motion combustion is perfectly appropriate, and if you haven't heard biologist and physiologists talk about "Burning" calories for years, you've lead too sheltered an existence. They mean precisely that, you take a carbohydrate, you introduce it to oxygen, it reduces to water and CO2, and energy is liberated. The magic in the mitochodria is that the process is controlled so you don't become hard boiled.
Though there have been a number of cases of athletes who've exercised either without proper hydration, or in climates where the humidity prevents evaporative cooling, who've raised their body core temperatures to that magic 110 degrees, cooking the proteins in their bodies (just like hard boiling an egg) and stopping any chance of future metabolism.
As the article carefully states, even Arboform uses only 50% lignin (yes, I *did* RTFA). The rest is made up of rather expensive "additives" - one crucial ingredient being Ecoflex, a synthetic (= oil-based) polymer which is needed to reduce the extreme brittleness of genuine lignin.
Two hopes spelled out in the articles will never materialize:
- it will never be as cheap as oil-based plastics are today, and
- it will never be able to replace most of the current oil-based plastics due to it's poor mechanical properties (unless we reduce the lignin content even further).
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
In the early days - 7 plants were named and shown to be excellent oil sources.
And these oil sources can be combined with a hardener to become a "plastic"
Soy oil was one of the first.
George Overley was the chemist working for Henry Ford to create many plant based components for Ford cars and trucks. Around 30 different components were plant based until Henry Ford was kicked out of the company he started.
The most famous is the Soy plastic bumpers that are mostly mistaken as Hemp Plastic by Jack Herrer in
"The Emperor Wears No Cloths"