"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."

Comments

Highly proprietary formula...

[polishengineering]

Great. The German's have successfully hidden their highly secretive and potentially Earth saving formula away from the masses and academia where it could be improved for over a decade. I'm for making a buck the same as the next guy, but when you come across something as important and the potential for widespread impact such as this you would think that your better half would take over and get the word out. Imagine if this little alternative plastic company joined forces with the largest paper producer in the US which provided it with an almost limitless supply of this ligin. That would drive the cost down and provide the volume necessary to make a legitimate impact on the market.

Overpopulation?

[Msdose]

Any article that doesn't mention overpopulation should not be allowed to present itself as any sort of solution to environmental problems.

Global warming is a scam to keep people poor

[leereyno]

Global warming is a leftist scam to prevent the development of liberal democracies and free markets in the 3rd world by retarding their economic and industrial growth.

The 3rd world and all of its problems represent the last possible hope for the left to remake the world into a communist dsytopia. If 3rd world countries are transformed into wealthy nations with political and economic freedom, there will be no one left to sell communism to other than wet-behind-the-ears college students, most of whom outgrow it.

The swindle of global warming is a scam to keep people in impoverished countries poor.

It's all about making the world safe for communism.