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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."
Is like calling ethanol "liquid grain." There's a big difference between being derived from a given substance and having the properties of that substance.
Not that this isn't nice and all, but picking science fiction-ish titles for things keeps you from being taken seriously.
Will this liquid wood be able to replace the vast number of different sorts of plastic we have today? There are some plastics with some fascinating properties out there, I'd like to imagine that we won't lose those properties forever when oil runs out..
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
"The lignin itself was misunderstood completely by [leaders in the field] and the majority of people," says Simo Sarkanen, an environmental science professor at the University of Minnesota.
Does that sound like a mad scientist to anyone else? "My research has been completely misunderstood, but I will change the world! And then they'll see! They'll pay for their ignorance! MUAHAHAHAHA!"
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin: Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Lignin. Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean? Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in lignin. Think about it. Will you think about it?
transparent aluminum.
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...
Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed? At what point does that million square miles of plastic gook start to look like a mine-able resource and not simply pollution? Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
--- Bwah?
I find it amusing that any time someone proposes using an alternative to petroleum-based products, that proposal always gets turned down and slammed for being more expensive, etc. than using petroleum...
...then we get back to petroleum products causing issues (environmental and economic)... and the cycle renews itself.
Curse you OPEC and the lobbyists you have in our elected government.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
For the benefit of the curious reader, here's some more information on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that you (and the summary) mention.
This weekend was a tentative release date, jackass.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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
It already exists
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
Ping Pong Balls are made of celluloid. Plastic made from wood. What is old will be new again...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Pendantics... yes. The O2 comes from the oxidation while it burns.
That said, the plants take the actual CO2 from the air, use the O2 in their metabolism, and use the C for structure. They also use the H from the H2O, but that gets rebonded with the O2 and released, they don't keep it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You are right when you say lots of natural gas would be burned. Other misconceptions abound. What follows is very abbreviated. The cheap way to make paper is to cook it using the Kraft process. The wood gets chopped into small chunks and cooked in a liquor stew which separates the lignin from the nice fibers used for paper. The lignin holds the cells together and make the wood hard so the tree grows tall. Coming out of the stew the glop gets washed off the fibers. The chemicals used to cook the wood are expensive so the glop containing the lignin (which is bound to some of the chemicals) gets burned. The burning gets rid of the lignin carbohydrates and a stream of chemicals (called smelt) which runs out the bottom of the furnace, goes into a tank of water, comes out in a stream called green liquor, and eventually ends up going back into the cooking cycle. The heat from burning the lignin goes, as slarabee describes, into turbines to make electricity and steam for various purposes. Now, if you don't burn the lignin, you have to use some other source of energy to make that steam and electricity. Second, and the point the article misses completely, how are you going to separate the lignin from the chemicals? Those boilers in paper mills are called recovery boilers because they recover the chemicals. It's the cheapest way to do it. How is going to a more expensive method for chemical recovery and going to a more expensive fuel a good solution for anything? Lignin in a liquid wood would be better than plastic. The value of the liquid wood using lignin, though, would have to be high enough to overcome the above costs.
"A common reporting error regarding hemp is the claim of excellent fiber properties, particularly the use of the hurd for papermaking. These claims probably stem from a 1938 Popular Mechanics article, which incorrectly stated that the woody core of hemp was 77% cellulose. Scientific and technical literature indicates that the cellulose content of hemp's core ranges from 30-40%.(12) The difference in cellulose content is substantial when one is evaluating pulping efficiency. This incorrect claim has been repeated and reprinted widely.(13)"
http://www.visionpaper.com/speeches_papers/Rymkenafhemp.html
Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed?
This is what Global Resource Corporation's microwave does. Right now they are fine-tuning their prototype on used tires. One 20-pound tire yields 1 gallon of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of propane/butane, some carbon black and some steel.
The device uses a vacuum chamber to reclaim the hydrocarbons after they've been released from the solid.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Peak oil is, for all intents and purposes, a myth. It relies on the idea that no new oil reserves will be found, and no new technologies developed. That is a massively erroneous assumption. For instance, the recent price-hike encouraged us Canadians to start mining our reserves of oil-sands. The world oil-sands reserves are massive (more than the oil sources we use now), and they're simply not taken into account when computing "peak oil" projections. Oil-shales are another source which has barely been tapped, and world reserves are estimated to be even higher than oil-sands. US oil shale deposits alone exceed all the remaining conventional oil deposits in the entire world. Likewise, oil-shales aren't included in the computation.
Realistically, while oil prices will undoubtedly rise over time, we're not likely to hit any "peak" for a long, LONG time. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at ways to minimize our oil consumption - I'm all for developing alternate-fuel vehicles, and building more nuclear reactors - but it does mean that we aren't facing a looming crisis just over the horizon.
Ummm... no. Ferns don't have seed pods. Ferns produce spores, which are far smaller than most seeds (orchid seeds perhaps being an exception).
I rather doubt your statement is true, that petroleum is comprised of nothing but decomposed fern spore. Could you please cite a reasonably authoritative source?
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"
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
This is a report on that area, and what's exactly what they mean by this "garbage patch" thing. It's scary, and it makes sense.
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
What's wrong with aluminum? I like aluminum.
I've seen this soup in Bali. It's millions of plastic bags used to hold tea that are then disposed of in the gutter, then flushed out of the drains in wet season. Fully disgusting. What better method of disposal will solve that problem... a bin? Don't assume this is plastic coming from the developed world where developed world solutions can be applied.