And we’ll never hear of it again
So the plastics industry has been pushing stories like this my entire life. Things never change because regular plastic is the cheaper option.
This is a news bulletin from RIKEN, a research center funded by the government of Japan.
This isn’t a story “pushed by the plastic industry”. The problem, I think, is that communication of scientific lab results is often overpraised (“It’s possible to do X!”).
It’s not wrong, but it also does not mean it’s always a good idea to do X, in the way it had been achieved in the paper.
Sadly, loud press releases does benefit funding. So it’ll continue to the detriment of your fatigue, and general distrust in r&d.
I have seen endless reports like this from every news source, labs, you name it. The reality is plastics have to be banned. Period. Only then can any of this work pay off.
I have seen endless reports like this from every news source, labs, you name it.
I’ve seen the same. We share this observation.
plastics have to be banned. Period.
Let’s phone the principal’s office and get plastics banned.
Plastics aren’t just shopping bags. Plastics are used in clothing, machinery, solid state electronics, literally everywhere. You can’t just ban a material that’s been essential to the world economy for the past century, you have to replace it with something
California finally did it for plastic bags other states have done it as well. Nationwide plastic bags and single use bottles need to be banned.
Yeah fine by me. We’ve had that for a decade now where I live.
Has had no measureable impact on ocean plastics.
This is obviously another lie like how easy it is to recycle plastics (it isn’t) and is probably going to proliferate even more microplastics than regular plastic degradation.
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Pretty much the reason why non-degradable plastics need to be restricted or banned, otherwise the cost of those ending up in the environment we bear on behalf of fossil fuel companies.
Then maybe introduce some incentives to make up for that 7% or else force their hand by introducing steep penalties for any plastics that are used which aren’t up to a higher standard like this… Or a little bit of both.
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I wrote a bill for my model congress that regulates all chocolate that melts at 30°C after 5 minutes the same as misbranded food
Breaks down… into micro micro plastics!
The point of this research was to avoid even that.
It’s pretty awesome that it even breaks down in soil:
In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.
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Fun fact: Nano plastics do exist and are the most harmful kind as they can evade kidney filters, accessing your blood stream and doing all kind of hijinks at cellular level.
This stuff again? What does it break down into tho?
It breaks down into safely.
Ah yes. And how pure is the stuff? No paint on there?
ITT: people commenting without reading the sidebar
Go, science! There will always be a need for some plastics, and having safer better options is a great thing for our future ♥️
Top documentary of 2035 - Guanidinium: The Silent Killer
Interesting approach, for sure. We’ve had a bit of a problem with making plastics degradable, in that we don’t want them to degrade while they’re still in use. This approach would obviously be unsuitable for packaging salty food, but for many other single-use plastics, this might be a good solution.
