Developed by researchers from China's Northeast Forestry University, the bamboo plastic can biodegrade in soil within 50 days and offers a pathway towards sustainable plastic alternatives.
So don’t store liquid in it? Not viable for beverage containers.
And unless you are going to use a sturdier plastic to surround it (which actually is a very good model because it keeps the harder to recycle stuff out of homes)… tell me you never worked inventory without telling me you never worked inventory?
What percentage of single use plastic is used for storing liquids? I would imagine it’s a minority, with things like plastic bags making up the majority.
Plus very acidic liquids like soda may not be bio-active enough to cause this to break down, depending on what the process is.
What percentage of single use plastic is used for storing liquids? I would imagine it’s a minority, with things like plastic bags making up the majority.
Plastic bottles are the most common type of container for fluids and make up a huge portion of plastic waste. Drinks, cooking oil and vinegar, cosmetics, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, motor oil, paints, medical products… and that’s just the common consumer stuff. Plastic bags are a big part too but liquid bottles are certainly not a minority.
Plus very acidic liquids like soda may not be bio-active enough to cause this to break down, depending on what the process is.
You also have to be concerned about the outside of the container. Will it be washed as part of the production/handling process? Will sweat and bacteria from human hands cause it to start breaking down? It will be packed in a box for shipping, then unpacked at a store, then picked up and looked at by who knows how many people before being purchased, then it has to stay in one piece until the product it contains is used up. A bottle of toilet cleaner or shampoo or laundry detergent might be handled hundreds of times, and its lifespan from production to final disposal might be a year or more.
Which have massive implications on weight and structural packaging. A plastic soda bottle is light and sturdy. A glass soda bottle is heavy and shatters. Also recycling of glass is not entirely straightforward in a lot of regions.
The world doesn’t (over) rely on polymers just because everyone wants to have a summer home in Alberta. They have materials properties that make them ridiculously good for storage and packaging. They just have very serious implications on the environment.
Reducing those environmental implications is VERY good and a lot of work is going into it. But doing so to the point it removes their beneficial properties… is kind of missing the point.
Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.
Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.
So don’t store liquid in it? Not viable for beverage containers.
And unless you are going to use a sturdier plastic to surround it (which actually is a very good model because it keeps the harder to recycle stuff out of homes)… tell me you never worked inventory without telling me you never worked inventory?
What percentage of single use plastic is used for storing liquids? I would imagine it’s a minority, with things like plastic bags making up the majority.
Plus very acidic liquids like soda may not be bio-active enough to cause this to break down, depending on what the process is.
Plastic bottles are the most common type of container for fluids and make up a huge portion of plastic waste. Drinks, cooking oil and vinegar, cosmetics, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, motor oil, paints, medical products… and that’s just the common consumer stuff. Plastic bags are a big part too but liquid bottles are certainly not a minority.
You also have to be concerned about the outside of the container. Will it be washed as part of the production/handling process? Will sweat and bacteria from human hands cause it to start breaking down? It will be packed in a box for shipping, then unpacked at a store, then picked up and looked at by who knows how many people before being purchased, then it has to stay in one piece until the product it contains is used up. A bottle of toilet cleaner or shampoo or laundry detergent might be handled hundreds of times, and its lifespan from production to final disposal might be a year or more.
for liquids there’s aluminum or glass
Then we should go back to glass bottles.
Which have massive implications on weight and structural packaging. A plastic soda bottle is light and sturdy. A glass soda bottle is heavy and shatters. Also recycling of glass is not entirely straightforward in a lot of regions.
The world doesn’t (over) rely on polymers just because everyone wants to have a summer home in Alberta. They have materials properties that make them ridiculously good for storage and packaging. They just have very serious implications on the environment.
Reducing those environmental implications is VERY good and a lot of work is going into it. But doing so to the point it removes their beneficial properties… is kind of missing the point.
There’s several big tradeoffs there.
Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.
Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.