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When news is announced like this the focus is always on biodegradable. They already make biodegradable plastic from corn. But it has two problems: it is more

by rmason 2y ago

When news is announced like this the focus is always on biodegradable. They already make biodegradable plastic from corn. But it has two problems: it is more expensive and has a rough finish which isn't as desirable as a smooth shiny surface. Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Very little barley is grown however in the state but I guess there could be if this proves to be competitive with regular plastic. In fact Northern Michigan which has too short a growing season for corn would be an ideal candidate. No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.

dtx1 2y ago
> No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution. Plastic Bags were banned here in Germany (Maybe EU?) so now you can get either Paper Bags or Plastic Bags made from recycled plastic water bottles. To be quite honest: The paper bags suck because they are fragile and the recycled bags are expensive.
- Abroszka 2y ago
  I think it's working as intended. It incentivises buying a good quality plastics or cloth bag and reuse.
  - yojo 2y ago
    Cloth bags are problematic. The Danish EPA put the break-even on cotton bags at 7,100 re-uses (or 20,000 for organic)[1]. Most people won’t shop enough in their life to pay back that organic cotton bag - reusing twice a week, it will take you 200 years before you break even. 1: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... - see section 6.3 for reuse numbers
- ajb 2y ago
  It depends on the paper. Some takeaways round here seem to come in very robust paper bags, although takeaway is perhaps not as challenging as a full bag of groceries.
dougdimmadome 2y ago
In Ireland a few years ago a plastic bag levy was introduced. If you want a plastic bag at the checkout, you have to pay 5c for each one. Now everyone has reusable shopping bags they bring to the stores. The bags are much more rugged than single use plastic bags or paper, and reuse is better than recycling. However, I think shopping bags are probably not the intended market for this stuff, and the need is more to replace the plastic wrapping that covers food. There have been efforts here and in the UK to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place but there will continue to be places where we still need it for a while
- michael_vo 2y ago
  Same in Canada. The reusable bags that the stores sell are 5-20$. You get hit once with that and you'll start bringing your own bags. It's actually really simple to influence human behavior with pricing!
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage). Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
    - maccard 2y ago
      Have you a source for this? Because all the published info I’ve seen says that it is great and it works as intended.
      - alistairSH 2y ago
        https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01946-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01946-6 I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse. IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.
spinach 2y ago
Paper bags might be biodegradable, but then we have issues with deforestation for the material.
- parineum 2y ago
  Carbon capturing tree farms are where most (all?) paper products come from.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    Not to mention the bags are usually made from significant amounts of recycled paper. So you're already getting a second use out of the material. I feel like in the 80's when there was a big "paper kills trees" moral panic the plastic companies took advantage of that to market plastic, and paper companies started recycling their products and developing fast-growing pulpwood species to plantation farm sustainably. And now we could absolutely go back to paper with fewer ill effects. It's probably better for the planet because even if your paper bags end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch something will decompose them into their organic constituents very rapidly and they won't agglomerate into rocks on beaches somewhere.
esskay 2y ago
PLA (biodegradable corn) is often sold as being a good biodegradable plastic. It ommits the part where its only biodegradable in a high pressure, high heat industrial composter. If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  If the PLA is plasticizer-free and derived from vegetation, it can be burned without pollution. It's not like there's a bunch of chlorine or fluorine atoms in the molecule. > If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time. More interested in learning to make it myself. Daughter and I have been extracting starch from potatoes, and we can reliably ferment to lactic acid. Distillation's trickier, and everything else after that's just bugshit crazy. Have to ferment M. hexanoica, it needs to be fed very specific nutrients to produce capryilic acid, extraction of that will be even more insane, and there seems to be no good source for tin in modern life. I've found a dozen tin scrapping videos on Youtube where you watch them and think to yourself "did they just screw around with soluble lead salts without even mentioning it?". Also, I've had spontaneous combustion in our compost before. Maybe your compost game's just weak. Be sure to spread grass clippings until they're no longer deeper than about 3".
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I'd argue burning it is worse then sequestering it.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      Ok. Argue that. What about it is worse than sequestering it? If microplastics are so bad, you'd rather it just sit there slowly breaking down into small chains of lactic acid, and those leaching into ground and surface water and blowing around int he wind?
      - Workaccount2 2y ago
robrichard 2y ago
Here in New Jersey, paper bags were banned
SoftTalker 2y ago
I seem to remember that a big issue motivating getting rid of paper bags (at the time) was "saving trees."
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  It's a pity that our school system has failed so many people by not teaching them some basics of economics, which is that the supply of trees is elastic and can increase with demand/price, and will decrease with decreased demand/price. Not using trees will only incentivize people to re-allocate land that was used for the cultivation of trees to the cultivation of something else that is higher demand, and thus profitable. The only way that not using paper will save trees is if we stopped all forms of cultivation/farming.
jvanderbot 2y ago
I'd like to see a useful spectrum of classifications between "lasts forever as a pollutant" and "dissolves in water". As in How biodegradeable is it?. I think that would help make distinctions between the many "biodegradeable" options. You want something that is just biodegradeable enough that it doesn't become a forever problem, but not biodegradeable enough that it mixes with food or becomes useless as a food container. The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.
- jpalawaga 2y ago
  protip, store your compost (with bag) in the freezer. not only will it not smell, but your bag won't degrade until you go and take it out.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Brilliant! Thank you.
- julianlam 2y ago
  That's a little weird for a bag designed to hold biodegradable products... have you tried other brands? I buy mine from Costco and they easily last 2-3 days (the amount of time it usually takes for the pail inside my house to fill up). I take care not to dump wet items in, though not exhaustively so, e.g. coffee grounds are OK, sauce and liquids go down the drain.
joecool1029 2y ago
> Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Seems like it caught on in road deicer? I remember seeing ice melt sold with it up in ontario: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/01/beet-juice-deicer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2022/01/beet-juice-deicer/
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  Problem is it’s pretty low value. Better than dumping it down the drain, but barely. Better than salt for surrounding plants/waterways, but the salt spreaders don’t pay that cost.
tw04 2y ago
> But stores went with the cheaper solution. Right, because a business will almost always take the cheapest option possible unless there is direct customer pushback. It turns out consumers are really bad about thinking about long term (think decades) consequences that don’t immediately provide negative feedback. Which is why we have government, to protect society from risks that may happen over a longer period of time or fall out of their direct control. Think: the EPA.
fuzztester 2y ago
>Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. In India and other countries where sugarcane is grown, people use bagasse (a byproduct of crushing sugarcane for making sugar) for various purposes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse
ruffrey 2y ago
There is a company called Genomatica that is working on this problem specifically for 20 years, and has started to gain ground. Turning waste sugar into nylon plastic and other products.

by rmason 2y ago

dtx1 2y ago

> No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution. Plastic Bags were banned here in Germany (Maybe EU?) so now you can get either Paper Bags or Plastic Bags made from recycled plastic water bottles. To be quite honest: The paper bags suck because they are fragile and the recycled bags are expensive.

Abroszka 2y ago
I think it's working as intended. It incentivises buying a good quality plastics or cloth bag and reuse.
- yojo 2y ago
  Cloth bags are problematic. The Danish EPA put the break-even on cotton bags at 7,100 re-uses (or 20,000 for organic)[1]. Most people won’t shop enough in their life to pay back that organic cotton bag - reusing twice a week, it will take you 200 years before you break even. 1: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... - see section 6.3 for reuse numbers
ajb 2y ago
It depends on the paper. Some takeaways round here seem to come in very robust paper bags, although takeaway is perhaps not as challenging as a full bag of groceries.

dougdimmadome 2y ago

In Ireland a few years ago a plastic bag levy was introduced. If you want a plastic bag at the checkout, you have to pay 5c for each one. Now everyone has reusable shopping bags they bring to the stores. The bags are much more rugged than single use plastic bags or paper, and reuse is better than recycling. However, I think shopping bags are probably not the intended market for this stuff, and the need is more to replace the plastic wrapping that covers food. There have been efforts here and in the UK to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place but there will continue to be places where we still need it for a while

michael_vo 2y ago
Same in Canada. The reusable bags that the stores sell are 5-20$. You get hit once with that and you'll start bringing your own bags. It's actually really simple to influence human behavior with pricing!
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage). Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
  - maccard 2y ago
    Have you a source for this? Because all the published info I’ve seen says that it is great and it works as intended.
    - alistairSH 2y ago
      https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01946-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01946-6 I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse. IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.

spinach 2y ago

Paper bags might be biodegradable, but then we have issues with deforestation for the material.

parineum 2y ago
Carbon capturing tree farms are where most (all?) paper products come from.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Not to mention the bags are usually made from significant amounts of recycled paper. So you're already getting a second use out of the material. I feel like in the 80's when there was a big "paper kills trees" moral panic the plastic companies took advantage of that to market plastic, and paper companies started recycling their products and developing fast-growing pulpwood species to plantation farm sustainably. And now we could absolutely go back to paper with fewer ill effects. It's probably better for the planet because even if your paper bags end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch something will decompose them into their organic constituents very rapidly and they won't agglomerate into rocks on beaches somewhere.

esskay 2y ago

PLA (biodegradable corn) is often sold as being a good biodegradable plastic. It ommits the part where its only biodegradable in a high pressure, high heat industrial composter. If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
If the PLA is plasticizer-free and derived from vegetation, it can be burned without pollution. It's not like there's a bunch of chlorine or fluorine atoms in the molecule. > If you put PLA in your home composter it'll still be exactly as it was in 5 years time. More interested in learning to make it myself. Daughter and I have been extracting starch from potatoes, and we can reliably ferment to lactic acid. Distillation's trickier, and everything else after that's just bugshit crazy. Have to ferment M. hexanoica, it needs to be fed very specific nutrients to produce capryilic acid, extraction of that will be even more insane, and there seems to be no good source for tin in modern life. I've found a dozen tin scrapping videos on Youtube where you watch them and think to yourself "did they just screw around with soluble lead salts without even mentioning it?". Also, I've had spontaneous combustion in our compost before. Maybe your compost game's just weak. Be sure to spread grass clippings until they're no longer deeper than about 3".
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I'd argue burning it is worse then sequestering it.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    Ok. Argue that. What about it is worse than sequestering it? If microplastics are so bad, you'd rather it just sit there slowly breaking down into small chains of lactic acid, and those leaching into ground and surface water and blowing around int he wind?
    - Workaccount2 2y ago

robrichard 2y ago

Here in New Jersey, paper bags were banned

SoftTalker 2y ago

I seem to remember that a big issue motivating getting rid of paper bags (at the time) was "saving trees."

flanked-evergl 2y ago
It's a pity that our school system has failed so many people by not teaching them some basics of economics, which is that the supply of trees is elastic and can increase with demand/price, and will decrease with decreased demand/price. Not using trees will only incentivize people to re-allocate land that was used for the cultivation of trees to the cultivation of something else that is higher demand, and thus profitable. The only way that not using paper will save trees is if we stopped all forms of cultivation/farming.

jvanderbot 2y ago

I'd like to see a useful spectrum of classifications between "lasts forever as a pollutant" and "dissolves in water". As in How biodegradeable is it?. I think that would help make distinctions between the many "biodegradeable" options. You want something that is just biodegradeable enough that it doesn't become a forever problem, but not biodegradeable enough that it mixes with food or becomes useless as a food container. The worst offender is compostable bags: They can hold trash for about 1 day before they become the trash.

jpalawaga 2y ago
protip, store your compost (with bag) in the freezer. not only will it not smell, but your bag won't degrade until you go and take it out.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Brilliant! Thank you.
julianlam 2y ago
That's a little weird for a bag designed to hold biodegradable products... have you tried other brands? I buy mine from Costco and they easily last 2-3 days (the amount of time it usually takes for the pail inside my house to fill up). I take care not to dump wet items in, though not exhaustively so, e.g. coffee grounds are OK, sauce and liquids go down the drain.

joecool1029 2y ago

> Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. Nothing has ever really caught on. Seems like it caught on in road deicer? I remember seeing ice melt sold with it up in ontario: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/01/beet-juice-deicer/ https://modernfarmer.com/2022/01/beet-juice-deicer/

Scoundreller 2y ago
Problem is it’s pretty low value. Better than dumping it down the drain, but barely. Better than salt for surrounding plants/waterways, but the salt spreaders don’t pay that cost.

tw04 2y ago

> But stores went with the cheaper solution. Right, because a business will almost always take the cheapest option possible unless there is direct customer pushback. It turns out consumers are really bad about thinking about long term (think decades) consequences that don’t immediately provide negative feedback. Which is why we have government, to protect society from risks that may happen over a longer period of time or fall out of their direct control. Think: the EPA.

fuzztester 2y ago

>Here in Michigan we have been trying to find a use for sugar beet waste for over forty years. In India and other countries where sugarcane is grown, people use bagasse (a byproduct of crushing sugarcane for making sugar) for various purposes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse

ruffrey 2y ago

There is a company called Genomatica that is working on this problem specifically for 20 years, and has started to gain ground. Turning waste sugar into nylon plastic and other products.