10 ms·

Japanese scientists create new plastic that dissolves in saltwater overnight

194 points by bentobean 2y ago

lores 2y ago
Obligatory "it's a big step to production", but we need heaps of new research on biodegradabe plastics by yesterday, so this is hopeful. I wish they'd say what kind of plastic it replaces, though.
nonelog 2y ago
What's the element that will have this invention NOT be killed by the usual suspects, though? It's really not the first time something game-changing has been invented, only for it not be heard of ever again.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  I dunno, I am sure the plastic industry would be thrilled to be able to get around environment concerns.
- thunkingdeep 2y ago
  Realistically? Taxes and tax enforcement. That’s really the only consistent and persistent way to change the incentives of the world’s economies. In most developed economies, the ultra wealthy are able to avoid paying their fair share, and the same goes for large corporations as well. Without fairness, there’s really no easy way to talk about strategy.
  - parineum 2y ago
    What's a fair share? I don't get how this phrase has got ao much traction from the people who are in support of various social safety net programs that are specifically designed to benefit those who don't pay their fair share. If you and I split a pizza and I pay for none but eat half, is that fair? Even if I'm poor and your rich, that's not fair. It might be right, it might be good but it's certainly not fair.
    - thunkingdeep 2y ago
      In the context of taxes and tax enforcement, I have no choice but to assume you are being intentionally obtuse as to what I mean by “fair share”
      - parineum 2y ago
        > In the context of taxes and tax enforcement In the context of politicians rallying their base, it's meant to insinuate the actual antithesis of it's normal meaning. Furthermore, it's a subjective word that means different things to different people so politicians can appeal to everyone's internal definition of fair, which is usually making everyone that makes more money than them pay more. It's a political slogan. It adds nothing to the actual discourse but it does get people out to vote! I guess the only "intentionally obtuse" part of my comment was the "I don't get how this phrase has got so much traction..." part. The "ultra-wealthy" and "corporations" pay plenty of taxes, they just pay it significantly different than you do so that if you want to compare W2s, it looks wrong but that's another disingenuous tool to con you into voting.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Probably the same thing that kills everything- cost and/or durability/usability.
- jerf 2y ago
  Making plastics out of sodium, phosphorus, and guanidinium ions [1] which the link characterizes as a "strong organic base", which is designed to break down and so will do so not just in the ocean, suggests to me that there are enough engineering disadvantages the article is not talking about that we'll probably never see this in real life. It's chemically quite distant from traditional plastics. The ocean may not care about some extra sodium and phosphorus... and then again, if we made enough, maybe it would... but I'll graciously assume for now it wouldn't, but the other places this would inevitably end up breaking down would probably not appreciate the resulting mess. I have to imagine any quantity of this in a fire near humans would be a fairly substantial problem of some sort. I don't know exactly what would pop out but it's got some awfully "exciting" feedstock going in to it with that sodium and phosphorus. [1]: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#section=Computed-Properties https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#sectio...
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  The guys marketing these things are really hoping that you have forgotten the law of conservation of mass. The ultimate problem with these dissolving plastics is that they are still plastic after they dissolve, it's just that they are invisible microplastics instead of visible objects. They largely aren't captured at WWTP and end up in the water supply.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  This isn't game changing? We ALREADY have biodegradable containers that degrade in salt water overnight and can be prevented from degrading with a coating that can then be breached by a scratch: It's called paper. I've used paper products with a hydrophobic coating (which means plastic, consumers don't like wax coatings that much) for decades. They don't solve the problem, because the plastic coating still fills us with microplastics. Maybe it cuts down on how much plastic is produced and thrown away, but we could have done this 20 years ago! There's no conspiracy thwarting "game changing" research to maintain some status quo, though there ARE often political factions who push for maintenance of the status quo. This is marketing. The people who write this stuff are marketers and they usually don't understand the research in the first place! This is why, despite everyone insisting that there are hundreds of "This will revolutionize batteries" that everyone complains never materialize, we have actually seen them materialize as lithium batteries like doubling in capacity over a decade. The marketing material overpromised, though the research was fruitful. Because it's marketing.
hedayet 2y ago
This is great progress! If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact. It's encouraging to see smart people attacking this hard problem persistently, delivering new solutions, and inching us closer to a real breakthrough with each iteration.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact. I would understand if it reduces plastic pollution, but how could it reduce usage?
  - kikoreis 2y ago
    Through regulation?
  - foundart 2y ago
    I read it as “by replacing use of some hard plastics”.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    If this a good substitute for "hard plastic" then it could reduce usage by replacing it.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      But wouldn't the thing we're replacing it with also be a hard plastic? Then we're reducing the use of more persistent hard plastics but we're not reducing hard plastic use overall.
goda90 2y ago
This is a total guess, but I imagine some of our biggest uses for single-use plastic involves food containers, medical equipment, and protecting things from the elements during transit. A lot of times that means exposure to salty solutions. Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast.
- nonelog 2y ago
  > Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast. They addressed that issue, it's in the article.
  - tbalsam 2y ago
    I don't think they really did? A single scratch to cause it to break down doesn't seem like it would really be a scalable solution for any kind of mass produced material like this. Would cause chaos if any individual container went bad in a shipment, so it's not really addressed I feel. OP's concerns still stand.
    - directevolve 2y ago
      The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application, and identifying applications that are tolerant to failure of the plastic or not exposed to salt water.
      - permo-w 2y ago
        >The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material
        directevolve 2y ago
        If the hydrophobic material has different properties than the plastic, they can complement each other. For example, soda cans have an inner coating that eliminates a soda pop-aluminum interface, preserving flavor and protecting the structural integrity of the can. By analogy, we can imagine sheets of this material where nearly all the mass is the degradable plastic, and a thin film of coating is enough to preserve it adequately for its purpose in the product where it’s being used.
jokoon 2y ago
Not sure if that thing could be used as food packaging, since food has salt and water. Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.
- porphyra 2y ago
  Also human hand sweat has both salt and water so anything that requires a human to carry them might not be suitable.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > There’s one major hurdle with any degradable plastic material of course: what if it comes into contact with the catalyst for its destruction before you want it to? A plastic cup is no good if certain liquids can dissolve it, after all. > In this case, the team found that applying hydrophobic coatings prevented any early breaking down of the material. When you eventually want to dispose of it, a simple scratch on the surface was enough to let the saltwater back in, allowing the material to dissolve just as quickly as the non-coated sheets.
  - Ancalagon 2y ago
    Is the coating made of PFAS, or wax?
    - 6177c40f 2y ago
      Parylene C, a chlorocarbon: [1] > Derivatives of parylene can be obtained by replacing hydrogen atoms on the phenyl ring or the aliphatic bridge by other functional groups. The most common of these variants is parylene C, which has one hydrogen atom in the aryl ring replaced by chlorine. [2] [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1782 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1782 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parylene#Permeability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parylene#Permeability
      - pas 2y ago
        it seems there's even a biodegradable version https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/705 https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/7...
nilslindemann 2y ago
I love the idea, but we could use glass, cardboard, wood, fabric for 90% of the things we are currently packaging with plastic. The cheese I am just eating not just has plastic around, but even plastic between every single cheese slice. Stuns me that wasting resources like this does not get taxed.
- skybrian 2y ago
  If an alternative is more expensive, it seems like we should at least consider whether it’s also wasting more resources? I would want to see the comparison done well, rather than simply assuming that plastic must be worse.
  - honkycat 2y ago
    We don't bake cost of proper disposal into materials, that is why plastic is so cheap. The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE. Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      Cost of disposal for plastic is very small. You can get it into a well-made landfill for a couple pennies per pound in the US. Charging manufacturers an extra little fraction of a penny for an item isn't a bad idea but it wouldn't affect much. What matters is government desire to handle trash properly.
      - leafmeal 2y ago
        If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics. I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.
jerf 2y ago
"An artist's impression of the new plastic, showing the strong bonds above the water and how they break down when submerged in saltwater" No, that's an AI image. Which is not itself a problem, but it's also useless garbage because neither the AI, nor the person generating it, appear to understand what is actually happening, and consequently the image is literally worse than useless. Image has what appear to be benzene rings, although the AI is clearly crossing that concept with neurons, but sodium hexametaphosphate has a fairly different shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate that I would expect an artist to pick up on... and of course the cross-contamination of the neuron concept is just wrong. And even by strictly non-scientific standards, the ocean having two distinct surfaces, one below another, is just unsightly and obviously wrong. Alternatively, this plastic really does rip holes in the ocean's surface and directly expose The Murky Depths to the surface world in a geometrically anomalous manner, in which case for C'thulu's sake we should probably never manufacture this stuff in any quantity. I won't go so far as to say AI image generation shouldn't be used here, but this is a nominally educational context. It needs to be screened by someone who can make sure it actually means something other than "you are a dummy who can't handle too much text in a single block so here's some bling to stab your dopamine receptors so you can bear the terrible drudgery of continuing to read".
- 6177c40f 2y ago
  Looks like it comes from the original RIKEN article [1], where they call it an "artistic rendering" instead of an "artist's impression." More accurate, I suppose, but I wish people would just actually say if an image is AI generated or not, at least for the sake of clarity. [1] https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_1/index.html https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_...
  - alphan0n 2y ago
    The original [0](PDF, Japanese) was published in November 2024 and features a similar but not identical rendering. I don’t think the original is AI generated at all. [0]https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400252514.pdf https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400252514.pdf
jklinger410 2y ago
Excited to never see this technology get used!
honkycat 2y ago
The fact we haven't globally banned single use plastic is incredibly stupid.
foundart 2y ago
What a great development. Commenters have noted various challenges that will need to be addressed but they seem largely solvable to me. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this as it moves from the lab to real applications.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nashashmi 2y ago
Best placement for this plastic is to be in a composite of other materials like cotton fiber.
nashashmi 2y ago
Looks like we can have plastic straws shamelessly now. And plastic cutlery as well.
mirawelner 2y ago
Every week I hear about a new solution to plastic. Every week more microplastics end up in my brain. I feel like we are not solving the problem.
- userbinator 2y ago
  There never has been a problem. It's only the fact that the industry has found a new virtue-signaling way to get you to consume more that they started collaborating with extremists in pushing the "plastics bad" propaganda.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deadbabe 2y ago
Only three things in life are certain: taxes, death, and microplastics. And I’m not sure about the former.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Honestly an ideal plastic is one that completely dissolves in water/salt water in 5-20 years. You want durability, just not the ability to last for tens of thousands of years.
jimnotgym 2y ago
I'm worried this will cause a buildup of plastic in arctic regions during the summer
- nonelog 2y ago
  Stop worrying and read the article, it contains the answer.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
Actual source (source of source of source): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782 More research from Takuzo Aida, which is quite impressive to read how they got there: https://www.science.org/authored-by/Aida/Takuzo https://www.science.org/authored-by/Aida/Takuzo
- araes 2y ago
  Science article also has some test apparatus images, heat processed finished plastic images, and images of the plastic under attack by several different solvents (hexane, CH2Cl2, THF, Acetone, MeOH, DMF). Also has stress-strain curves of the material, and behavior when used in glued together boxes for packaging. Generally, if it actually gets made in quantity, seems like it would be an improvement for somewhere like Japan. Last time I read about Japan on this type of subject, it was examining the outlets of metropolitan streams, and the huge quantities of trash that people just wash down to the oceans. (Notably, from the perspective of considerate people trying to figure out ways to keep the beaches clean and deal with the upstream polluters).
ost-ing 2y ago
Pollution is still seen as some technical problem even in 2025 but im not convinced. I think for decades I’ve read about some miracle substance that is environmentally friendly and can replace trad plastics. Decades later still virtually no practical movement in the space can be seen.
- parineum 2y ago
  That's because this news is reported the same way that new battery breakthroughs are reported. Creating a material in a lab is far from mass production and field testing.

194 points by bentobean 2y ago

Obligatory "it's a big step to production", but we need heaps of new research on biodegradabe plastics by yesterday, so this is hopeful. I wish they'd say what kind of plastic it replaces, though.

nonelog 2y ago

What's the element that will have this invention NOT be killed by the usual suspects, though? It's really not the first time something game-changing has been invented, only for it not be heard of ever again.

DanielHB 2y ago
I dunno, I am sure the plastic industry would be thrilled to be able to get around environment concerns.
thunkingdeep 2y ago
Realistically? Taxes and tax enforcement. That’s really the only consistent and persistent way to change the incentives of the world’s economies. In most developed economies, the ultra wealthy are able to avoid paying their fair share, and the same goes for large corporations as well. Without fairness, there’s really no easy way to talk about strategy.
- parineum 2y ago
  What's a fair share? I don't get how this phrase has got ao much traction from the people who are in support of various social safety net programs that are specifically designed to benefit those who don't pay their fair share. If you and I split a pizza and I pay for none but eat half, is that fair? Even if I'm poor and your rich, that's not fair. It might be right, it might be good but it's certainly not fair.
  - thunkingdeep 2y ago
    In the context of taxes and tax enforcement, I have no choice but to assume you are being intentionally obtuse as to what I mean by “fair share”
    - parineum 2y ago
      > In the context of taxes and tax enforcement In the context of politicians rallying their base, it's meant to insinuate the actual antithesis of it's normal meaning. Furthermore, it's a subjective word that means different things to different people so politicians can appeal to everyone's internal definition of fair, which is usually making everyone that makes more money than them pay more. It's a political slogan. It adds nothing to the actual discourse but it does get people out to vote! I guess the only "intentionally obtuse" part of my comment was the "I don't get how this phrase has got so much traction..." part. The "ultra-wealthy" and "corporations" pay plenty of taxes, they just pay it significantly different than you do so that if you want to compare W2s, it looks wrong but that's another disingenuous tool to con you into voting.
Mistletoe 2y ago
Probably the same thing that kills everything- cost and/or durability/usability.
jerf 2y ago
Making plastics out of sodium, phosphorus, and guanidinium ions [1] which the link characterizes as a "strong organic base", which is designed to break down and so will do so not just in the ocean, suggests to me that there are enough engineering disadvantages the article is not talking about that we'll probably never see this in real life. It's chemically quite distant from traditional plastics. The ocean may not care about some extra sodium and phosphorus... and then again, if we made enough, maybe it would... but I'll graciously assume for now it wouldn't, but the other places this would inevitably end up breaking down would probably not appreciate the resulting mess. I have to imagine any quantity of this in a fire near humans would be a fairly substantial problem of some sort. I don't know exactly what would pop out but it's got some awfully "exciting" feedstock going in to it with that sodium and phosphorus. [1]: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#section=Computed-Properties https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#sectio...
jabroni_salad 2y ago
The guys marketing these things are really hoping that you have forgotten the law of conservation of mass. The ultimate problem with these dissolving plastics is that they are still plastic after they dissolve, it's just that they are invisible microplastics instead of visible objects. They largely aren't captured at WWTP and end up in the water supply.
mrguyorama 2y ago
This isn't game changing? We ALREADY have biodegradable containers that degrade in salt water overnight and can be prevented from degrading with a coating that can then be breached by a scratch: It's called paper. I've used paper products with a hydrophobic coating (which means plastic, consumers don't like wax coatings that much) for decades. They don't solve the problem, because the plastic coating still fills us with microplastics. Maybe it cuts down on how much plastic is produced and thrown away, but we could have done this 20 years ago! There's no conspiracy thwarting "game changing" research to maintain some status quo, though there ARE often political factions who push for maintenance of the status quo. This is marketing. The people who write this stuff are marketers and they usually don't understand the research in the first place! This is why, despite everyone insisting that there are hundreds of "This will revolutionize batteries" that everyone complains never materialize, we have actually seen them materialize as lithium batteries like doubling in capacity over a decade. The marketing material overpromised, though the research was fruitful. Because it's marketing.

hedayet 2y ago

This is great progress! If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact. It's encouraging to see smart people attacking this hard problem persistently, delivering new solutions, and inching us closer to a real breakthrough with each iteration.

krisoft 2y ago
> If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact. I would understand if it reduces plastic pollution, but how could it reduce usage?
- kikoreis 2y ago
  Through regulation?
- foundart 2y ago
  I read it as “by replacing use of some hard plastics”.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  If this a good substitute for "hard plastic" then it could reduce usage by replacing it.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    But wouldn't the thing we're replacing it with also be a hard plastic? Then we're reducing the use of more persistent hard plastics but we're not reducing hard plastic use overall.

goda90 2y ago

This is a total guess, but I imagine some of our biggest uses for single-use plastic involves food containers, medical equipment, and protecting things from the elements during transit. A lot of times that means exposure to salty solutions. Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast.

nonelog 2y ago
> Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast. They addressed that issue, it's in the article.
- tbalsam 2y ago
  I don't think they really did? A single scratch to cause it to break down doesn't seem like it would really be a scalable solution for any kind of mass produced material like this. Would cause chaos if any individual container went bad in a shipment, so it's not really addressed I feel. OP's concerns still stand.
  - directevolve 2y ago
    The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application, and identifying applications that are tolerant to failure of the plastic or not exposed to salt water.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      >The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material
      - directevolve 2y ago
        If the hydrophobic material has different properties than the plastic, they can complement each other. For example, soda cans have an inner coating that eliminates a soda pop-aluminum interface, preserving flavor and protecting the structural integrity of the can. By analogy, we can imagine sheets of this material where nearly all the mass is the degradable plastic, and a thin film of coating is enough to preserve it adequately for its purpose in the product where it’s being used.

jokoon 2y ago

Not sure if that thing could be used as food packaging, since food has salt and water. Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.

porphyra 2y ago
Also human hand sweat has both salt and water so anything that requires a human to carry them might not be suitable.
barbazoo 2y ago
> There’s one major hurdle with any degradable plastic material of course: what if it comes into contact with the catalyst for its destruction before you want it to? A plastic cup is no good if certain liquids can dissolve it, after all. > In this case, the team found that applying hydrophobic coatings prevented any early breaking down of the material. When you eventually want to dispose of it, a simple scratch on the surface was enough to let the saltwater back in, allowing the material to dissolve just as quickly as the non-coated sheets.
- Ancalagon 2y ago
  Is the coating made of PFAS, or wax?
  - 6177c40f 2y ago
    Parylene C, a chlorocarbon: [1] > Derivatives of parylene can be obtained by replacing hydrogen atoms on the phenyl ring or the aliphatic bridge by other functional groups. The most common of these variants is parylene C, which has one hydrogen atom in the aryl ring replaced by chlorine. [2] [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1782 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1782 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parylene#Permeability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parylene#Permeability
    - pas 2y ago
      it seems there's even a biodegradable version https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/705 https://www.kit-technology.de/en/technology-offers/details/7...

nilslindemann 2y ago

I love the idea, but we could use glass, cardboard, wood, fabric for 90% of the things we are currently packaging with plastic. The cheese I am just eating not just has plastic around, but even plastic between every single cheese slice. Stuns me that wasting resources like this does not get taxed.

skybrian 2y ago
If an alternative is more expensive, it seems like we should at least consider whether it’s also wasting more resources? I would want to see the comparison done well, rather than simply assuming that plastic must be worse.
- honkycat 2y ago
  We don't bake cost of proper disposal into materials, that is why plastic is so cheap. The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE. Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Cost of disposal for plastic is very small. You can get it into a well-made landfill for a couple pennies per pound in the US. Charging manufacturers an extra little fraction of a penny for an item isn't a bad idea but it wouldn't affect much. What matters is government desire to handle trash properly.
    - leafmeal 2y ago
      If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics. I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.

jerf 2y ago

"An artist's impression of the new plastic, showing the strong bonds above the water and how they break down when submerged in saltwater" No, that's an AI image. Which is not itself a problem, but it's also useless garbage because neither the AI, nor the person generating it, appear to understand what is actually happening, and consequently the image is literally worse than useless. Image has what appear to be benzene rings, although the AI is clearly crossing that concept with neurons, but sodium hexametaphosphate has a fairly different shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate that I would expect an artist to pick up on... and of course the cross-contamination of the neuron concept is just wrong. And even by strictly non-scientific standards, the ocean having two distinct surfaces, one below another, is just unsightly and obviously wrong. Alternatively, this plastic really does rip holes in the ocean's surface and directly expose The Murky Depths to the surface world in a geometrically anomalous manner, in which case for C'thulu's sake we should probably never manufacture this stuff in any quantity. I won't go so far as to say AI image generation shouldn't be used here, but this is a nominally educational context. It needs to be screened by someone who can make sure it actually means something other than "you are a dummy who can't handle too much text in a single block so here's some bling to stab your dopamine receptors so you can bear the terrible drudgery of continuing to read".

6177c40f 2y ago
Looks like it comes from the original RIKEN article [1], where they call it an "artistic rendering" instead of an "artist's impression." More accurate, I suppose, but I wish people would just actually say if an image is AI generated or not, at least for the sake of clarity. [1] https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_1/index.html https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_...
- alphan0n 2y ago
  The original [0](PDF, Japanese) was published in November 2024 and features a similar but not identical rendering. I don’t think the original is AI generated at all. [0]https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400252514.pdf https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400252514.pdf

jklinger410 2y ago

Excited to never see this technology get used!

honkycat 2y ago

The fact we haven't globally banned single use plastic is incredibly stupid.

foundart 2y ago

What a great development. Commenters have noted various challenges that will need to be addressed but they seem largely solvable to me. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this as it moves from the lab to real applications.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nashashmi 2y ago

Best placement for this plastic is to be in a composite of other materials like cotton fiber.

nashashmi 2y ago

Looks like we can have plastic straws shamelessly now. And plastic cutlery as well.

mirawelner 2y ago

Every week I hear about a new solution to plastic. Every week more microplastics end up in my brain. I feel like we are not solving the problem.

userbinator 2y ago
There never has been a problem. It's only the fact that the industry has found a new virtue-signaling way to get you to consume more that they started collaborating with extremists in pushing the "plastics bad" propaganda.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

deadbabe 2y ago

Only three things in life are certain: taxes, death, and microplastics. And I’m not sure about the former.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Honestly an ideal plastic is one that completely dissolves in water/salt water in 5-20 years. You want durability, just not the ability to last for tens of thousands of years.

jimnotgym 2y ago

I'm worried this will cause a buildup of plastic in arctic regions during the summer

nonelog 2y ago
Stop worrying and read the article, it contains the answer.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago

Actual source (source of source of source): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782 More research from Takuzo Aida, which is quite impressive to read how they got there: https://www.science.org/authored-by/Aida/Takuzo https://www.science.org/authored-by/Aida/Takuzo

araes 2y ago
Science article also has some test apparatus images, heat processed finished plastic images, and images of the plastic under attack by several different solvents (hexane, CH2Cl2, THF, Acetone, MeOH, DMF). Also has stress-strain curves of the material, and behavior when used in glued together boxes for packaging. Generally, if it actually gets made in quantity, seems like it would be an improvement for somewhere like Japan. Last time I read about Japan on this type of subject, it was examining the outlets of metropolitan streams, and the huge quantities of trash that people just wash down to the oceans. (Notably, from the perspective of considerate people trying to figure out ways to keep the beaches clean and deal with the upstream polluters).

ost-ing 2y ago

Pollution is still seen as some technical problem even in 2025 but im not convinced. I think for decades I’ve read about some miracle substance that is environmentally friendly and can replace trad plastics. Decades later still virtually no practical movement in the space can be seen.

parineum 2y ago
That's because this news is reported the same way that new battery breakthroughs are reported. Creating a material in a lab is far from mass production and field testing.