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Your remark hints at the fundamental problem with plastics: lifespan and chemical resistance. We worked so hard to develop plastics which have a long lifespan a

Your remark hints at the fundamental problem with plastics: lifespan and chemical resistance. We worked so hard to develop plastics which have a long lifespan and high chemical resistance which makes them extremely versatile for containers and structures we don’t want to fall apart on their own. At the same time, it’s these exact same properties of plastics which make them non-biodegradable and resistant to being broken down by the human body’s immune system and waste removal processes. The advantages we developed them for are also the disadvantages we’re trying to replace them for. In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer. Something that’s indestructible while it’s in use but can be decomposed and recycled instantly with the push of a button. This is a paradox!

permo-w 2y ago
is it a paradox? how unlikely is it that there's a plastic substance out there that can be quickly dissolved to bio-degradable substances but only using a relatively cheap and non-toxic solvent not present in most use cases for plastic? that's not a paradox, it's an engineering problem.
silisili 2y ago
It's what makes sense. I don't think it's that hard given materials available, I think companies just forego putting thought into it because customers don't care and will claim their products are weak and not long lasting, while having to spend more money for the problem. Things like sandwich containers/wrappers shouldn't even be plastic to begin with. A salad container should probably not have a lifespan of much more than a week or so. A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid. I'd love to see more alternatives pop up in the short term, whether it's natural wax paper, banana leaves, hollowed out shells or gourds, some type of thin wood, etc. But plastic is just so cheap and ubiquitous it's a hard thing to convince a company to do.
- c22 2y ago
  > A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid. As someone who once received a beverage in just such a disposable cup and then left it in my car overnight I have to say screw this idea.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    In Other News: efforts to stem the tide of global pollution with microplastics brought to a halt by slobs who eat in their car. Full Disclosure: I eat in my car.
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    Would you really drink the rest of an opened beverage after it was left in your car overnight, though?
    - atrus 2y ago
      No, but that doesn't mean they want it spilled all over their car either.
analog31 2y ago
Those properties also coincide with being less toxic. Greater chemical reactivity means more unknown stuff gets into your food. Unfortunately, less toxic until its found that they aren't, like PFASs.
threatofrain 2y ago
Plastic containers have many strengths, but if we consider a subset then glass is a competitor. In some sense we can have a great container and not worry about substances leeching into food, it just won't be as lightweight and trivial as plastic.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Would the average consumer be willing to accept the price increase due to the weight of glass containers vs plastic? The heavier glass will cost the vendor more in shipping on top of the container itself. That's shipping from the glass maker to the bottling facility, shipping from the bottling facility to the distribution center, shipping from distro to retail. There could then be additional shipping from retail to consumer. Glass would also be much more susceptible to storage temperatures. Liquids susceptible to temps below freezing could be bad for glass containers without enough room for contents expansion.
  - HappyPanacea 2y ago
    Flexible glass exists, if used in a non-sphere container, the container flexing will allow more volume with same surface area. Using flexible glass as a very thin coating around paper, a container could be kept lightweight and the shipping cheap.
card_zero 2y ago
The article mentions a hydrophobic coating, like a fence around the plastic: once breached by a scratch (or by being crushed) the coating no longer keeps salt water out. I wonder whether the coating itself is made from something terrible. In principle, though, there's your "push of a button": throw the plastic bottle in a trash compactor, break through the coating, now it dissolves in the sea.
- culopatin 2y ago
  So like cardboard boxes then.
amelius 2y ago
No, we did a bad job. Rocks are also resistant against many things. Yet, they are not as much a problem.
- chongli 2y ago
  Asbestos is a rock. It makes a fantastic insulation (pretty much fireproof) but it's such a huge problem [1] that we have specialized workers who remove it from old buildings and perform the necessary cleanup to make the area safe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia
  - amelius 2y ago
    Yes, that's __one__ type of rock. Not sure what you want to prove here.
userbinator 2y ago
In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer. ...and I hope by "we" you mean the owner and not the corporations pushing planned obsolescence aggressively, because that's exactly what they're going to do with things like this.
- chongli 2y ago
  I mean we as a society. We want really good containers for our food and other goods we purchase but we don't want a mountain of indestructible waste piling up everywhere and causing pollution and health problems. Before the invention of plastics we didn't have that. We had paper, metal, wood, and glass containers for food. They were either water susceptible (paper, wood, and metal) or expensive to manufacture and heavy (metal and glass) or even brittle and somewhat dangerous (glass but also metal with sharp edges). We still use paper and some metal for a lot of food packaging today, but it's always mixed with plastic. Plastic bag inserts, plastic coating on paper packaging, plastic film to act as a barrier between the food and the paper, etc. Even the lowly paper coffee cup is coated with PTFE to make it waterproof!
  - HappyPanacea 2y ago
    A thin coat of flexible glass around lightweight biodegradable material (like paper) might work - it is lightweight, nonreactive, not brittle or dangerous but might be somewhat more expensive to manufacture.
    - chongli 2y ago
      That would be amazing. I'm not sure how that would be possible though. Soda lime glass, our most commonly used glass, has a melting point that begins at 700C (~1300F) and doesn't become very workable until much higher temperatures than that! This is far too hot to be anywhere near most ordinary kinds of paper. Other glasses have much higher melting points than that, with fused silica melting at 2200C!
aeonik 2y ago
This is true, but there are escape hatches to this, so it's not a true paradox. A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and is more impact resistant, we'd be halfway there. Also, if we could easily melt down the plastic without degradation, that would be nice as well. Also, if we could easily dissolve the plastic in a solvent that wasn't highly toxic. That would be great too. Basically if we could make the containers out something that makes it easy to reshape and reuse, we could convince more people to collect most of the waste. It would be more valuable as an input to many different crafting or manufacturing processes. But also, wood is kind of polymer, and chemical is pretty similar to plastic, and there are a lot of different kind of plastics out there, they are all pretty different, so it's a bit hard to generalize in this area.
jorvi 2y ago
It's not really a fundamental problem if plastic was only used for things that are meant to stay whole a long time. Say an RFID tag or a piece of trim on a car. Currently we put supermarket-made perishable salads in a plastic container, we wrap the container in plastic, we put a plastic strip lid on it, and we put the oil and nuts in two separate plastic wrappers inside the plastic container. That is ludicrous insanity for something that perishes in a couple of days max.

permo-w 2y ago

is it a paradox? how unlikely is it that there's a plastic substance out there that can be quickly dissolved to bio-degradable substances but only using a relatively cheap and non-toxic solvent not present in most use cases for plastic? that's not a paradox, it's an engineering problem.

silisili 2y ago

It's what makes sense. I don't think it's that hard given materials available, I think companies just forego putting thought into it because customers don't care and will claim their products are weak and not long lasting, while having to spend more money for the problem. Things like sandwich containers/wrappers shouldn't even be plastic to begin with. A salad container should probably not have a lifespan of much more than a week or so. A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid. I'd love to see more alternatives pop up in the short term, whether it's natural wax paper, banana leaves, hollowed out shells or gourds, some type of thin wood, etc. But plastic is just so cheap and ubiquitous it's a hard thing to convince a company to do.

c22 2y ago
> A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid. As someone who once received a beverage in just such a disposable cup and then left it in my car overnight I have to say screw this idea.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  In Other News: efforts to stem the tide of global pollution with microplastics brought to a halt by slobs who eat in their car. Full Disclosure: I eat in my car.
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  Would you really drink the rest of an opened beverage after it was left in your car overnight, though?
  - atrus 2y ago
    No, but that doesn't mean they want it spilled all over their car either.

analog31 2y ago

Those properties also coincide with being less toxic. Greater chemical reactivity means more unknown stuff gets into your food. Unfortunately, less toxic until its found that they aren't, like PFASs.

threatofrain 2y ago

Plastic containers have many strengths, but if we consider a subset then glass is a competitor. In some sense we can have a great container and not worry about substances leeching into food, it just won't be as lightweight and trivial as plastic.

dylan604 2y ago
Would the average consumer be willing to accept the price increase due to the weight of glass containers vs plastic? The heavier glass will cost the vendor more in shipping on top of the container itself. That's shipping from the glass maker to the bottling facility, shipping from the bottling facility to the distribution center, shipping from distro to retail. There could then be additional shipping from retail to consumer. Glass would also be much more susceptible to storage temperatures. Liquids susceptible to temps below freezing could be bad for glass containers without enough room for contents expansion.
- HappyPanacea 2y ago
  Flexible glass exists, if used in a non-sphere container, the container flexing will allow more volume with same surface area. Using flexible glass as a very thin coating around paper, a container could be kept lightweight and the shipping cheap.

card_zero 2y ago

The article mentions a hydrophobic coating, like a fence around the plastic: once breached by a scratch (or by being crushed) the coating no longer keeps salt water out. I wonder whether the coating itself is made from something terrible. In principle, though, there's your "push of a button": throw the plastic bottle in a trash compactor, break through the coating, now it dissolves in the sea.

culopatin 2y ago
So like cardboard boxes then.

amelius 2y ago

No, we did a bad job. Rocks are also resistant against many things. Yet, they are not as much a problem.

chongli 2y ago
Asbestos is a rock. It makes a fantastic insulation (pretty much fireproof) but it's such a huge problem [1] that we have specialized workers who remove it from old buildings and perform the necessary cleanup to make the area safe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia
- amelius 2y ago
  Yes, that's __one__ type of rock. Not sure what you want to prove here.

userbinator 2y ago

In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer. ...and I hope by "we" you mean the owner and not the corporations pushing planned obsolescence aggressively, because that's exactly what they're going to do with things like this.

chongli 2y ago
I mean we as a society. We want really good containers for our food and other goods we purchase but we don't want a mountain of indestructible waste piling up everywhere and causing pollution and health problems. Before the invention of plastics we didn't have that. We had paper, metal, wood, and glass containers for food. They were either water susceptible (paper, wood, and metal) or expensive to manufacture and heavy (metal and glass) or even brittle and somewhat dangerous (glass but also metal with sharp edges). We still use paper and some metal for a lot of food packaging today, but it's always mixed with plastic. Plastic bag inserts, plastic coating on paper packaging, plastic film to act as a barrier between the food and the paper, etc. Even the lowly paper coffee cup is coated with PTFE to make it waterproof!
- HappyPanacea 2y ago
  A thin coat of flexible glass around lightweight biodegradable material (like paper) might work - it is lightweight, nonreactive, not brittle or dangerous but might be somewhat more expensive to manufacture.
  - chongli 2y ago
    That would be amazing. I'm not sure how that would be possible though. Soda lime glass, our most commonly used glass, has a melting point that begins at 700C (~1300F) and doesn't become very workable until much higher temperatures than that! This is far too hot to be anywhere near most ordinary kinds of paper. Other glasses have much higher melting points than that, with fused silica melting at 2200C!

aeonik 2y ago

This is true, but there are escape hatches to this, so it's not a true paradox. A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and is more impact resistant, we'd be halfway there. Also, if we could easily melt down the plastic without degradation, that would be nice as well. Also, if we could easily dissolve the plastic in a solvent that wasn't highly toxic. That would be great too. Basically if we could make the containers out something that makes it easy to reshape and reuse, we could convince more people to collect most of the waste. It would be more valuable as an input to many different crafting or manufacturing processes. But also, wood is kind of polymer, and chemical is pretty similar to plastic, and there are a lot of different kind of plastics out there, they are all pretty different, so it's a bit hard to generalize in this area.

jorvi 2y ago

It's not really a fundamental problem if plastic was only used for things that are meant to stay whole a long time. Say an RFID tag or a piece of trim on a car. Currently we put supermarket-made perishable salads in a plastic container, we wrap the container in plastic, we put a plastic strip lid on it, and we put the oil and nuts in two separate plastic wrappers inside the plastic container. That is ludicrous insanity for something that perishes in a couple of days max.