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Transparency isn't the reason we use so much plastic. We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. We like it because it lasts thousands of
by fastball 1y ago
Transparency isn't the reason we use so much plastic. We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products. Or it will stick around in various components without needing to worry about rain and such.
What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.
- mjevans 1y agoPlastic likes: 'waterproof' (fluid proof for many things) Difficult to shatter (drop safe-ish) Shows stuff off 'nicely' Priced inexpensively (damage to the commons is not factored in...)
- verelo 1y agoIt’s almost like we just gave up on making glass less breakable when we found plastic
- Henchman21 1y agoI'm haunted by a story I read once, about East German beer glasses that were unbreakable. They developed them because of a serious shortage of raw materials as I recall. I would be happy to buy two dozen and pass them on to my family when I die. But that's the problem, isn't it? The lack of sales. Just ask Pyrex, I guess?
- bnc319 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173177
- Henchman21 1y agoAha! I'd forgotten where I'd read it, but it makes sense it was here. Thank you!
- nine_k 1y agoA plastic bottle is not just less breakable. It's also way lighter weight than glass, and harder to dent and pierce than aluminum.
- cma 1y agoAlso needs to be robust to salt and acid, aluminum cans have a plastic lining.
- kyriakos 1y agoPart of the reason that a lot of drinks in aluminium have short shelf life. Acidity eventually makes aluminium leak into the drink.
- saagarjha 1y agoOn a very long timeline, sure
- cma 1y agoSlightly different situation with steel in contact with the contents, but this can happen rapidly: https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/chemistry/electrochemistry/lasagna-cell/ https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/chemistry/electrochemist... I'm not sure if there is a scenario something similar could happen with a drink.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoMore importantly, and unlike glass, if you do break plastic, it's not dangerous.
- fastball 1y agoYep, plastic has a lot of benefits. But I genuinely don't think the translucency is that much of a selling point. If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone.
- masklinn 1y ago> If plastic could not be translucent and was always opaque, I think we would still use it for almost all of the same use-cases as we do today, on the back of durability + weight alone. - any sort of housing window and display protection, I have at least half a dozen within easy reach not including actual computer displays - transparent food packaging is important to both identify the product and ascertain its state (especially at the store e.g. berries) - viewing liquid levels at a glance is extremely useful
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MyPasswordSucks 1y agoWe also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic. Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.
- dpacmittal 1y agoLet's not forget it's strength to weight ratio and how incredibly cheap it is. A polythene bag having few grams of weight can easily carry a load of 5kg or more while costing only a few cents.
- smolder 1y agoWhat's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
- grufkork 1y agoI like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
- ozim 1y agoI think few cents do represent it. Production alone per piece is more like really small fraction of a cent.
- pineaux 1y agoCame here to say this. The production of a plastic bag costs somewhere in the range of 0.05 cents to produce. If you would factor in the impact on the environment it would probably cost a few cents. Which, given the insane amount of plastic bags that are consumed each day. Would be significant.
- Gigachad 1y agoThere’s quite a lot of packaging that’s mostly cardboard but with a transparent plastic window to see the product.
- brazzy 1y agoThose are usually cellophane, which is essentially transparent paper.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoTHere’s a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit isn’t lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesn’t need to either.
- fastball 1y agoThe plastic doesn't need to last for thousands of years for our actual use, but the properties that make it last for thousands of years are also what make it desirable for our use: fully waterproof, impermeability to microbes, etc.
- jibal 1y agoYou're just repeating yourself, while ignoring that your sweeping generalization has already been refuted.
- fastball 1y agoI don't think so. I was clarifying my point which seemed misunderstood by 2muchcoffeeman and didn't contain much of a sweeping generalization (more a statement of fact about the nature of plastic).
- jibal 1y agoWrong on both counts. "We like it because it lasts thousands of years." There are numerous other reasons for liking plastic ... in fact that's a very odd and unusual reason to like it. You say that the properties that we like about it are why it lasts thousands of years, but that's a very different statement. In fact, people have pointed out that we would prefer for it to have its likable properties but NOT last for thousands of years. So you've made a whole host of logic errors. You may not think so, but that's another consequence of the underlying problem here. I won't respond further.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y agoYeah but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties. It's not even the case that all those properties are necessary for all actual cases of their use.
- ghushn3 1y agoNobody likes plastic because it lasts "thousands of years". People care about storing food products well. If we can do that without lasting thousands of years that seems like a pretty good win.
- fastball 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207115
- cbmuser 1y agoHave you ever heard of Cellophane?
- constantcrying 1y agoGood at storing food products and lasting thousands of years are very closely related. The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree. The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
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- Ray20 1y agoThe problem with plastic is not that nothing can be done with it after disposal, the problem with plastic is that it harms the environment during use. There is no problem with the fact that a plastic bag does not deteriorate for thousands of years after use: you just throw it in the trash, and it lies in a pile of garbage for thousands of years, absolutely harmless and with a near-zero impact on the environment (because the areas of garbage dumps are tiny both relative to the environment and relative to other human impacts on the environment) Propaganda about the harm of plastic bags is designed for complete idiots, whose idiocy borders on a clinical diagnosis. The real problem is with other products of plastic, which break down while in use, polluting the water and air with microparticles. Car tires, synthetic fabrics, paints and paint coatings and various exterior finishes, sidings and so on. All of this, even with the slightest wear, whether from mechanics or ultraviolet radiation, pollutes the environment throughout the entire use. Against this problem, plastic bags are completely harmless even if we start using them ten times more and throwing them away ten times more often. And this problem cannot be solved by changing the method of disposal or recycling. Only by stopping the use. The fight against plastic bags and all this stuff about recycling plastic is literally a joke how drunk man searching for something under the streetlight that he lost somewhere else in the park. Only he searches for it at someone else's expense, actively spending the allocated funds on alcohol and large-scale media projects on the need and importance of the search under the streetlight
- bccdee 1y agoThat's not entirely true. I throw away a lot of cardboard packaging with a plastic window glued into it. Obviously this can't replace all plastic, but it can certainly replace some. Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.
- neltnerb 1y agoCuriously, a lot of tape is made from "cellophane", which is chemically similar to paper. The windows on envelopes are typically made from it. Not sure about cardboard boxes but you can make cellophane pretty strong.
- paulmooreparks 1y agoA use case is already stated in the article: "So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."
- doctorpangloss 1y agoSome consumers. In the context of e-commerce, product is on a screen, does it matter?
- iLoveOncall 1y agoWhat are paper packs? I can't think of anything that could be qualified of "paper pack" and be currently in use as a replacement for a "plastic container". I know I don't want to use paper BAGS because they break super easily when carrying goods but that doesn't seem to be what the article is talking about.
- dyauspitr 1y agoWe would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why don’t we have plastic that degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
- LoveMortuus 1y agoAlso something that doesn't slowly poison you over time like what plastics (microplastics) do with microplastics. There's almost no way to get rid of those from our body except breastfeeding, but in that case, it's actually even worse, since usually people don't breastfeed for fun.
- cbmuser 1y agoNo one was ever harmed by incorporating plastics. And id your body can’t make any use if it, it will leave your body through the digestive system.
- iamflimflam1 1y agoSadly that’s not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819327/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819327/ Etc… just google microplastics.
- cbmuser 1y ago»We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.« Depends on the type of plastic used. Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.
- lucideer 1y agoWe use plastic for a wide range of reasons depending on the application & one of them is transparency. The alternative in the case tends to be glass which ticks a lot of your boxes (rain proof, etc.) but is heavy & brittle. It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.
- _ink_ 1y ago> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever. That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
- KronisLV 1y agoOver here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point. I haven’t really tossed away a bottle/can in years. I mean, I didn’t really use to do that previously anyways, but now I don’t even throw them into the regular trash, instead collect them in a separate bag. I’d say it’s all about some sort of an incentive.
- diggan 1y ago> Over here in Latvia they established a deposit system where drinks cost more to buy at the store but you get that money back (store credit, or you can just donate it) when you bring the bottles/cans to a drop off point. AKA "Container-deposit legislation" (or "Pant" as we call it in Sweden and maybe also Germany?). Seems to work very well, and you also have a ton of people collecting cans that others throw in the environment, as they'll get money for it. Kind of wish we had it here in Spain too, as the environment and the sea ends up with a lot of cans and glass bottles. Seems like such an obvious idea to have nationwide.
- raphman 1y agoYeah, in Germany pretty much all cans and bottles require a deposit (single-use plastic bottles: 0.25 €) and every shop selling cans/bottles with deposit is required to take them and similar bottles back. Most supermarkets have a reverse vending machine that take cans and bottles, crushes single-use ones, and returns a voucher for the deposit. Some videos of these machines in action (not sure whether there are people on HN who have never seen one): - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWqwu63eTPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWqwu63eTPQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlfDavzHq7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlfDavzHq7I - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozVpMDDawnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozVpMDDawnw
- littlestymaar 1y agoSingular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute. In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 1y agoThere isn't one replacement for plastic. Hence also we can't expect every single replacement to address every single use of plastic. Transparent paper is fine.
- atoav 1y agoIdeal would be a material that has all the properties, but biodegrades after a reasonable period (what is reasonable depends on the usecase of course).
- az09mugen 1y agoYou mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A sea-water dissolving plastic : https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scientists-japan-develop-plastic-that-dissolves-seawater-within-hours-2025-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...
- Zigurd 1y agoUntil the last coal fired power plant is decommissioned, the rational way to "recycle" plastic is to burn it. There's you're "not common trigger:" the temperature in a coal furnace. Currently, plastic packaging is measured in the tens of millions of tons per year, while coal is measured in the billions of tons.
- tsimionescu 1y agoNo, burning it is not "rational", it is the very opposite. We talk so much of carbon sequestration, and then "rationally" try to release all of the already-sequestered carbon back in the atmosphere.
- Zigurd 1y agoIt won't make a significant difference compared to burning coal.
- tsimionescu 1y agoThat's like nicking a vein while you have a arterial hemmohrage - sure, it won't make a big difference, but it also doesn't help in any way. We need to stop burning coal, oil, and methane - and replacing any of them with plastic would not be helpful in the least.
- Zigurd 1y agoIt's technically correct that it doesn't help with reducing CO2 emissions. But plastic recycling is a flop and a charade. Reducing use of plastic is going to be the only effective way to reduce the harm from plastic. But if we're up to our asses in plastic that's going into the environment in our bodies, burning it isn't a bad choice.
- tsimionescu 1y agoI'm not talking about recycling plastic, but about burying it it in landfills. The plastic in our bodies is not generally getting there from environmental pollution, it's getting there from us using plastic to wrap and cook the majority of our food and drink and cosmetics etc.
- dragontamer 1y agoThis is cellulose, which is for many practical purposes just paper. This sounds like something that'd be very cheap and flexible. I've drunk out of plenty of paper cups before. So maybe this is a transparent paper cup. Which is possibly useful somewhere.
- Animats 1y agoThe article is unclear on what this actually is. Pure cellulose? Cellulose acetate? Cellulose based plastics have been around for a century, but making them is apparently too expensive for packaging. [1] Is this new stuff cheaper to make? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
- jkestner 1y agoWe like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable. Sometimes. Its plasticity of use means that we use it for for a lot of single-use products. The Clive Thompson Wired article I’m reading right now starts with “a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.” Of course, the problem is that it’s optimized for cost sans externalities.
- wizardforhire 1y agoReading the thread so far I feel everyone one is missing the biggest reason why plastic. Not to negate the technical uses and requirements mentioned especially yours, which are incredibly important… And of course that reason is economic. Plastic is essentially free, being a waste byproduct of petroleum extraction. Outside of the upfront infrastructure investment the feedstock is cost negligible. So pure profit once you're up and running. That the process is locked behind a knowledge wall, in that not just anyone is going to have the capitol and knowledge to execute, which limits the competitive landscape. So low risk high reward, which just gets investors salivating. At this point we take plastics as a given. Plastics have been so successful that the glass ceiling has been reached and now we’re all worried about the lifecycle costs. Regarding that lifecycle: I’m pro plastic. I romantically entertain recycling despite its lack luster performance and track record. At this point in time given the severity and perniciousness with the problems of disposal I feel the only prudent course of action is putting waste plastic back in the holes we get it out of. That this isn’t done is a whole rabbit hole of legislation, economic incentives, technical hurdles, entrenched theological fallacies that persist culturally bringing us back to the ouroboros of legislation.
- NotAnOtter 1y agoExactly. The specific properties that make plastic useful in industry are the exact same properties that make it an ecological problem. You cannot realistically replace plastic without first accepting an inferior product, trying to make an equally good product will lead you to a new ecologically problematic product. People think plastic is bad because it comes from oil, that's not the case. Plastic and the oil it comes from is a biproduct of the primary reason we drill for oil - which is energy. The generation of plastic isn't the problem per se, it's the existence of it from then on. So if you find some new zero emission way of making a plastic substitute that has all the same problems of plastic, you haven't really done anything. The solution to plastic is a change in consumer spending, probably facilitated by national regulation. So... good luck.
- codingdave 1y ago> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever. Glass. You are talking about glass. It is re-usable and recycle-able. It just has the unfortunate property that if you break it, the resulting shards will slice people up pretty badly, so it is far less safe for transport logistics. Not to mention heavy.
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- amelius 1y agoThere's a lot of food in plastic that will expire long before any plastic/paper will biodegrade. > What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions You mean like a "forever chemical"?
- neltnerb 1y agoGlass?
- bufferoverflow 1y agoI disagree. We use plastic because it's cheap, lightweight, waterproof and not (very) toxic. If we had plastic that is not transparent and biodegraded in a year, it would be perfectly fine, as it would cover almost all food packaging cases. But, unfortunately, we use plastics for everything these days. I saw even some cars are now made of plastic (Bezos's Slate).
- latexr 1y ago> We like it because it lasts thousands of years. Because if it lasts thousands of years it will do a good job of storing your food products. We don’t need it to last thousands of years to store food. That durability is in fact quite a disadvantage when we consider microplastics in our own bodies. Its time frame to natural degradation could be orders of magnitude smaller and it would still do a great job for food and many other applications, with significantly less harmful drawbacks.
- nopelynopington 1y agoExactly. Most foods in plastic have a shelf life of <12 months and those that need longer can just continue to use plastic. Most fruit only lasts 1-2 weeks and comes in plastic trays, wrapped in plastic film that last hundreds of years after
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- SergeAx 1y agoWe already have such material, and it is plastic. It degrades quite rapidly if exposed to 400°-500°C temperature.