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.
We 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.
Let'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.
What'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.
Well the thing is that it does not cost a few cents. It costs a few cents to make and (say) 20x that to dispose of properly. Since the user only has to pay part (the smaller part) of it, then it looks cheap.
> super-easy to mold
Or "plastic".
A 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."
Nobody 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.
Good 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.
The 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
Have you ever heard of Cellophane?
Aka rayon (but foil not fiber).
That'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.
I used to reduce plastic mainly for environmental reasons now I find myself doing it for health too.
The more I learn about microplastics and chemical leaching, the more I realize how much plastic interacts with our bodies, not just the planet. Especially when heat, oil, or acid are involved like in cooking or packaging hot foods it's hard not to think twice.
I'm not saying we should panic, but I do think it's worth reframing: health and sustainability aren't separate concerns here. They're intertwined.
Even if alternatives like ātransparent paperā aren't perfect, they might still offer meaningful gains for both the environment and our bodies. And for many people, that might be what tips the scale.
Here is the original paper from the researchers:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads2426
Apparently they wanted to create a material that:
1. is transparent,
2. can be made thick enough,
3. and is purely cellulose-based.
Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.
I think it's Glassine?
Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from getting fused to the previous page.
Glassine has been around forever. Useful for philately!
There are also transparent rolling papers
But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.
Great summary of paper akin of TL;DR.
If only AI/LLM can summarize most research papers like this correctly and intuitively I think most people will pay good money for it, I know I would.
The Wall Street Journal recently started putting a 3-bullet-point AI generated summary at the top of each story.
I genuinely wonder if the Romans actually had peak technology all things considered & balanced.
I have a hard time using "balanced" and Roman in the same sentence.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
> They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
That's the point. They had sustainable and clean technology. It was a sweet spot.
Did the ancient Romans have transparent paper, celluloid or cellophane?
Just curious whether I'm missing some connection.
I'd take modern healthcare tbh
Meh, a longer life isn't necessarily a happier one.
Too much lead.
It actually wasn't poisonous given the circumstances.
Huh, I somehow never made the connection to cellophane being cellulose-based. I just thought it was plasticā¦
Sounds similar to cellophane. But the process to make it is very different. Maybe it has some new properties that cellophane doesn't.
Itās funny how weāve all just become desensitized to the idea that some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean and rather than work on that problem, we work on creating better garbage.
> some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean
And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.
Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.
If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/industrialised-countries-are...
> Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the ocean
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
It's not about recycling, their regular garbage goes into the ocean too (after they dump it into their rivers).
There are people working that angle as well[0], and they focus on prevention for this reason. We need all angles.
The Ocean Cleanup is probably the most impressive and inspiring humanitarian / climate endeavor around right now. Been following them for a long time, their PR is really good. Actually showing the places before and after, showing the trash they take out, explaining how the tech works, being transparent about the struggles and whatnot. Really, really well orchestrated, I always feel a spark of hope after I see something from them.
Its really hard to change people without using threats or force. Easier to change their environment.
> Its really hard to change people without using threats or force.
People change all the time. We are much different than ~10 years ago, before the rise of the far-right in the West. We are much different than 100 years ago.
People get much more exercise, eat healthier, are better educated ... so much as changed. Another new thing is people love to embrace nihilism rather than hope and progress - almost nobody embraces the latter these days.
What makes you think that people eat healthier and get more exercise?
In the US at least, Obesity is on the rise, people eat more meat than ever before, and life expectancy is basically flat over the past decade.
"People changing" and "changing people" are radically different things.
Itās usually easier to solve a technical problem than a societal one.
My momās been helping out at a small local shop, and theyāve been trying to move away from plastic packaging. They tried compostable films and recycled paper, but either the cost was too high or the materials just didnāt hold up well.
This transparent paper made from cellulose sounds really promising. If it can handle heat, looks good, and actually breaks down in the environment, that would be a big help for shops like theirs.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of material? Iād love to hear how it performs in real use, especially with things like liquids or anything sensitive to moisture.
I can't help it, sounds to me like cellophane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
We need a new class of materials that have plastic like properties but donāt take thousands of years to degrade or are impossible to recycle.
I think that degradation of plastic is the larger concern. Storage of garbage is generally an overstated concern, while microplastic pollution clearly show the threat of plastics that break into millions of tiny pieces.[1] Stable plastics that last pose so many fewer problems when it comes to pollutants.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
It would be incredible if they could make plastic that didn't break down. But given the history of plastics, I would have to be very convinced that whatever they do to it isn't making it terribly toxic in ways that we don't measure. I would rather ditch plastics for better materials than have to check that yet another new acronym isn't in my water bottle.
It's keeping it out of the air and water that we need to work on. If we properly trashed our plastic, it would not be floating in the ocean.
We need it to break down properly, or not at all.
Only inorganic materials will last forever. We can reuse metal and glass and ceramic forever but never a plastic.
Eh, I think we just overshot our goals by 100x. We could settle on a plastic that degrades into harmless dust after 10 years, but no less (nor anymore than 100). That's good enough to keep going with all of it.
But then your bottles would fall apart on the shelf because they degraded enough to get a hole in them.
Oh well, at least the planet and its inhabitants would likely be better off.
Sure, but talk to anyone about paper straws and you will probably see the issue with this.
Surely there's a gap that could be the sweet spot between "thousands of years" and a couple of years
Unfortunately, I think it's that either there's a microorganism that will eat your material, and you get a couple of years, or there's not, and you get thousands.
Wood, cardboards, and papers. Unfortunately, they are not as easily shaped and more expensive to make. Figure out how you can mass produce an iPhone, including all the PCBs, out of wood and paper and you will become a billionaire.
The problem is any idiot can make a bottle that lasts thousands of years. It takes an engineer to make a bottle that barely lasts a year.
A milk carton?
Even if it doesn't replace all use-cases for plastics, it seems like it can replace lots of throw-away plastic products. That alone would be good progress. I don't mind cellulose shopping bags, straws, throwaway cups, plates, utensils, etc.
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