Researchers develop ‘transparent paper’ as alternative to plastics

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.

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."

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.

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.

> 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.

THere’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.

You mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A sea-water dissolving plastic : https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...

Plastic likes:

  'waterproof' (fluid proof for many things)

  Difficult to shatter (drop safe-ish) 

  Shows stuff off 'nicely'

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.

Huh, I somehow never made the connection to cellophane being cellulose-based. I just thought it was plastic…

I genuinely wonder if the Romans actually had peak technology all things considered & balanced.

Sounds similar to cellophane. But the process to make it is very different. Maybe it has some new properties that cellophane doesn't.

"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."

> 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...

There are people working that angle as well[0], and they focus on prevention for this reason. We need all angles.

[0] https://theoceancleanup.com/

Its really hard to change people without using threats or force. Easier to change their environment.

It’s usually easier to solve a technical problem than a societal one.

Environmentally-sensitive garbage disposal is expensive. Not everyone can afford it.

“some countries” is doing a lot of heavy work to say “basically the Philippines”, which is a gigantic outlier in output per capita and just also absolute volume. China and India produce quite a bit, but not compared to how many humans they have.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

This is about dealing with reality.

Is it really biodegradable? Almost all varieties are not. They only fall apart in smaller plastic or need special heated environments. None of them will degrade if you simply throw them „into the woods“.

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...

But then your bottles would fall apart on the shelf because they degraded enough to get a hole in them.

I would like you to qualify "didn't hold up well". Can you explain how? Can we get more detail?

Why?

They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem there.

They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes: sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a week.

Where is the terrible part?

Why? Will it get soggy like the regular paper straws?