[HN Gopher] Durable plastic gets a sustainability makeover in no...
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Durable plastic gets a sustainability makeover in novel
polymerization process
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-02-10 12:44 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| userbinator wrote:
| _We 've spent 100 years trying to make polymers that last
| forever, and we've realized that's not actually a good thing,"
| Fors said._
|
| Indeed not a good thing for continued profits and the cartel of
| planned obsolescence.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| And fish
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Microplastics are a major issue for all animals and maybe for
| all living things.
| userbinator wrote:
| Never been a problem and likely never will.
| jaapz wrote:
| That's a lot of confidence for a field of research that
| is relatively new
| wongarsu wrote:
| The "sustainability makeover" reads like it can in principle be
| recycled, and if we really want to we can make it from plants
| (though we likely wouldn't).
|
| I don't have access to the full paper, but "Flexible and soft,
| the resulting material can be completely chemically recycled
| using heat and degraded by acid" doesn't inspire confidence that
| it would actually degrade well in nature. At least from that
| short description it does at least sound economically viable for
| deliberate recycling. At least with the right incentives.
|
| They call it "bio-sourced material". Now I don't have a chemistry
| degree, but my amateur understanding is that most of the
| synthesis chains available here ultimately derive from oil. For
| example you can get DHF by catalyzing 1,4-butanediol on cobalt or
| aluminum oxide. Wikipedia lists a number of ways 1,4-Butanediol
| is made industrially, but they all boil down to oil product,
| natural gas, or the occasional "we mostly make this from oil, but
| sometimes ethanol is used instead". The most "bio-sourced" of
| those is via Butadiene, where wikipedia claims "While not
| competitive with steam cracking for producing large volumes of
| butadiene, lower capital costs make production from ethanol a
| viable option for smaller-capacity plants."
|
| It reads like a nice material, but as usual temper your
| expectations
| m0llusk wrote:
| Nearly any petrochemical derived polymer can also be
| constructed from plant sugars. Much of this has been known for
| a while and the real question is how to scale these processes
| industrially and integrate them with existing supply chains for
| plastic production. In this case it appears that alcohol is
| synthesized from plants for production:
|
| ... synthesis and characterization of a strong thermoplastic
| made from 2,3-dihydrofuran (DHF), a monomer made in one step
| from 1,4-butanediol, a bioalcohol already produced on the plant
| scale. ...
|
| from https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.2c06103
| awanderingmind wrote:
| Interesting comment, thank you.
| jajko wrote:
| One thing I would go miles and miles to avoid - having it break
| down during use, releasing god knows what into my food.
|
| Acidity breaks it down? What if some ketchup in bun or some
| other acidic part of food is wrapped with it? In 2 hours when
| you unpack you look at holes in that plastic wondering if you
| will eat that material (of course you will). Had enough BPAs
| and PFOAs scare to not trust novel chemical crap from companies
| that have no issue poisoning half the planet for profit and
| having real food safety only as an annoying afterthought.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Indeed. I'm not a big fan of Teflon. But at least it's almost
| completely inert (unless overheated), which makes it much
| less likely to be harmful than substitutes.
| Someone wrote:
| > But at least it's almost completely inert (unless
| overheated), which makes it much less likely to be harmful
| than substitutes.
|
| I don't think that's a strong argument. Asbestos is quite
| inert, and that is what makes it so harmful. A fiber will,
| over time, harm more and more cells.
| lazide wrote:
| Teflon isn't a sub-cellular sized needle though.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Probably breaks down to shorter chain PFAS
|
| https://chemsec.org/the-teflon-chemical-ptfe-is-often-
| touted...
|
| Although it is claimed that very little migrates to food
|
| https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-
| food/authorize...
|
| The monomer used to make it is considered "probably
| carcinogenic"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrafluoroethylene#Safety
|
| so occupational exposure at the factory and environmental
| release are concerns.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > The monomer used to make it is considered "probably
| carcinogenic"
|
| Yeah, this is what I heard before. That the coating
| itself isn't so bad, but the manufacturing process
| produces stuff that is awful enough that we probably
| shouldn't use it.
| metalman wrote:
| yup, acidity breaking plastic down is a big no no, for ANY
| human contact or use in a engineered structural component.
| the latest "eco plastic" offering fits into the same category
| as the latest battery tech, wonder food, la la la, foofoo
| berries. Some of these things WILL pan out eventualy, but the
| evaluation needs to be cold blooded, and explicit based on
| access to real test data and real world third party
| evaluation. Till then it's quasi organic energy enhancing foo
| foo berry powder, though the expectation is that we all abase
| ourselves before the deployment of the magic word,
| sustainability.
| lazide wrote:
| The underlying problem of course is that recyclable and
| biodegradable properties are almost always at complete odds
| with durable, stability during use, chemically non-reactive.
| blueflow wrote:
| This is a human issue. When in use, we expect the material to
| be durable. When we throw it away, we expect the material to
| decompose. We do not have materials that react to human
| intention.
| numpad0 wrote:
| But it is problematic when electrical insulations and
| personal ID cards start to decompose over the courses of
| 5-10 years.
| tartoran wrote:
| Could be solved with a tax policy, durable plastics being
| made more expensive to encourage reuse and conversely
| biodegradable less durable plastic taxed less. Eventually
| things converge naturally towards an equilibrium.
| lazide wrote:
| nah - you can't have something which both resists
| degradation when exposed to food, the environment, etc. AND
| naturally biodegrades in a reasonable time.
|
| it's like wanting a useful fuel which doesn't burn. they
| mutually contradict each other.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think the #1 concern about plastic waste are single-use
| plastics. For instance you might get takeout food in a
| polystyrene clamshell, foamed or not. Lately I noticed this
| product line
|
| https://www.healthychoice.com/cafe-steamers
|
| which are some of the tastiest frozen meals on the market,
| but they not only come in a plastic bowl, but there are two
| layers of the plastic bowl, one of which is perforated to
| separate the sauce from the food so that the food gets
| steamed. Boy is there a lot of plastic.
|
| Thing is, these are all thermoplastics
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Classifications
|
| unlike the thermoset plastic that this article is about. I
| mean, if you make a plastic bowl out of this thermoset
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine_resin
|
| and use it thousands of times the amount of waste generated
| is dramatically less than is generated by those steamers. The
| environmental risk people are most concerned out now is that
| some fraction of plastics are not recycled, burned, or
| landfilled and wind up in the environment where they get
| ground into microplastics. As much as people blame industry
| on blaming the consumer, it's a lot better to chuck plastic
| in the trash than to chuck it outdoors and a good idea to
| pick it up on the side of the road whenever you can. That
| black agricultural plastic is a disaster. (See also the risk
| of plastic car tires!)
| rob_lh wrote:
| Adding some personal analysis to your point, the last time
| I looked at plastic market research in detail, the two
| biggest markets by volume and revenue were packaging and
| insulation, which I believe were dominated by
| thermoplastics. Those are the big ones if you want to make
| an impact on plastic usage.
|
| Also, pulling from memory that may not be quite right, but
| I recall roads taking a substantial amount of polymer
| additives and that tire degradation is a major source of
| microplastic exposure for humans. The tire problem is
| poised to get worse with EVs being so heavy and
| accelerating so hard that the tires are bigger and wear
| faster, but I'm not aware of even any promising research
| there besides more bio-based feedstocks to improve the
| sustainability.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In building there is also a lot of use of PVC which is
| environmentally awful, for instance for flooring and
| siding.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Health_a
| nd_...
| rob_lh wrote:
| Having worked in polymers and seen the development of some
| recyclable, 3D-printed thermosets like what's proposed here, I
| think this is a fair take. On the whole, I'm glad to see other
| researchers continuing to research the space.
|
| There are a few big challenges to be managed. One is material
| diversity--it's cool they got it to work with one monomer (most
| thermosets are two that you mix together), but it's a long road
| to showing the process works well in just one application let
| alone. To make a substantial impact, the process would have to
| be suitable to a bunch of different applications, likely
| requiring different material properties that would require many
| different monomers.
|
| Then we can talk about value. While the value of fully
| recycling plastic can be managed as an externality by
| government taxes/fees, the big question is how much it actually
| costs in energy, time, money, and material waste that somebody
| has to pay for--there's no free lunch here, and it's rolling
| all those costs back up into the product. I have been secretly
| hoping that automated waste sorting and excess solar capacity
| could be used to run such waste management processes and close
| the business case, but energy demand and prices seem to only be
| going up due to AI. Still, it's good there's another example of
| it being possible but a long road to really reducing single-use
| plastics.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I don't understand why recycling plastics is desirable. Plastics
| are made from hydrocarbons, right? So putting them in the ground
| amounts to carbon sequestration, which is good? What am I
| missing?
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