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Pardon the ignorance but aside from cost, what is wrong with using glass? Why not just make a ton of glass from cheap sand and scale/automate it to make it cheaper?
Glass is incredible carbon intensive to make, and takes practically forever to break down. It's also fragile.
Pardon the ignorance but aside from cost, what is wrong with using glass? Why not just make a ton of glass from cheap sand and scale/automate it to make it cheaper?
Sure, it 'could' - anything is possible! > Of all the ideas presented, creating a fibrous film that is edible, no-waste, anti-microbial and water soluble was the one that took off, and Zhao published her first paper on the subject 15 years ago. Since then, she’s continued to tweak and refine the formulation. This industry is driven by ROI and waste reduction. If this worked, it would've worked long ago.
Find a more ecological alternative and then tax the hell out of the current methods.
Plastic packaging protects food from moisture and dirt. If you make the packaging out of a water-soluble material and then eat it, surely that's almost completely useless? Like, now you need some kind of additional outer wrapper to stop your edible packaging from getting contaminated. The article mentions muffin liners as an alternative use case, but those are usually made of thin paper and are already compostable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea is that it becomes like fruit and vegetables. You purchase them unwrapped, wash them, and eat them. This would have implications on the supply chain of course to try and keep these items clean. It could also replace individually wrapped items, such as in a box of cereal bars the individual bars wouldn't need plastic wrap.
My protein bars need individual wrap. I am not putting them 'naked' inside of my hiking backpack. Not to mention how nasty the last one is when it takes you 2 months to finish a box... All of them exposed to air? Thanks but no thanks.
At least for me - when I hike I usually have a box and put all of those items there “raw” - the box protects them from mechanical forces but I don’t need to individually wrap my apples inside that box. Having other edible things have such an edible covering would be amazing actually.
No time soon... Plastics are mostly a by product of petroleum refining so it's hard to beat the economic factors. And the manufacturing machines have been in use for so long that they are completely paid for so adding one more plastic whatever is relatively cheap compared to any new gizmo. At this point the only way to stop plastic products is to subsidize a replacement to the point of making it cheaper than plastic…
The funny thing is that we are _already_ paying for it with all the trash handling infrastructure - mostly government payed and supported by taxes around the world.
The money is there - imagine paying less for trash, but a bit more for the product - still the same amount of money spent. But now the manufacturer has the incentive to use those new films and _not_ pay for its disposal. As economies of scale kick in, we can have clean environment and pay less for it all (less trash infra).
I just hope people (governments) realize this in my lifetime…
Pardon the ignorance but aside from cost, what is wrong with using glass? Why not just make a ton of glass from cheap sand and scale/automate it to make it cheaper?
Plastic is also easier to mold into a variety of shapes, so you get conveniently stackable containers and lids without much extra cost (the same shapes introduce stress points in the glass where fractures could occur).
Plastic can also be made flexible, i.e. as shrinkwrap (which this product would replace in some cases). You aren't going to wrap vulnerable fruit and veg (like english cucumbers) in glass wrap.
Glass can be easier to recycle, but again you're fighting volume and mass in transportation as well as waste management. It's great for things like liquids if you have businesses willing to re-use them, but they also have to expend the extra energy to properly clean and sanitize them before they can be reused.
The last time I bought a soda from a company that would take back glass bottles and reuse them, the flavor could only be described as "soap". I never again wondered why every other company sold disposable aluminum and plastic after that.
Not an expert on this matter but I am pretty sure most hydrocarbons can be burnt pretty cleanly in the right conditions.