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Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

sdstate.edu

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Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#111

Post by tw04 »

cm2012 wrote: post #104
mrmincent wrote: post #26

I would kill for this for when I’m buying fresh produce at the shops. Right now I just raw dog the produce into my basket as putting 4 apples into a plastic bag to ease the weighing and transport home seems like a selfish thing to do to the environment, but something that starts to break down soon after that sounds great.

People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.

>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment.

I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#112

Post by rablackburn »

tw04 wrote: post #111
cm2012 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.

>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.

At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.

On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#113

Post by gleenn »

ehnto wrote: post #102
lunarboy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAME. It kills me inside when people wrap things like fruits and potatoes in plastic that have natural peel they'll remove before eating anyways

Japan is wild for this, but also pretty good at recycling plastic in general. Bananas are often wrapped individually for sale. You buy a box of biscuits and they're often individually wrapped in plastic etc.

Japan recycles but also a whole bunch of their waste is incinerated. I think they super-heat it to reduce emissions but guessing that also costs energy which also secondarily causes emissions.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#114

Post by milch »

parineum wrote: post #105
odie5533 wrote: post #81

It's a miraculous thing corporations have done convincing us that we're the ones polluting the environment.

Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for. The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them. The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them. If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.

Every person I know that works "back of the house" says the amount of plastic that you don't even see as a consumer is at least 10x of the final consumer packaging

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#115

Post by ehnto »

geerlingguy wrote: post #109
ehnto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bring your own, non-plastic bags. I do wonder if maybe some cultures just don't have this and so the deprecation of plastic bags has left everyone quite confused. It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.

Reusable shopping bags have been a thing for a long time, but I think for many, they never went back to them after stores banned them as a Covid mitigation.

Oh interesting, I don't think we had that ban where I live. We had many, many restrictions, but not that one.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#116

Post by instagraham »

Why is it that we read about so many inventions like this - once - and then never hear of them again?

Most countries have to import plastic along with their oil. Surely the economics of this gets worse every time oil or shipping prices rise. And more so if you account the cost of waste disposal.

There are economic incentives to scaling up these biodegradable alternatives. Are they not big enough to result in a push?

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#117

Post by refulgentis »

instagraham wrote: post #116

Why is it that we read about so many inventions like this - once - and then never hear of them again? Most countries have to import plastic along with their oil. Surely the economics of this gets worse every time oil or shipping prices rise. And more so if you account the cost of waste disposal. There are economic incentives to scaling up these biodegradable alternatives. Are they not big enough to result in a push?

Per TFA, this is a highly manual one off process with a not-well-scaled resource - a specific type of vine cutting that can only be harvested every other year without affecting the overall vibe health.

So Id wager it's the brutal road from proof of concept to scaled production.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#118

Post by odie5533 »

parineum wrote: post #105
odie5533 wrote: post #81

It's a miraculous thing corporations have done convincing us that we're the ones polluting the environment.

Corporations don't do things that people don't want to pay for. The entire purpose of their existence is to provide products to customers that want them. The miraculous thing is people eschewing responsibility by putting blaming the person selling products to the people that want them. If ot weren't for all those drug dealers, we wouldn't have any addicts.

Your explanation assumes that 1) people have full knowledge of everything corporations do and 2) corporations aren't hiding what they do.

Corporations actively use addiction and psychological manipulation. They're not just passively filling consumer wants.

Your drug dealer analogy actually proves the opposite: we hold dealers responsible precisely because we recognize supply drives addiction. That's exactly why we have laws against dealing rather than just treating addiction as purely a demand-side problem. By your analogy, drug dealing should be legal because it gives the people what they want.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#119

Post by lstodd »

kragen wrote: post #108
lstodd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. We burned shavings/rejects from a polyester-resin+glass boat building.. in a 200L drum. That was quite smoky and smelly, but still I think better than just shipping it all off for burying in a landfill. And fiberglass decomposed basically into fine sand too.

Environmentally speaking, shipping it off to a landfill would have been orders of magnitude better; burning it released thousands or millions of times more pollution. Most polyester resins are aromatic, so incomplete combustion can produce a wide variety of quite toxic substances.

I guess we did release some. Mostly soot and half-burned hydrocarbons to be decomposed by solar UV. Still, thinking of all this just being buried for like 2e6 years ... that seems even more wrong.

Re: Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose

#120

Post by lordhexd »

tw04 wrote: post #111
cm2012 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.

>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.

Sure plastic aren't great for the environment when we're just dumping it out there without much care. Obviously reducing waste and reusing is what we should strive for on all fronts. Demonizing one thing results in overcompensation on the flip side and we know for a fact that that's not where we want to end up either. Remember when we tried to reduce paper use as much as possible because of deforestation? Or saturated fats?
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