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"Liquid Wood" a Contender To Replace Plastic
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Feb 14, 2009 08:09 PM
from the no-more-starving-bacteria dept.
from the no-more-starving-bacteria dept.
Ostracus recommends a Christian Science Monitor piece on the 40-year quest to find a replacement for non-biodegradable plastic. One candidate, written off 20 years back but now developed to the point of practicality, is a formulation based on the lignin found in wood. And it turns out there is another strong environmental reason to put lignin to use in this way: burning it, which is its common fate today, releases the carbon dioxide that trees had sequestered. "Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. ...[R]esearchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive."
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Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Insightful)
Is like calling ethanol "liquid grain." There's a big difference between being derived from a given substance and having the properties of that substance.
Not that this isn't nice and all, but picking science fiction-ish titles for things keeps you from being taken seriously.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that is what the pills were called.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, but the biodegradability of such a substance is over-played as well. Take a drive down to the local landfill, dig down quite a bit and you will find that many biodegradable substances that have been there for 20+ years have not really biodegraded at all. This is caused by the fact that the biodegradability of a substance is often dependent on the oxygen available to organisms to breakdown the substance. Thus, if you pack the trash too tightly, you create an anaerobic environment where organisms are less efficient at breaking things down.
What we really need is a better method of disposal, not necessarily creating new kinds of substances.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Interesting)
If these substances contain much carbon, that sounds like a good thing from a global warming perspective. Maybe we should change our goals and embrace this.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:4, Informative)
Pardon my ignorance, but aren't we trying to REDUCE the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Maybe it's better than burning plastic, but this seems backwards to me.
What they meant (but phrased poorly) was that by extracting the lignin from the wood, the CO2 is kept sequestered inside the lignin, rather than being allowed to escape back into the atmosphere (which is what would happen if the wood were burned or allowed to biodegrade)
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Informative)
To be perfectly honest, I'm against biodegradable products in areas that demand environmental resistance. I'd hate to have a biodegradable roof, for example. ;)
Still, my shampoo being biodegradable is for the best.
To get to the parent's point, biodegradation is essentially rotting, a slow form of combustion. Life forms, just like humans, eat whatever, break down the hydrocarbons and exhaust it as H2O and CO2.
So if the idea is to prevent the release of CO2, the prevention of rotting is a good thing. One CO2 sequestration method often talked about up here is a couple of different plowing methods that tends to keep CO2 in the ground. They're talking about being able to sell them as carbon credits. Some already are. Thing is, those very methods are also good for soil fertilization and preservation, so they're just good business practices depending on the soil; many were already doing it.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Interesting)
You bring up an interesting issue that's often misunderstood or intentionally ignored by people arguing for a cause using CO2 emissions as their only back-up. If your only goal is to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, you need to:
1) Support our managed timberlands
2) Argue that the trees should be felled as soon as they stop producing ounce-for-ounce as much lumber as could be produced on the same footprint by fresh-planted trees
3) Demand that the trees are treated and used as lumber (rather than paper) and land-filled after use. Or, preferably, preserved and land-filled immediately rather than being trucked around for construction.
The carbon is trapped in the wood, sealed to prevent short-term release, and imprisoned in a landfill. Hey, we can put a park on top =).
This is, of course, a stupid plan, but friendly in terms of CO2 emissions. There is a balance there that's often overlooked by tree-huggers and owl-slashers alike.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:4, Insightful)
You bring up an interesting issue that's often misunderstood or intentionally ignored by people arguing for a cause using CO2 emissions as their only back-up. If your only goal is to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, you need to:
1) Support our managed timberlands
2) Argue that the trees should be felled as soon as they stop producing ounce-for-ounce as much lumber as could be produced on the same footprint by fresh-planted trees
3) Demand that the trees are treated and used as lumber (rather than paper) and land-filled after use. Or, preferably, preserved and land-filled immediately rather than being trucked around for construction.
The carbon is trapped in the wood, sealed to prevent short-term release, and imprisoned in a landfill. Hey, we can put a park on top =).
This is, of course, a stupid plan, but friendly in terms of CO2 emissions. There is a balance there that's often overlooked by tree-huggers and owl-slashers alike.
Anybody who suggests managing global atmospheric carbon starts with managing "Timber" has got a really messed up idea about how the environment works. That is like saying to cure you of cancer we have to kill the tumors, so we're going to give you a pound of arsenic... you will certainly be cured of the cancer.
Let's look at the gaping holes in this thinking;
So I must totally agree with you on your evaluation of this being a stupid plan. I do however take exception with your portrayal of "Tree Huggers". Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that there are emotional, crunchy granola, earth firsters who would be happy to see homo sapiens disappear tomorrow. I consider these folks an aberation. A religious cult with a seriously warped view of reality. On the other hand. There are scientists, scholars, and a whole raft of thoughtful, intelligent and informed people who are seriously interested in a future with people in it. We have used our world as a toilet for a very long time (look at the margins of any American highway to get the picture I'm painting.) There's an old saying, you don't SH*T where you eat. Sadly, as a species we're learning first hand why that bit of simple logic is so vital. A significant number of young men in this latest generation are now suffering from the effects of psuedo-estrogens in the food and water we consume because there's virtually no control of the tens of thousands of chemicals we've introduced into our environment without so much as a question to the impact those chemicals might have on us and the other life forms on the planet. Atmospheric carbon it a critically important issue, but it points to a much larger problem. Human beings are threaten by their own poor judgement, and lack of ability to accurately guage what is a real threat and what's not. People are worried about sharks at the beach when more people die of lightening strikes every year. However, they have no problem moving into mobile homes built directly
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to bee too pedantic here, but your roof IS biodegradable. The roofs of most modern houses are made of wood. It's the nice non-biodegradable shingles which keep you dry.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Informative)
rust though, specifies iron.
And do you really think that just because it's done in a organism/cell that the reaction is any less energetic? Improperly stored grain/hay can get so hot that it ends up combusting from the heat of rotting.
At least according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], cellular respiration [reference.com] is a form of slow combustion [att.net].
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually he's absolutely correct, thinking of a metabolic process as a slow motion combustion is perfectly appropriate, and if you haven't heard biologist and physiologists talk about "Burning" calories for years, you've lead too sheltered an existence. They mean precisely that, you take a carbohydrate, you introduce it to oxygen, it reduces to water and CO2, and energy is liberated. The magic in the mitochodria is that the process is controlled so you don't become hard boiled.
Though there have been a number of cases of athletes who've exercised either without proper hydration, or in climates where the humidity prevents evaporative cooling, who've raised their body core temperatures to that magic 110 degrees, cooking the proteins in their bodies (just like hard boiling an egg) and stopping any chance of future metabolism.
Parent
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Insightful)
The CO2 that comes from plastic, was pulled from the ground. Without us, it would have stayed there, for possibly an extremely long time.
The CO2 that comes from trees, was already in the air, and only was temporarily pulled out into the tree. On the tree's death, the CO2 would have released (as it rotted, or burned, depending).
So, while looking at the small picture, it's no better. But, zooming out to the big picture, it's a world better.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a non-argument.
So you are saying I should stop turning off my A/C and lights, since someone else would use that electricity anyways?
Should I run my taps 24/7 as well, since someone else would be using that fresh water anyways?
No.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Informative)
My reading of this vaguely written sentence is that lignin is currently being burned. If instead used as a petroleum replacement in plastic-like materials it would not be burned -- at least not until it hits the post consumer trash incinerator.
Is lignin extracted from wood in any other industries besides paper production? Would the paper industry be able to supply enough lignin to replace even a fraction of the plastic currently being produced? Even if it did, sounds like that would simply shift the burning from lignin in the wood fiber to petroleum products.
At the paper mill where I recently worked, the lignin was not burned just for the pleasure of it. The quicky skipping a couple dozen steps process is as follows... The lignin is extracted from the wood pulp by a cocktaail of sodium family chemicals casually referred to as liquor. When loaded with nice potential energy filled lignin, the liquor is referred to as black liquor. The black liquor is piped to the recovery boilers where the lignin burns out leaving nice clean white liquor and a lot of high pressure steam. The white liquor is in closed loop system and goes back to pick up more lignin. The high pressure steam is used on the actual paper machines and drives turbines to provide nearly one hundred percent of the electrical power needed by the entire mill.
Remove the lignin by another process so that it can be used to make 'liquid wood'. Now where will the mill get its high pressure steam? Burning petroleum products just like it does now when there is an upset condition in the supply of black liquor. Lots of natural gas. Lots.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the idea is to build facilities that produce nothing but "liquid wood", so it is a non issue for paper mills. If it can be worked out, and produce proper "consumer friendly" replacements to currently used plastics, then its nothing but a win-win situation. No extra CO2 is being released into the atmosphere, compared to plastic, whatever its eventual fate.
On a side note, people here comment that trees rotting releases CO2 into the atmosphere..while true on a small level, most of it ends locked up int
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds likely. I think that while paper mills are reasonably fussy about their source of wood, a 'liquid wood mill' would be far more liberal in what it could take as an input.
Don't rotting
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the paper industry grow low ligin trees for paper production, if they used higher ligin trees they should be able to supply both demands. The ligin industry might even develop using high ligin trees and consider the paper pulp a valuable by-product.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:5, Funny)
it was made of plastic :(
Parent
More than one type of plastic (Score:3)
Will this liquid wood be able to replace the vast number of different sorts of plastic we have today? There are some plastics with some fascinating properties out there, I'd like to imagine that we won't lose those properties forever when oil runs out..
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The effect of oil running out won't be a loss of those interesting, special-purpose plastics. Where plastics are truly indispensable or irreplaceable, they will continue to be used, although they may be somewhat more expensive.
Where plastics are used unnecessarily, they will be discarded in favor of something else.
Re:More than one type of plastic (Score:5, Informative)
We *can* create oil, even out of plain CO2 if necessary. We do have the chemical knowledge for that you know.
Making any plastic will be still as easy as it is today : you buy some type of oil-derivative at the store, and polymerisize it. Easy enough.
It will however, be a very costly thing to do indeed : it requires loads of energy. Right now that energy has simply been put in oil long ago, and making most plastics is in fact an exotherm process.
We will still make plastics. Producing them, however, will stop producing energy and start massively costing energy.
So that leaves multiple scenarios open. If we do get fusion operational somehow, for example, plastics will likely be as abundant as they are today, at least for a while. Even if we don't nuclear power is probably cheap enough to provide all those "specialty plastics", maybe even at comparable prices. The mass-market plastic will be the only thing disappearing.
My guess is, we'd replace it by another extremely useful and versatile substance we so massively used before the oil started to get so widespread : Iron. It's only marginally more expensive than plastics (mostly due to the mines' labour cost, there is more than enough iron in the ground to coat the entire earth with it several times). Instead of buying your salami in cheap plastic packaging you'll simply buy it in a can.
Parent
Quote from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
"The lignin itself was misunderstood completely by [leaders in the field] and the majority of people," says Simo Sarkanen, an environmental science professor at the University of Minnesota.
Does that sound like a mad scientist to anyone else? "My research has been completely misunderstood, but I will change the world! And then they'll see! They'll pay for their ignorance! MUAHAHAHAHA!"
Great, now they have to refilm The Graduate (Score:4, Funny)
Next step (Score:5, Funny)
transparent aluminum.
Re:Next step (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Lignin used to be the same way (Score:4, Interesting)
Once upon a time, when woody plants first evolved, there was nothing that could break them down. As a result, dead trees piled up hundreds of feet deep all over the world until bacteria evolved that could finally eat the stuff. This went on for long enough to leave the huge amount of coal that is still buried today.
I would hope that some form of bacteria will develop the ability to eat various forms of plastic, as that's the only way that trash island is ever going away...
Re:Lignin used to be the same way (Score:4, Funny)
Yea, these alarmists just like scaring people. The biosphere will evolve to deal with any problems we create today. This means that there's hope for our great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grand children after all.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, these alarmists just like scaring people. The biosphere will evolve to deal with any problems we create today.
Not sure whether this comment was meant seriously or not, but it is pretty much a given that the biosphere will evolve to take care of the mess we've made someday (it's been through worse already). The only question is whether we'll be around to see that happen, or if we'll have all died off before that time.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Lignin used to be the same way (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble, though, is those situations where plastics are destroying some part of the ecosystem far faster than organisms can evolve to clean them up. In the Great Pacific Garbage patch, for instance, the plastic is entering the food chain at an impressive clip and annhilating seabird populations. I'm sure the bacteria will have something figured out within a couple of centuries; but they might not have all that much company when they do.
Parent
Re:Lignin used to be the same way (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: Seed pods of ferns? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm... no. Ferns don't have seed pods. Ferns produce spores, which are far smaller than most seeds (orchid seeds perhaps being an exception).
I rather doubt your statement is true, that petroleum is comprised of nothing but decomposed fern spore. Could you please cite a reasonably authoritative source?
Parent
Well, there are seed ferns (Score:4, Informative)
Or at least were. During the Devonian period these plants spread rapidly across the land and created the first forests.
However I don't know of any source that claims that these seed pods are the primary constituent of coal.
First of all the largest bulk of ancient coal deposits were laid down during the Carboniferous period, which followed the Devonian. These periods are all 10's of millions of years long and certainly bacteria evolved to eat lignin on a shorter time scale than that. In fact it is actually fungus that do most of the eating of wood anyway.
It is also not true that coal was only formed in one or a few specific geological periods. There are coal deposits which formed in every period from the Devonian on through to relatively recent periods in the Cenozoic Era. LOTS of coal formed in the Carboniferous and a lot of it is now high quality coal.
And anyone that has seen what sorts of stuff is in coal deposits will know that the vast majority of it was all sorts of different plant materials. There are leaves, trunks, roots, branches, etc all in the coal and in some places there are whole FORESTS turned to coal where all this stuff is still quite plainly visible. So maybe fern seed pods are a decent part of that, I don't know, but it is a lot more complex than that and even a modern forest could turn to coal in the right conditions.
Parent
Repurposing excess plastic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The stuff that's floating around there is much, much harder to extract and use (it's tiny particles suspended in water) than the stuff we are still dumping every day. If we can't even be bothered to recycle all plastics and organics when they are in big trucks, what makes you think it's economical to do it halfway around the world, filtering millions of gallons of water to get at it?
here's your answer (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Ocean-Plastic-Landfill-Algalita1nov02.htm [mindfully.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
That elicits the image of a dog chasing it's tail.
Sure, you can take steps to mitigate problems, but it seems, at least to me, more reasonable to address the root of the problem. Which is too much fucking plastic.
Use the Plastic Microwave (Score:3, Interesting)
Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed?
This is what Global Resource Corporation [globalresourcecorp.com]'s microwave does. Right now they are fine-tuning their prototype on used tires. One 20-pound tire yields 1 gallon of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of propane/butane, some carbon black and some steel.
The device uses a vacuum chamber to reclaim the hydrocarbons after they've been released from the solid.
The OPEC cycle (Score:3, Insightful)
Curse you OPEC and the lobbyists you have in our elected government.
Didn't we have this over a century ago? (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't we have this (plastic made from wood) over a century ago?
It's called cellophane.
Re:Didn't we have this over a century ago? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Ping Pong Balls (Score:5, Insightful)
The crucial thing is the lignin content (Score:5, Interesting)
As the article carefully states, even Arboform uses only 50% lignin (yes, I *did* RTFA). The rest is made up of rather expensive "additives" - one crucial ingredient being Ecoflex, a synthetic (= oil-based) polymer which is needed to reduce the extreme brittleness of genuine lignin.
Two hopes spelled out in the articles will never materialize:
- it will never be as cheap as oil-based plastics are today, and
- it will never be able to replace most of the current oil-based plastics due to it's poor mechanical properties (unless we reduce the lignin content even further).
The original plastics were plant based (Score:4, Interesting)
And these oil sources can be combined with a hardener to become a "plastic"
Soy oil was one of the first.
George Overley was the chemist working for Henry Ford to create many plant based components for Ford cars and trucks. Around 30 different components were plant based until Henry Ford was kicked out of the company he started.
The most famous is the Soy plastic bumpers that are mostly mistaken as Hemp Plastic by Jack Herrer in
"The Emperor Wears No Cloths"
It's already here. (Score:5, Informative)
Although lingin-based plastics may be something new, bioplastics are by no means new.
By pure and honest coincidence, I have a disposable cup [f-k.com] made out of a plant-based bioplastic sitting on my desk that I got from a restaurant along with some take-out earlier today.
It's virtually indistinguishable from a normal plastic cup, and actually looks a bit nicer than your typical disposable drinkware -- the crystal-clear bioplastic is sturdy and has a nice 'shine' to it. It's biodegradable, and contains no oil-based inputs, although you'd never guess it by looking at it or handling it.
The manufacturers [natureworksllc.com] of the biopolymer claim that it can be adapted to all sorts of other products, at what seem to be fairly reasonable prices (~$1/kg). What's not to love?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This weekend was a tentative release date [debian.org], jackass.
Re:okayyy... soooo...... (Score:5, Informative)
This is better because in this case the product is "Carbon Neutral", as in it is releasing CO2 that the plants had used to grow. When we use petroleum products, the CO2 released is from carbon that was taken out of the cycle and buried deep underground... Now eventually it would even out in a few millennia... The Earth had handled this carbon before... But the Earth would not be the climate that we as humans are used to... The ecosystem using that much carbon had far more plant growth... As such much, much more Oxygen in the air. Which in turn can support much larger animals. Especially insects.... A warmer, oxygen-rich, swampy environment.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Pendantics... yes. The O2 comes from the oxidation while it burns.
That said, the plants take the actual CO2 from the air, use the O2 in their metabolism, and use the C for structure. They also use the H from the H2O, but that gets rebonded with the O2 and released, they don't keep it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)