"Liquid Wood" a Contender To Replace Plastic 226
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."
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, I read TFA. I did misunderstand. The effect is to use the lignin so we don't burn it and release the CO2. Mea Culpa. Carry on.
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)
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.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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.
here's your answer (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Ocean-Plastic-Landfill-Algalita1nov02.htm [mindfully.org]
Old news (Score:2, Informative)
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:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:1, Informative)
Or, Nuclear power. There is a new nuclear heat reactor expected on the market in some 5 years. You bury it in the ground, and it reacts in so much as you take heat out. If you stop taking heat, it stops reacting. Anyway, that could replace your energy needs.
http://www.physorg.com/news145561984.html
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.
Re:Didn't we have this over a century ago? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:okayyy... soooo...... (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: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].
nothing is ever as simple as in TFA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah right... (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch [wikipedia.org]
Re:Liquid Wood sounds good... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.visionpaper.com/speeches_papers/Rymkenafhemp.html [visionpaper.com]
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:3, Informative)
And if THAT were true, we could burn all the oil in existence without seriously shifting the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
As far as we know, the CO2 content of the atmosphere was much higher in the early stages of life. Emergent life filtered the CO2 out of the atmosphere, sequestering it inside their bodies and eventually buried it under ground in the form of oil, coal, etc. The result is less atmospheric CO2 today. On a longer time scale this would result in even less CO2 in the air. Your assumption that such a process would have led to zero CO2 content today is baseless - you can't make such an assumption without knowing the original atmospheric content and the rate of sequestration over time.
Re:Can't come soon enough (Score:3, Informative)
Peak oil is, for all intents and purposes, a myth. It relies on the idea that no new oil reserves will be found, and no new technologies developed. That is a massively erroneous assumption. For instance, the recent price-hike encouraged us Canadians to start mining our reserves of oil-sands. The world oil-sands reserves are massive (more than the oil sources we use now), and they're simply not taken into account when computing "peak oil" projections. Oil-shales are another source which has barely been tapped, and world reserves are estimated to be even higher than oil-sands. US oil shale deposits alone exceed all the remaining conventional oil deposits in the entire world. Likewise, oil-shales aren't included in the computation.
Realistically, while oil prices will undoubtedly rise over time, we're not likely to hit any "peak" for a long, LONG time. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at ways to minimize our oil consumption - I'm all for developing alternate-fuel vehicles, and building more nuclear reactors - but it does mean that we aren't facing a looming crisis just over the horizon.
Re:Didn't we have this over a century ago? (Score:2, Informative)
Cellophane is only one of many cellulose-derived plastics. Celluloid was the first, but the most important are esters of cellulose and organic acids. Cellulose acetate was first produced in 1865, and others are cellulose butyrate and cellulose propionate. Unfortunately, although produced on an industrial scale for a long time, they are much more expensive than most plastics.
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?
Here's a report (Score:3, Informative)
This is a report [mindfully.org] on that area, and what's exactly what they mean by this "garbage patch" thing. It's scary, and it makes sense.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:3, Informative)
I think it really, really depends on what part of the country (or the world) you're in.
There are almost no roofs in the midwest that are not asphalt shingles. I believe this is fairly different in the southwest. I'm not sure the exact reasons (my guess would be something to do with snow, but it could be relative availability of materials).
But yes, shingle roofs are still hugely common in certain areas of the country. In two years doing residential buildings in Minnesota I never did a roof that wasn't shingles.
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.
Biodegradable plastics (Score:1, Informative)
The Evolution of Biodegradable Plastic
Biodegradable plastic is plastic that biodegrades into humus when disposed of, due to the action of the micro-organisms that turn dead plant life into humus, the organic part of soil. The result is a rich and fertile soil.
There have been three generatons of biodegradable plastic. The first was starch based plastic, PLA, almost always made out of corn. The second generation was oxo-biodegradable conventional plastic, and the third, the current generation, is biodegradable conventional plastic.
PLA, or corn-based plastic
PLA, or corn-based plastic, was the first generation of biodegradable plastic. It is still made and promoted by corporate giants that have huge financial and political power, such as the Dow Chemical Company, Cargill, Inc., and Archer Daniel Midlands, but it has many drawbacks.
It is billed as 'sustainable,' as it is based on food sources, primarily corn. However, if all of the disposable plastic products in the world were made out of corn, 150,000,000 tons of corn would be used to make plastic. Prices for corn would rise dramatically, and third world hunger would increase even more dramatically. There are currently 850,000,000 hungry people in the third world. If we imagine that condition worsening greatly, the result could only be a humanitarian catastrophe of appalling proportions. That is the real ramification of 'sustainability' in today's world.
Furthermore, PLA isn't a very good plastic. It imparts an off taste to water when used for water bottles, it melts when used as soup spoons, it's weak, and therefore items made of it are heavy, it has a short shelf life, and it often starts to decay before use, while still on the shelf. What's more, almost no recyclers accept it for recycling. In fact, recyclers dislike PLA and are trying to ban it, because it gets confused with more conventional plastics, and ruins their recycled plastic batches.
The state of California is promoting this product by limiting the use of the term biodegradable, and all synonyms for biodegradablilty to PLA, which decays within 120 days in commercial (not home) composting facilities. Unfortunately PLA decays so fast in an oxygen-free (anaerobic) environment (typical of landfills,) that it generates methane in landfills before they are capped to tap the methane. Generating methane quickly in landfills is undesirable because it is a potent greenhouse gas. If it is generated before the landfill is capped, it outgasses into the atmosphere, promoting global warming. (Click to see video about using methane from landfills.)
Oxo-Biodegradable Plastic, the Second Generation of Biodegradable Plastic
The second generation plastic oxo-biodegradable plastic was very different than the the previous generation of biodegradable plastic called PLA, starch-based plastic, or 'spudware. Oxo-biodegradable plastic had many advantages over PLA-It was invulnerable to water, one might adjust it to the desired biodegradation rate, some products could contain recycled content, it could be recycled, it didn't diminish the grain supply, it was stronger, less expensive, and was made from an otherwise useless industrial byproduct, naphtha.
This second-generation biodegradable plastic is little known in the US, but is is well established and widely used in Europe. Tesco and Carrefours, the largest grocery chains in the world, and in France, respectively, package their customers' groceries in oxo-biodegradable 't-shirt' bags. In fact, the largest bakers in Mexico and South Africa package bread in oxo-biodegradable bags, and oxo-biodegradable plastic is becoming common in India and China. The US is so far behind the curve on this, that it is a little embarassing.
Oxo-biodegradable plastic doesn't biodegrade when deeply buried in landfills, because it requires an initial phase of degeneration which required certain environmental factors-oxygen and one of the following three circumstances-heat, UV light, or mechanical stress-and because the subsequent biode