"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."
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:More than one type of plastic (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.
Repurposing excess plastic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can't come soon enough (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (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 into biomass...and at geological timescales, into oil...
Re:Next step (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (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, 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.
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (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:More than one type of plastic (Score:2, Interesting)
Your points are somewhat flawed.
1 >> "Making any plastic will be still as easy as it is today : you buy some type of oil-derivative at the store, and polymerize it. Easy enough."
True, it should be easy, once you figure out an economical, industrializable chemistry to do your polymerization. But wrong, you don't just buy some type of oil-derivative. Current polymers based on petroleum refinement are based on hydrocarbons. Plastics such as poly-styrene, -propylene, -ethylene, -ester, and nylon generally have long carbon backbones. The plus side of it: cheap source of monomer, cheap and easy chemistry, great resulting products. The down side of it: biology generally doesn't have long carbon backbones, so life-on-earth has not generally evolved the metabolic machinery to handle hydrocarbons and derivatives. Petroleum forms from biochemistry subjected to pyrolytic conditions where life itself cannot survive. Thus, while petroleum and biochemistry share carbon, they share little else. That is why there is interest in finding biochemistry-based polymers that can be plasticized, because they will be subject to natural biological degradation.
If you look at the structure of lignin, it is already polymerized, based on a backbone of carbohydrates and quinones - and that is something that many self respecting microbes can sink their teeth into. A lignin based plastic would just further polymerize the compound into something with the desired characteristics (mw, density, viscosity, melting point, modulus, plasticity, etc).
2 >> "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 . . .We will still make plastics. Producing them, however, will stop producing energy and start massively costing energy."
Lignin has already stored a lot of that energy - it is already a large and highly structured compound. Further polymerization shouldn't be any more expensive than any other plastization chemistry.
I don't think that anybody in industry or the consumer side, or even the ecology side, objects to the energy of producing plastics. Plastics are wonderful materials - cheap, easy, abundant, safe for humans - pretty much all good, except that they persist in the ecosystem, ultimately bad. Most of the petroleum we use is spent on energy. If alternative energy would be used for cars, homes, and industry, there will be more than enough petroleum to fulfill our plastics needs forever. All of the issues that apply here have to do with the environmental impact of non-biodegradable plastics, NOT with energy misuse, industrial efficiency, greenhouse gases and effects, petroleum reserves, nor global oil politics. The plastics industry is pretty sound - and would be nearly perfect if we could make a bio-plastic. Until now, that has been a challenging task, or someone would have done it already. I don't think that there is a nefarious polystyrene lobby that has squashed development; everybody recognizes it is important. And once you do discover an applicable chemistry and then tool-up the manufacturing infrastructure, it then becomes cheap, moneywise and energywise - just another plastic.
3 >> "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."
Huh? We make plenty of plastic now without fusion. You make it sound like production of a lignin-based plastic will be some sort of energy-sucking black hole. It's just another plastic - but with a whole lot of impediments to having just a simple chemistry. If you read the original article, this is making news because it does sound promising - these guys might have cracked that nut of finding a process that can
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.
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.
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"
Re:More than one type of plastic (Score:3, Interesting)
Your points are somewhat flawed.
Right back at you.
Current polymers based on petroleum refinement are based on hydrocarbons. [...] biology generally doesn't have long carbon backbones, so life-on-earth has not generally evolved the metabolic machinery to handle hydrocarbons and derivatives.
Uh, all kinds of living things make fats which are mostly CH bonds, and we have already made all kinds of plastics out of vegetable oils. Henry Ford made a car made almost entirely out of soybean oil (the body was famously made with hemp fibers and resin.)
Getting hydrocarbons from bio sources is not a problem. They're not pure hydrocarbons, but they do have hydrocarbon chains. You do have to add energy (forgive my simplification) to reorganize into long-chain hydrocarbons. But energy is available, we can get a lot from wind and sun that we're not bothering with now.
If you look at the structure of lignin, it is already polymerized
It's also in a tree. Tree harvesting has traditionally been abused and is difficult to do right and still make money.
There is a reason that soda bottles aren't steel, tin, aluminum, or glass anymore. There is a reason that plastic bags have replaced paper at the grocery store, why butchered meats come wrapped in plastic, why toys are made of plastic, why picnic ware is made of plastic
Well, yes, yes there is. The reason is that the people with the timber paper and plastics industries are all wrapped up in the same system. Hearst demonized hemp using his newspaper industry, in order to protect his timber paper industry. Hemp plastic was likewise a threat to DuPont. We should be using hemp paper for all of this stuff. Instead we're using a system where people go out to the desert to die to secure the rights to pump oil out of the ground and spend a lot of energy and cause a lot of pollution so that your grocer can get a bag cheaper than if it were made out of timber-based paper, a product whose demand is kept artificially high by utilizing the government to make the competition illegal.
Don't let historical fact get in the way, though.
There will always be a need for the myriad of petroleum based plastics and devices that we use for specific products and purposes.
Not really. Given what we can do with chemistry today I sincerely doubt that there is any petroleum-based plastic which could not be satisfactorily made from a more renewable source, or for which a more renewable substitute cannot be found.
But we use TONS of "non-primary" support products, like grocery bags, food wraps and packaging, shipping and packing materials, retail packaging, disposable bottles and containers (soda and water bottles, laundry soap, cat litter, engine oil, household cleaners, etc), picnic and table ware, disposable medical items, and so on - i.e. the disposable junk that we consume and discard everyday. If a biodegradable plastic can be made for those products, it will be the proverbial win-win-win.
It would be an even bigger win if we didn't use plastic and if we didn't use plastic for more of those items. Grocery bags? Reuse. Food wraps and packaging, shipping and packing materials? Hemp paper (and other eco-friendly items, like those food starch packing peanuts.) Disposable bottles and containers? Most of them should really go back to glass, especially for consumables. Those which need to be plastic or metal because their contents are hazardous would often be better packed into metal containers. A lot of those products ought to be changed, too. For example you can make motor oil out of vegetable oil.) They still use refillable glass bottles in many countries, and when they wear out they are easy to recycle, if not cost-effective. You could just crush them up and throw them in the ocean and add to the world's supply of beach glass for all I care, if they would just stop putting
Re:Next step (Score:2, Interesting)
Several gemstones are composed of mostly aluminum oxide (The names come from the impurities/color). The general name for them is corundum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum [wikipedia.org]
Re:Calling this "liquid wood" (Score:3, Interesting)
It probably had the dis-advantage of requiring people to do the right thing to get plastic to the machine.
I think we need to somehow bring the machine to people; I mean, somehow make it almost impossible for people not to do the right thing. I have no idea how: of course, it's best for people not to have unnecessary plastics in the first place.An extreme example:
net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt
- Douglas Adams
A soup of plactic (Score:2, Interesting)
HEMP (Score:1, Interesting)
Hemp is a great source of lignin. Needs no pesticide, no fertilizer, and grows faster than almost any other plant.
No need to chop any further trees for paper or anything else besides wood beams.