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@@paytonturner1421 You have to ask yourself, is the hemp plastic "cheaper" than plastic? If not, economics says people will use plastic. Both hemp and plastic can be recycled into energy at the end of life of the object. Incineration is Recycling into electricity.
I don't understand why you want to talk about alternatives to plastic. It's only economically viable if it can be produced in massive quantities at a cheaper price. Using oil found in the ground as plastic before using as fuel, uses the oil twice instead of once. Come back and talk about alternatives to plastics after no more Oil is used for Energy.
There is a commercial hemp manufacturer just down the road from where I live in Canada. One of the industries they serve is the automotive industry; their product can be used to help create things like interior panels, package trays, etc reducing the amount of plastic needed or replacing heavier wood based materials. Hemp is also good for land stabilization, weed control, etc. They even sell growing mats for starting seeds or even as a dirt alternative for growing microgreens.
I guess car body panels count as single use plastics 😂 But yeah, there's been about a century if missed opportunity for hemp utilization and r&d, it's going to branch out with more interest.
@@besknighter Just read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and was astounded to learn there are fungi with not 2 sexes, not 3 sexes, not 10 or 20... but tens of thousands of sexes. They are funky and amazing!
Commercial Hemp. It's been bouncing around in my head for ages as a next entrepreneurial career. The plant is hardy, doesn't require lots of pesticides, is not water intensive to grow, is fast-growing, and the fiber has many uses from hemp paper to hemp plastics products. The biggest barrier, as you say, is lack of production because Hemp is still considered a "Controlled Substance" and that creates a lot of hoops to jump through. It's stigmatized. The seaweed packaging is very interesting as well as shrimp/lobster shell extraction. I run a longtime family owned seafood business that deals in live lobster and we have above-ground tanks for holding live lobster. I have often wondered about using those tanks to grow seaweed... All that being said, I still think Commercial Hemp is still the most sustainable of those ideas...
I wonder about genetically modifying hemp to completely remove any mind altering component? We do that to crops we eat, why not do it for something we don't even eat?
A few years ago, an engineering student in Thailand built a machine that made disposable food containers out of rice straw. Rice straw is an extremely common form of agricultural waste in Thailand until recently, nearly all of it was burned by the rice farmers. Now, burning some rice straw in the fields produces a great natural fertilizer and is also helpful for controlling weeds and crop pests without using dangerous and expensive chemicals. However, the amount of rice straw that Thai farmers produce far exceeds what they need to do this. There's plenty of extra that left over that farmers could be selling for a much needed source of extra income and be used for many applications from traditional Thai homes to biomass energy production. It's not just Thailand that could benefit from this technology. China, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Myanmar, Japan, and even Louisiana all produce lots of rice as well. If this technology can be adapted to work with wheat straw it could be a game changer for packaging in the west, Ukraine, and Russia. I would like to know how the rice straw packaging industry is going in Thailand.
Straw can be used for construction. CAFboard (Compressed Agricultural Fiber) or Straw bale SIPS (Structural Insulated Panels) are some of the names of these, besides the traditional use of normal straw bales. They've got some nice properties just be sure to keep them dry! And straw can be used to make papers (straw paper) or cardboards for packaging. And like any biomass it can be turned into biochar and pyrolysis products, or energy. All better and less smoggy ways to use straw.
I remember seeing an article in Beyond2000 (Sci-Fi channel back in the '90s, I think) about someone using surplus rice grains to make biodegradable (and edible if you really want) bowls for street vendors. I don't know if this took off or failed.
I’m suprised they burn it, my understanding is it is that just produces the equivalent of wood ash which is 5% of the mass and burns off all the carbon and carbon is huge for regenerative agriculture
Another alternative that people forget is glass. It use to be that drinks were sold in glass containers that were returned to the store. And using biodegradable plastics means they can sometimes break down if stored for a long time, ruining the contents and limiting the shelf life. It would also mean that things like cutlery made from it would have a best before date and could mean a lot of it gets thrown out without being used.
I’d also point to aluminum cans, which, like glass are MUCH easier to recycle than plastic (though not as easy to just wash out and reuse) but still fairly cheap and convenient. I’ve recently seen some water sold in a can clearly based on a classic soda can but with a resealable screw-on top like a bottle, which seems like a nice option for vending machines or other places people are unlikely to return the glass bottles
@IONATVS aluminum cans have a plastic lining therefore making them a mixed material and thus difficult to recycle and as far vending machines and people not likely recycling them, one, more recycle bins around town, two, even if someone doesn't recycle glass at least it won't break down into micro glass as that's just sand
@williamgtimber2510 as I know it's all aluminum cans and yes it's just a thin coating on this inside. The reason is because most sodas are corrosive so without the lining it would eat through the can eventually
The company I work for was selling plant-based compostable plastic bottles back in the '90s, but ran into a major problem. The same quality that allowed the plastic to decompose in landfills also caused the bottles to break down on store shelves or in warehouses. I imagine the same problem exists for any plant-based plastic containers designed to decompose under certain conditions -- premature deterioration and a mess in aisle 3...
This is the main reason we dont see more use of it - but also, one of the leading reasons if we do switch, they still will have to take something like 5 years. So finding something that can work in he middle is the hardest thing.
I saw that as a problem immediately after hearing about the rapid rate of decay. Gone after six weeks?! Those products would be lucky to make it out of the bottling plant. Any proposed packaging needs to survive at least as long as the 'sell by' date of its contents!
Another side to that is producing stuff that goes into the bottles that is safe to consume for years. If the bottle will last for several years, they can produce and store food/drink in them that will last years. I mean, if the bottles were only expected to last a few months, and the contents were only going to be fit for consumption for a few months, it might actually improve things on two fronts ;). I remember hearing about how dominos pizza (or was it pizza hut?) basically made dough for only a few months a year. They had developed it to last for up to two years before they wouldn't ship it to the store. The preservatives etc to make that even salable isn't that good for us.
I always thought the most applicable use of the bioplastics SHOULD be food packaging, because we need to wean ourselves off all the insane amounts of sugar and salt in our food. No plastic AND healthier. But that sort of regulation has to start with our government, and until they're responsible for paying for healthcare for everyone, they won't bother. Just enjoy the economic benefits of keeping the population just sick enough to need a lot of drugs.
I recycle HDPE - 2 liter pop bottles myself I bought the parts to turn empty pop bottle HDPE into filament to use in my 3D printer That way I can print fishing lure bodies to make my own lures
@@dagwood1327 My lady saw the kit online and ordered it for me , she will not tell me how much $ or where from It has a heated nozzle that you draw the plastic through First you cut a thin strip out of the bottle After the plastic is drawn through the nozzle , there is a spool that the plastic filament is wrapped onto
@@tacticalultimatum Hahaha! Also: "Want a greener alternative to buying disposable water bottles? This mega bottle with a huge carbon footprint made of dozens of materials and impossible to recycle (in an economicaly viable way). It also connects to your phone so you get tons of instagramable info you absolutely don't need!" 😂 🤦 Come on... how about a metal bottle that you can use and reuse f.o.r.e.v.e.r and even pass on when you die? 🤣
We could also go back to using glass for a lot of things like bottles. Glass definitely isn't perfect, but it's more easily recyclable and it doesn't leech microplastics
@@Evan-rj9xy during the Cold War in east Berlin, a company managed to take virtually unbreakable glass. At the time it was very expensive and would likely be more expensive today, but it’s very likely we could do it cheaper and more efficiently today if someone would brush off the patents.
Glass is heavy, relatively fragile and it takes a lot of energy (heat) to melt down and recycle. I want glass but the detriments does not out-weight the benefits.
Huge caveat that I'm not a farmer/botanist/agriculture expert, but if we could replace a HUGE amount of the corn that we produce with Hemp, it seems like it'd be a very VERY worthwhile endeavor. Corn is massively wasteful and overproduced because of ill-conceived corn subsidies. We straight up don't need all of it, and yet waste untold amounts of water and fertilizer producing it. So replacing a wasteful crop with one that not only cuts down on plastic production, but also can combat water and fertilizer waste seems like a very common sense thing to do.
we definately need to cut back on using corn for bioFuels. The amount of carbon released from the soil just to plant the stuff is far greater than what is reclaimed by the plants while growing.
Agree - a cut back on corn would be a good idea. As for more use of HEMP - I dont know, but if most of the plant can be used and it does suck up more co2 - then sure, but thats a lot of IFs. Yet, before we do, we need to start moving towards a better battery tech first as thats the only real way we drop the need for biofuels for transportation.
@@adr2t We definitely need to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be cutting down on corn, cutting down on plastics, increasing renewables, etc all in tandem. It's not an either-or proposal.
I've done a lot of commercial fishing, and creating some sort of biodegradable cordage for fishing nets would huge. For several fisheries, those nets are trashed after 2-4 seasons anyway, so if there was a way to add an enzyme to a commercial composter for some sort of pla based cordage, that would eliminate literally tons of plastic pollution
I'm a big fan of the opportunities from Bamboo. It's way strong along the grain, can be turned into fibers that can be used for clothes, grows extremely quick which captures a good amount of carbon in a short time. Lots of possibilities. I have shirts, pants, underwear, toilet paper, and more made out of bamboo as it's primary material.
Bamboo textiles are often manufactured in a closed loop system, so the chemicals are re-used and never leave the factory. They use lye (sodium hydroxide) and carbon disulphide to access the cellulose in the plant matter, creating sodium cellulose xanthate, which is acidified, separating the cellulose (which is spun into fibre) leaving dithio carbonic acid, which decomposes back into carbon disulphide and water, which are reused.
The real enemy is spandex, which is mostly polyurethane (85% ish), drastically shortens the lifespan of the fabric it's blended with, and then - it's blended, so extremely difficult to recycle, etc. It's become ubiquitous - even in men's workshirts, because better fit I guess?
I have done research on PLA, wheat starch and chitosan in my career. I even made ice cream spoons for the University of Minnesota's milk shake booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Finding any biodegradable alternative to plastic is tough, because you want it to retain strength until the moment of disposal, then you want it to disappear nearly instantly. And before you ask, none of my work achieved these lofty goals, but I've seen some small progress. And chitosan smells horrible when extruded.
The first time I ever heard of a non-petroleum plastic was in a video about farm/construction equipment maker JCB using soy plastics to make body panels. They reduced weight versus the metal panels, The color went all the way through so scratched did not need to be painted, and one of the workers swung a sledgehammer over his head onto a panel and the hammer bounced.
@@MonkeyJedi99 I can't speak for the exact plastic you saw. But a lot of plant based plastic is more a 'marketing' thing and aren't any better then petroleum based plastics, in terms of environmental impacts or biodegradability. Many of them are chemically near identical and have the exact same problems as petroleum based plastics even though they are 'plant-based' which sounds eco friendly. What they are doing is extracting polymers from the plant material, and by the time the chemical process is done the end product is chemically the same or very similar as the petroleum products we compare them with. Its worth remembering, oil, coal, natural gas - all of these originated from plants that just sat in the ground under the right conditions. So the components that make them up are the same components that make up live plants today. Plant-based is a deceptive term and should be treated with scrutiny. There are plant based plastics that break down, but there are many other they are just the same plastics we are trying to get rid of with a marketable cover.
I agree those are some fantastic options currently in the works. As someone who works their day job finding enzymes and engineering microorganisms to convert corn-derived glucose to PLA and other bioplastics, people just underestimate the scale and cost parity required to compete with petrochemical-derived plastics. Most of these research groups/startups have excellent ideas and decent products, but getting funding for scale up is an uphill task. The price of oil largely dictates their feasibility and commercial success. With heavy political and societal headwinds (especially in US), lack of oil price controls is the key bottleneck for most if not all of these technologies to really be successful. Let's hope Europe and soon everywhere succeed with these alternatives and we make an actual dent in overall plastic usage.
Not to mention the fact that big oil isn't going to willingly let these startups compete on a much greater scale. They would take too large a bite out of the pie that is mostly consumed by big oil.
This! It all depends on this. We have the knowledge and technologies to move away from plastics... The thing is they are making a few fowks super rich. It happens with everything: if it isn't going to fill someone's pockets, you bet it ain't gonna happen. Recycling exists just because there's a profit to be made. This is the sad truth about our society.
Hempcrete is a fabulous, fireproof, building material. You can also build out of Hemp with a plastic core, but obviously, we don't want that, and it's not structural. Hempcrete is not labeled as structural either, but having a wood frame takes care of that. Hempcrete is my favourite building material.
Hempcrete is the SHIT...i wish i could invest in that company but they only take BIG BIG investments starting at 1 million last time i checked... but Hempcrete is an amazing product and company.
We are already using alternatives to plastics in Sweden. All residents in my region are getting free compostable "plastic" bags. We put all food scraps and compostable materials in them and companies are picking them up and turning them into biofuel. All busses in the region use biofuel.
The thing I would like to see most of all, is the ability to purchase non-packaged everyday grocery items without needing to go to a special store or pay significantly more. Many items this is already extremely easy to do with in theory - rice, dry beans, flour, and other granular/powder products along with liquids can easily be dispensed from a machine into any container. However very few stores offer this, and those that do are typically specialty stores that aren't affordable. But the advantage of using a reusable container don't stop at reducing waste. Reusable containers are also more durable, often look nicer, and might offer features like easily viewing contents or having an air-tight seal. Surely we have all seen the tik-tok videos where someone decants all their groceries into nice little bottles and boxes and trays and makes their refrigerator look like some kind of modern art? The only problem with that, is they then throw away (even if it's "recycling") all the bottles and packages that stuff came in. But if you could just go to the store, load up your containers, and take them home it would be great!
The "fill your own package" idea was tried and abandoned for candy and coffee because people suck. Between just spilling the stuff onto the floor and "topping off a pocket" or snacking without paying, they ruined it for the rest of us.
I’ve worked on some projects that use hemp in construction and because it’s lightweight its not great at acoustics (sound insulation follows a mass law). The stuff seems kinda crumbly and a bit tricky to work with but the architects take lessons learned from each project
Excellent video, great to see we have readily available solutions. The problem now is industrial inertia. Plastics are so intertwined in global supply chains, they almost have a technological lock (like the qwerty keyboard). We need legislation, taxes and subsidies to help get us out of our local minima / maxima and towards the global optimal solution.
If I had the money I'd start planning a hempcrete house tomorrow. I think its an especially good option for steppe environments. Historically its been difficult to live a settled existence on steppes due the extreme weather and lack of building materials common elsewhere. With hempcrete you can use wood or masonry products sparingly for the structure and then fill in the gaps with it and have great insulation that helps keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I think it will making urbanism in the great plains and the eurasian steppe viable beyond the next few decades.
Down here in New Zealand, we used to use plastic bags for everything, but a few years back we changed all of that to reusable fabric bags. You'll be surprised how quickly people can adapt to new things.
Do ~40% of adult New Zealanders equate technological advancement that benefits the planet as a socialist/communist/liberal Californication conspiracy as in the USA? Promoted mostly by Australia's Rupert Murdoch's US media giant Fox "news" as in the USA?
@@XKS99 Yes, I've seen the cheap plastic reusable shopping tote bags. (I doubt that using them *increases* the problem, though -- as long as they are actually reused.) But some people use shopping bags made from real fabric instead of plastics. My family takes reusable bags to the store for grocery shopping & "cooler bags" are great for refrigerated items. (Yes, those have plastic, but it's still way better than one-time use plastic bags.)
@@XKS99 yeah, but I'd argue there are still improvements in making that switch, at least in smaller places like New Zealand. Yes the production process making those kinds of bags is worse in terms of CO2 production vs using single use bags your whole life, or whatever the exact numbers those studies have shown (Its been a while since I have seen those kinds of studies). But, reducing how much loose plastic litter that is just floating around can be a big improvement immediately for local nature. I think New Zealand is pretty good about not littering, but even when you do your best stuff gets out there, from the trash or landfills or however. Having reusable bags reduces that kind of accidental litter a lot. So for a place like New Zeland, which has a lot of unique and endangered wildlife and wants to do what they can to preserve it, policies like this make sense. Its an immediate improvement for particular goals. Regardless of if they put the policy in place or not the reusable bags already exist or were being produced anyway. New Zealand didn't invent reusable bags technology or revive an already dead industry to start remaking the bags after society stopped so they could have the bags. Its like saying you won't refill a plastic bottle you have in your hand because the bottle is bad for the environment. If that makes any sense. It isn't the world changing solution suited for every location, I agree. But some places it makes sense, and it should show that we need to take a lot of different strategies to make improvements where we can, that make sense where we are applying them.
I just come from different "all is lost, the future is awful" video and I have to see is nice seeing people focusing on the solutions and not in the problems. Loved the video!!
The best waste is still the one we don't have to produce in the first place. But let's face it : having all those potential solutions rising and slowly replacing petrol based plastics we use today is a win! Thanks a lot for, once again, a great video! Cheers from Switzerland
There are still Red Lobster stores open all over. I went into one and was able to get 6 cheddar bay biscuits in less than 5 minutes for less than $5. They were still warm in the bag. I gave them to my coworkers and everyone loved them. One of the few things all 5 of us agreed on. Despite being a deal, the 'Lob prob makes a great margin on those biscuits. If millions of people *knew* they could have fresh, hot biscuits to-go in less than 5 minutes for less than $5 I think THAT would save the chain. And, ya know, not getting screwed by private equity anymore.
I’ve tried to reduce/eliminate most of the single use plastics. I carry my own utensils/straw, I use laundry sheets, I use glass or silicone storage containers, I use a stainless steel water bottle and reusable mesh bags for produce. I do eat frozen convenience food (I’m single, retired and don’t like to cook) but buy those that come in compostable containers. I’ve been interested in alternative building materials and hempcrete has topped the list for several years. It was great to get an update on these alternative technologies.
Great that you bring this to the attention. I missed PHA in your story 🙌 A company here in The Netherlands started making great products (fossil free, real biodegradable, very durable) with PHA. Cups for coffee, festical usage etc. and various other things.
I suspect the problem with any kind of compostable or biodegradable plastic is going to be how long it lasts with food in it. If a Coke bottle was made out of it, then I'd worry that it would dissolve and leak before it was bought. However! For short term things, like sandwiches, bread, take-away food, cutlery, straws, pallet shrinkwrap and so on, it sounds excellent. And even if we can only remove half the plastic packaging, that's still a huge win, while we work on the other half.
Some companies are quietly removing the “reduce” out of reuse and recycle♻️ because they know that plastics are not 100% recyclable and reducible in part to that.
The "reduce" in "reduce, reuse, recycle" means reducing the amount of plastic you buy in the first place. For example, buying items in compostable packaging instead of plastic packaging, or using glass items instead of plastic, are ways to reduce plastic use.
Most plastics can be stopped just by using glass or other traditional materials and by changing certain habits. Install soda machines instead of bottled soda, install water fountains instead of bottled water, use your own cup for coffee, buy powdered detergents and soaps as they can be packed in paper/cardboard, pack grains in cloth or jute bags(what they do all over Asia including for smaller 2kg packs), pack cookies, bread and other consumables in paper and/or cardboard and so on. Plastic is here as it is a by product of petroleum refining and the industry around it is extremely profitable for corporations.
Plastic is also less expensive and/or more convenient than the alternatives mentioned. Until there's sufficient culture shift to being okay with less convenience and until something cheaper than plastic comes along, the current state of things is likely to remain unchanged. For the record, I do prefer to give up some convenience personally and would be okay with going back to deposits on bottles and such.
As someone who is allergic to mushrooms, fungi, crustaceans, shellfish and shrimps (or prawns as we call them Australia), I think the researchers are out to kill me! 😅 PLA with added enzyme(s) seems to the answer for me.😊
@@UndecidedMF Ahh, the curse of having a common but also famous name! I used to work for one organisation where there were 4 people named David Jones, so we need our middle initial as the tie breaker in our email addresses. 😇😁
I was a steward at a event many years ago. The food they provided us was low budget dhal ,basically just spiced lentils. It was served in clamshell boxes. When I heard that the boxes were pressed from potato starch, I ate the box, which provided more satisfying bite than the dhal alone.
Glass seems like a viable alternative, because it is easy to recycle. However, it can take up to 4,000 years to degrade. We wont be able to fully eliminate the use of plastic, but we can greatly reduce the impact and waste caused by it.
The problem is only good glass sand is from river sand dessert, sea and ocean sands are unviable and compared to other types there is not much of river variety some shortage issues even caused sand mafias to form
Recycling glass s very energy demanding. Glass containers are also much heavier than plastic ones. That adds to enviormentall cost of transport. Not to mention of safety concerns with glass breaking. Glass used to be the main materials for making containers, there is a reason we moved from it.
glass breaks if you drop it, resulting in more waste. How many glass cups do you go through compared to reusable plastic ones? I don't think it's an alternative to the properties provided by plastic. And as another poster said, glass is Very energy intensive to recycle. Much more so than plastic unfortunately.
I posted a comment about being a hemp farmer, but i thought id post one about being a mushroom farmer, too, since i did that before i grew hemp. Basically we would sterilize oak sawdust subatrate, but it in a plastic bag, innoculate it, and seal it up in a sterile environment. You could track the mycelial growth just by looking through the clear plastic. We had a weird case where we got a contaminating fungus in a batch, so we separated it for disposal. You cant just dump the stuff anywhere, or it could come back, and it ended up sitting in storage for a while. When i finally went to get it, it appeared as if the mycelia had eaten through some of the bags! I was dumbfounded to say the least. Either wed just accidentally discovered a way to destroy plastic, or something weird was up. Long story short, we hadnt. In the cases where the bag had broken down and the fungus escaped, all of the bags appeared as if theyd been under vaccum, like a food sealer. What had happened was the mycelia had sequestered a lot of the carbon in the substrate. A lot of fungi can survive in low oxygen environments, and some are facultive anaerobes, meaning they can get along without it. So whole the shiitake was consuming oxyen, the facultive anaerobes were consuming the co2. It was getting heavily sequestered, and eventually the atmosphere was depleted, essentially vacuuming the bag, which was then stressed by the substrate expanding and creating microfissures in the bag all around the substrate block. Not exactly the breakthrough i was dreaming of, but at least the mystery was solved 🤷
The only things I'm wondering are: are they cheaper to produce; do they take more resources to produce and thus generate more pollution; what convenient singular and short word do we use to specifically refer to bio-polymers like we have the word plastic to refer to oil-based polymers?
So I'm an older guy who went back to school for an honours degree in interior design, which I'm in the midst of, but as I'm watching this video I'm writing a book on the history of architecture and interior design. 2/5 of the book is actually a lexicon/glossary/encyclopedia, and guess which section I'm writing right this moment? Interior finishes and textiles! I have a few thoughts. Hempcrete is a going to be a niche material, at least for the foreseeable future. One problem with it not mentioned is that it has to be rebuilt relatively frequently. However, I've been a huge proponent of hemp fibre for years. When I see the statistics on how many litres of water it takes to manufacture a pair of jeans, how much sheep fart methane into the sky per bale of wool, how much energy is used making bamboo into a usable fibre, not to mention how long most synthetic ffibres last in the landfill, I still can't believe hemp fibre isn't an industry standard. As for "natural" plastics, so far they either behave like synthetics by lasting forever, or they break down too quickly or at unpredictable rate. Store owners and customers alike I'm sure don't like seeing their Coke as a puddle of goo on the shelf. Regardless of current technical limitations, I still believe we're going to science our way out of our predicament, and change the fundamental philosophy of circular economies and commerce. I hope we all live long enough to see it!
I thought you would just plaster over the hempcrete - it shouldn't have any major durability issies, it looks comparable to straw bale construction, traditional plaster work, or lathe and plaster. All of which are traditional materials that can last a long time. Like any architectural material, it may require maintenance over time.
I agree with you about the alternatives for plastic bottles etc... Just looking at things around my room, I have a plastic tube of tooth paste that expires in 2 years time. I don't plan to keep it that long, but if the tube started to decay in a few months, I fear it would just lead to more waste. Piles of drinks, cosmetics etc... stored in warehouses would end up going to waste because they could not be stored for long enough. Unfortunately one of plastics greatest qualities (it's durability) is also it's greatest problem. Finding a substance which can last for years but can also be broken down or recycled easily when no longer needed will not be easy.
@@JamesTurner-os7sw I obviously don't have all the answers, but there's another consideration to take into account that didn't even occur to me until a year ago. Plastic is lightweight. If many products were shipped in glass bottles, for example, think of millions of delivery trucks and the amount of energy they would use shipping the stuff, then collecting the recyclables. Yikes. That's why young people are so important. They don't have the rigidity in their thinking yet that older people do. I'm a little annoyed that my generation always complains about younger generations. I look at my son's and I think that wow, we've got some young clever people on case!
One unexpected thing this does, is put pressure on the oil industry to improve plastic. Oil is natural substance and there's a better than average chance that it could be made into materials in a similar manner to chitin, fungi, or kelp. The industry simply needs competition that pushes them to do so. So far with a virtual monopoly there has been no reason for them to improve their products, with these new products now there may just be a reason to do so. The best way to get away from toxic plastics, is to replace them with non toxic versions. I'm hopeful that these products you mentioned will succeed, and in the process, force lazy oil, to innovate to improve their products as well. If that happens we all win.
Thanks for keeping the message about single-use plastics going! It's staggering what we use once and throw away like plastic bottles, bags and straws. If just 10% of the US population stopped using plastic straws the impact could be huge. If you assume each person goes through about 200 straws a year, then 10% (33,000,000 people) would equate to around 6,600,000,000 plastic straws a YEAR kept from our landfills. For me, something like plastic straw waste that takes 100 years to break down is not what I want as part of my legacy since they are going to last a lot longer than me! :-)
I believe this is my favorite video I have seen from you. I have been so frustrated as I go through every day with plastic knowing that we can end it. And frustrated that I can only do so much. This is one of those issues I wish governments around the world would embrace so we can end all petroleum based plastics.
Something I've been thinking about for a long time now, is the amount of waste inherent in shipping products to our homes. And I don't just mean burning fossil fuels to transport stuff, I mean the boxes. Cardboard is recyclable, but remember the three Rs? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - they are in that order for a reason, recycling is supposed to be the last effort when you can't reuse something and couldn't avoid having it in the first place. But there's actually a great way that we could reuse shipping containers, a way that the greatest of sinners in this category is uniquely positioned to implement. Amazon, with their ubiquity and their own fulfillment network, could transition to delivering packages in reusable containers that they would simply pick up when your next delivery comes. I already have a service very much like this for water deliveries - I live in a city with really poor water treatment (we get boil water alerts at least a few times a year, and even when it's "safe" it's still pretty nasty), so I get water delivered in 5 gallon bottles. But these bottles aren't wasted, I put the empties on my porch and they take them away to clean and refill them. They don't recycle the bottles, they just use them again which costs much less and uses far far less energy. Amazon could do the same with plastic bins, drop off a bin of stuff you ordered then next time they bring something pick up the bins you left out waiting for them. Yes, I know if they do that we're now using more plastics - but plastic that isn't single-use is way less of a problem and cardboard just wouldn't hold up to repeated use very well in the way that plastic can.
There was nothing wrong with old fashioned paper wax lined milk carton type of containers. AND they were bio degradable...... They keep trying to re invent the wheel.
The paper part is what plastic was replacing because paper normally came from trees at the time. Paper also had other limits in terms of how much you could store and hold without increasing the amount of "weight" and design into making a paper container. So really all this is to find a way to replace the paper with something cheaper or less resource timing to product.
🔅Heat: hello? And not even intense heat. 🔸 paper and wax have higher carbon footprint, plus it is heavier, for things like plastics that are ubiquitous, it is a considerable increase of carbon emissions, from manufacturing and transportation. 🔸and plastic is much much stronger, there are products that just need that. 🔸it can be transparent.
The biggest problem of the wax lined milk cartons is that they never existed. The cartons were always lined with a plastic, both on the inside as on the outside. It looked as they where composting, but in reality they left a lot of microplastics.
Chitosan (from shrimp shell) is also a lifesaving product EMS use to help clotting (halves clotting time). We use granules of it or dressings impregnated by it.
One common plant-based material that people often conflate with plastic is cellophane, which is a transparent sheet material that is often used to wrap stuff.
I love the seaweed straws I've encountered before, I also purchased some metal straws for myself, and the straw becoming ice cold enhances the drinking experience IMHO
@@alexanderdeburdegala4609 Metal straws always feel very uncomfortable to me, but I bought reusable silicone straws and they've worked very well for me.
Thanks for the video! I love new technologies that solve real problems, but what I love even more is seeing it actually get used and this use grow quickly!
Imagine throwing out water bottle after drinking the water in it. I reuse my water bottles, refilling them for months, sometimes years on end and only throw them out if there's a leak or if it becomes internally crumpled without any way to uncrumple it.
Be careful of this, it can be worse for you to reuse a plastic bottle too much. It depends on the plastic used and how that was made. But plastic bottles are not a good item to keep using long term
This is not to say that the volume of plastic waste isn't a problem (it is, big time), but on the subject of something a little hopeful, Ideonella sakaiensis is known to consume PET polymers for energy. Basically there is a new potential source of energy in the environment and bacteria WILL find a way to eat it.
What would be absolutely cool would be a transparent to mostly transparent/semitransparent mycelium-based plastic that can hold drinking water, safely, for up to 2 years, but after the contents have been downed the bottle can be cut up, boiled or soaked in near boiling water for 3 to 5 minutes, then be cut up and used for either noodles or mushrooms in your Bolognese sauce.
Plastic water bottles in its self is not the problem. It is the lack of a return scheme that is the problem. In Scandinavia and Germany they have return schemes that catch up to 95% of the plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water
When it comes to food we don't really have a choice. Fruit, vegetables, bread and many other things come in plastic. We can either buy them like that or not eat them.
The idea that recycling and renewable energy needs to be profitable before it's worth doing will go down in history as one of the most selfish aspects of this knowingly climate changing generation (lets not even think about car owners). Government should be pumping money into large scale recycling and renewables.
Comrade, profitability is basically the only way anything has ever been accomplished, public works need to be paid for through taxes or revenue. I don't know what your way of paying for things entails
Military industrial complex would like to have a word with you and the current day usage of penicillin and NASA is sending you a letter of recall for those integrated circuits used in the mobile phone you have in your pocket.
Are you doing EVERYTHING you can to help? Have you abandoned ALL the things that aren't renewable? Do you give every spare cent to research making recycling cheaper? No? Then be quiet evil one.
As an alternative insulation product, you could look into Airkrete (not to be confused with Aircrete). Airkrete is a magnesium oxide foam. Another interesting building material is Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC). AAC is a concrete foam. Aluminum powder is mixed with the cement powder. When water is added, there is a chemical reaction, and hydrogen bubbles form. The hydrogen dissipates and is replaced with air. AAC is load bearing, 4 hour fire rated, insects wont eat it, it does not mold. It has a fairly decent R value, due to its thermal mass and the fact that it is a foam.
That's a good point. But at least Legos are not one time use and don't really create much waste. I still have Legos from 40 years ago that work like new.
I'd spend like 10x the cost for mycelium LEGO bricks than for plastic. They're seriously missing out on a market of people who will pay a premium for a more ecological option.
At least with LEGO very little is thrown away, I've passed much of my collection on to my great nephew and there are LEGO lending librarys/groups also.
I'm done feeling guilty about it. It's not our job to reduce the production of plastic. I try to do my best but I'm done feeling guilty about it when I have no reasonably cheap alternative.
@@racingfortheson I see what you mean since demand usually affects supply. But are there enough people demanding plastic alternatives? Legislation to curb the widespread use of single use plastic is going to be the only fix I see. Even then, legislation typically only happens when there's a demand from the population. I just know that I feel stressed and guilty about using plastic. And I try to avoid it when possible, but I'm giving myself permission to turn that guilt into blame. It's a mental health solution for myself. I know I'm not the only person who feels this guilt and pressure.
@@mattrinne I’m definitely someone who believes in small government but this is exactly something the government could do. Put a date, 5 years, and say they are outlawed at that point. Gives people time to get used to the idea and companies time to figure it out. Then fine the 💩 out of products that break the law. Take that money and put towards clean up. Probably solved.
It is so important that you are bringing attention to these developments that plague the environment. So glad that you have 1.43M subscribers. You deserve all taht and more. Thank you for being a very well researched source for those who give a d*mn about the survival of life on our planet.
Thanks for sharing this information. Plastic waste is a blight on our planet that we are all contributing to. These alternatives offer hope that we can reduce our plastic consumption without causing a significant disruption which would in turn lead to a backlash against less convenient solutions.
Large building use of concrete is find - the main problem is finding a replacement for roads and smaller buildings as it cost more there than larger buildings that can hold more stuff.
@@RasakBlood The plastics hazards that we knew of in the 1960's and 1970's were mostly related to the production of plastics. In many ways we thought of plastic as safer than glass at the customer or post customer part of the product life cycle. (Due to reduced broken glass.) The first I heard of research showing that some plastics mimicking hormones was about 1990. (I think that study was looking at frog reproduction.) We keep finding new hazards. So @longranger270's statement and concern is accurate and legitimate. PFAS(s) (forever chemicals) are a different story. We have known about the hazards since the 1960's or 1970's if I understand correctly.
I try to cut back on 1 time use plastics as much as I can. Drink from the tap, try to go for a soda in aluminium, etc... Packaging is the big one that seems hard to do. All those products look good for the future. Let's hope they make it.
I still remember when the milk man picked up the used glass milk bottles and dropped of new bottles full of fresh milk. When I was very young we used to buy soda pop in glass bottles. We washed them out and exchanged them for new full bottles.
Agreed. And it was also done for store bought soda and milk. There was a deposit paided to encourage the return of the bottles. Bottle type pop vending machines would have wooden crates besides the vending machine for returning the bottles. (No deposit in that case.) With standardized bottles and jars this could happen again. Reuse is more cost efficient than recycling. Standardization is needed to reduce the logistics costs. Masson and Atlas have basically set some standards for jars. This could be done. And the standards wouldn't need to be glass. It could be a lighter material to reduce transportation cost. Durability and the ability to clean and sanitizer are important factors. (Glass was used fifty years ago because it is a lot more durable than most people realize. It is durable enough to hold up to harsh cleaning and sanitizing processes. Lack of this durable is one of the challenges for reusable plastic bottles and jars.)
Blissful ignorance is the problem, "Live, Laugh, Love" Britney's of America that waste $50 a month on temu, and have 20 plastic multi-use plastic, and 10 metal bottles... If I refill a "single use" bottle an average of 3 times before I "recycle" it as required by local sanitation, Britney needs to use ONLY her 30 bottles for the next 20 years (not buy 3 every year) to have an equivalent offset. Plastic grocery bags weren't an issue, since I had plenty of useful around the house reuses for them... now I have a pile of bright blue walmart bags, and get to see them all over... including along the sides of the Colorado River.
@@trixinreno419 Disposable shopping bags were definitely a problem here, because people mostly just dumped them and they end up on the local ocean, killing the wildlife.
@loganmedia4401 "Campaigners say these bag hoards are creating fresh environmental problems, with reusable bags having a much higher carbon footprint than thin plastic bags. According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag." Reusable are a bigger problem when Becky needs one to match every outfit... Reusable is a bigger problem when they get used once or twice by the homeless population before being used to shit in... It's cute that you can't see outside of your bubble, and I appreciate that you have a neat little stack of Reusable bags and 15 heavy plastic or metal bottles... but if you look outside of your situation, not everyone has the capability to keep their walmart bags in the back of their leased "single use" PLASTIC car designed for programed obsolescence... maybe travel a bit, volunteer and donate your time... see that the world is full of different situations... The rich that have the ability to make a change cause more problems than the poor... not sure when the last time any of the homeless in my community took a private flight for dinner in the Hamptons, but I'd venture to guess they could waste single use plastic for years and never touch the damage caused by (our congress) the rich elite... maybe regulations on the wasteful nature at the top should be addressed before policies that primarily impact the marginalized?
Something fun I learned recently regarding plastics. BPA is bad for animals. So, companies started taking it out of food packaging. And replacing it with something in the same "chemical family" that is possibly WORSE for animals.
This sort of research is a key part in resolving the problem of our consumer waste. I'm interested in all of it. Thank you for this video, I knew about some of these but was surprised by others, :)
While traveling for work at one point (we were in Bulgaria) a co-worker ordered a drink that I could swear came with a straw made out of noodle, something like a long straight piece of unboiled macaroni. He even ended up eating it when he was done, I've searched online from time to time and found nothing, but I'm convinced that what it was.
You covered a l-o-t of ground, because plastics are used in so many ways. It would be helpful to categorize use cases in different industries, food packaging, construction, packaging, etc. and address each in detail as each have significantly different requirements. While you touch upon the use cases and their critical performance requirements, your whirlwind tour of the many ways plastics are used makes difficult to get down to the important part: taking action(s), e.g.… - *investing* in companies that have solutions and are at a stage beyond the lab, - how to *recognize/confirm* what you're seeing in the grocery store or hardware store, etc. I do invest, and I actively watch what I buy and consume, so thank you for what you are doing.
I bought glass straws and I really liked them and somebody gave me aluminum straws that were just slightly bigger than the glass ones and they fit in them. I only needed to get little rubber end caps and now I have a portable glass straw that's not gonna break in transit. I have always been carrying a water bottle. There is so much waste out there that we really should be looking at uses for our waste to turn into other things because then you can get some thing that's literally free to build something else.
As usual, an excellent and well produced video. Here is the UK, politicians are at last (after centuries) realising that a superb and natural insulant is walking around. Lambswool is cheap, natural, does not burn, has excellent insulation properties and does not rot or degrade over time. Maybe some time in the future you may include this material in another video. Here in Wales, we have more sheep than humans, so there is no shortage of raw material.
you talk about hemp and construction, this reminds me that one of my cousins wanted to build her house using techniques inspired by those of the Middle Ages. he spoke all the time about the "hemp and lime" technique as an ancestral technique but much less harmful to the environment than classic cement (lime requires temperatures 3X lower for its manufacture), it nevertheless has the disadvantage of being very slow; lime takes more than 10X longer to "dry" than classic cement (lime mortars have been found, sheltered from the air since the 11th century, which were still soft to the touch )
I think that there won't be one singular material to replace plastic. Plastic's perfect storm of properties are durability, versatility and cheapness. If we get several materials that are durable and cheap but also eco-friendly, but which fill the roles of different types of plastic, they may be able to, in combination, replace plastic.
The only problem with that is the same plastic can be made I to far different products with just a few additives, the same company can make the plastic for many, many companies that all make different products, so it's so very cheap
I love hemp. When you can use just about every part of the plant for something useful, it seems ridiculous that we aren't using more of it. I wish there could be more of a market for it in products so we could just incorporate more hemp into the food and product chains.
Another material which I have experimented with in my studio is nanocellulose. Recommend having a look at it. In the past the amount of energy required to produce it meant it was not feasible. But they have solved that issue. Unlike the LLM mess!
Thank you, fills my heart with hope of a cleaner future for all! What I don't understand is why these petrol owners aren't getting on board with these alternatives.
The biggest problem is getting people to change. Even if it is better and saves money some people will want to stick with the old way of doing things. But they will come around. Thanks for the video!
Hempcrete is cool, but Rockwool has a soft spot in my heart. It's melted rocks spun into fibers, and it's 100% recyclable by melting it down. It's literally volcano cotton candy. How metal is that?
While I've heard the process referred to as being similar to making cotton candy, I've never actually heard it called that directly. I think that's the only thing I'm going to call it now. Thanks!
What I think is that it isn't really a matter of consumer preference for most of these. With packaging, your average consumer just doesn't know what it is that projects their product until they open it. And accepting it, these materials will slowly find more and more use as they get cheaper until they reach a threshold of costing as much as regular plastics and then they'll just be everywhere.
Thanks for this video - it really gives me hope that we may move away from plastic and all the pollution it causes. I'm thinking the real issue is creating a polymer that can store food and liquids at a variety of temperatures without breaking down, yet breaks down easily once it's done being used. I like the idea of being able to compost stuff at home, but I'd have to be absolutely sure that what it broke down into was good for my garden. Speaking of which, you didn't mention whether these new plastic substitutions broke down into environmentally friendly molecules. Just because it starts with natural materials, that doesn't mean it stays that way once it's subjected to all the heat, chemicals, and pressures that make it into a new substance. We have to make sure we're not repeating the problem. After all, petroleum is technically natural, too.
A sub shop near me uses straws that are compostable. They feel just like plastic straws, not like paper straws. I wish more restaurants and convenience stores would switch to these.
I do like hearing about these advances and they always show promise but they never seem to hit the big time. It seems that we are always years away from something being mainstream but it does not happen. I would love to see all plastics used for food packaging that can decompose.
as a 3d printer hobbyist I would love to see the PLA home recycle process come to production. I initially wanted to be able to reuse the wast to make more filament but realized you needed at least 50% of material to be new plastic. Not really ideal, but I can get on board with it being composted and added into a home garden.
Don't forget, hemp oil can be used to create compostable plastic. It's just crazy to me that hemp is the highest-cost item for hemp building materials. A carbon tax would pay farmers to grow hemp, and charge them to grow other crops, along with raising pesticide prices. Make hemp easy to grow, no permits, raw fields can never be used as proper medicine or recreational cannabis. Gov should subsidize hemp processing facilities near rail terminals so stalks, leaves, and seeds can be separated and sent for further processing & manufacturing. This would turn the stalks into a cheap byproduct instead of a boutique commodity.
I hope we get this new PLA in the 3d printing world soon. We do tend to create a lot of plastic waste (even though it doesn't compare to the broader plastics usage in food / clothes etc)
Which alternative plastics are you the most curious about? Order yourself a LARQ Bottle PureVis 2 to go plastic free and enjoy ice cold water throughout the entire day. bylarq.com/undecided5
If you liked this, check out Are We Getting Scammed with Solar? th-cam.com/video/BD7aCkLwR7U/w-d-xo.html
Hemp can be a good plastics replace.
@@paytonturner1421 You have to ask yourself, is the hemp plastic "cheaper" than plastic? If not, economics says people will use plastic. Both hemp and plastic can be recycled into energy at the end of life of the object. Incineration is Recycling into electricity.
I don't understand why you want to talk about alternatives to plastic. It's only economically viable if it can be produced in massive quantities at a cheaper price. Using oil found in the ground as plastic before using as fuel, uses the oil twice instead of once. Come back and talk about alternatives to plastics after no more Oil is used for Energy.
Hi Matt, thanks for the great shows. Which plastic is also healthy for us boys? Plastic with no estrogen.
That Larq is very interesting.
The fact that mycelium based products can't be used for food, leaves mushroom for improvement.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂…genius
I do hope you have children to appreciate this level of skill.
@@jopo7996 bravo sir. 👏
😮
Groan! 😂
There is a commercial hemp manufacturer just down the road from where I live in Canada. One of the industries they serve is the automotive industry; their product can be used to help create things like interior panels, package trays, etc reducing the amount of plastic needed or replacing heavier wood based materials. Hemp is also good for land stabilization, weed control, etc. They even sell growing mats for starting seeds or even as a dirt alternative for growing microgreens.
The new NASCAR EV prototype is made from hemp composite panels for its body, instead of carbon fiber!
Good for single use plastics but not plastics used for industry
I guess car body panels count as single use plastics 😂
But yeah, there's been about a century if missed opportunity for hemp utilization and r&d, it's going to branch out with more interest.
i hope so Louis. 👍
@@luisostasuc8135 In racing it does. Not so much in production cars.
The mycellium IS the fungal organism. The mushrooms you see on the surface are just temporary structures that the organism builds for reproduction.
Man, fungi are weird. We've been eating what it does look like.
@@besknighter Just read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and was astounded to learn there are fungi with not 2 sexes, not 3 sexes, not 10 or 20... but tens of thousands of sexes.
They are funky and amazing!
You obviously never actually grew any LIQUID mushrooms... 8^)
@@e.matthews came here to mention that book as well
@@darthdiculous6511 the fruiting bodies.
Commercial Hemp. It's been bouncing around in my head for ages as a next entrepreneurial career. The plant is hardy, doesn't require lots of pesticides, is not water intensive to grow, is fast-growing, and the fiber has many uses from hemp paper to hemp plastics products. The biggest barrier, as you say, is lack of production because Hemp is still considered a "Controlled Substance" and that creates a lot of hoops to jump through. It's stigmatized. The seaweed packaging is very interesting as well as shrimp/lobster shell extraction. I run a longtime family owned seafood business that deals in live lobster and we have above-ground tanks for holding live lobster. I have often wondered about using those tanks to grow seaweed... All that being said, I still think Commercial Hemp is still the most sustainable of those ideas...
Another plus is the climate they grow in. You can't grow cotton in Canada but you can grow hemp!
I wonder about genetically modifying hemp to completely remove any mind altering component? We do that to crops we eat, why not do it for something we don't even eat?
@@TarzanIndianawhy waste the resources on that though? Any place that still bans hemp products is living in the dark ages.
@@TarzanIndiana you can eat hemp
Do it Brother
A few years ago, an engineering student in Thailand built a machine that made disposable food containers out of rice straw. Rice straw is an extremely common form of agricultural waste in Thailand until recently, nearly all of it was burned by the rice farmers. Now, burning some rice straw in the fields produces a great natural fertilizer and is also helpful for controlling weeds and crop pests without using dangerous and expensive chemicals. However, the amount of rice straw that Thai farmers produce far exceeds what they need to do this. There's plenty of extra that left over that farmers could be selling for a much needed source of extra income and be used for many applications from traditional Thai homes to biomass energy production. It's not just Thailand that could benefit from this technology. China, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Myanmar, Japan, and even Louisiana all produce lots of rice as well. If this technology can be adapted to work with wheat straw it could be a game changer for packaging in the west, Ukraine, and Russia. I would like to know how the rice straw packaging industry is going in Thailand.
Straw can be used for construction. CAFboard (Compressed Agricultural Fiber) or Straw bale SIPS (Structural Insulated Panels) are some of the names of these, besides the traditional use of normal straw bales. They've got some nice properties just be sure to keep them dry! And straw can be used to make papers (straw paper) or cardboards for packaging. And like any biomass it can be turned into biochar and pyrolysis products, or energy. All better and less smoggy ways to use straw.
Hope it's more popular... but it seems pretty seasonal...
I remember seeing an article in Beyond2000 (Sci-Fi channel back in the '90s, I think) about someone using surplus rice grains to make biodegradable (and edible if you really want) bowls for street vendors. I don't know if this took off or failed.
@PrograError Rice is grown pretty much all year around here in Thailand.
I’m suprised they burn it, my understanding is it is that just produces the equivalent of wood ash which is 5% of the mass and burns off all the carbon and carbon is huge for regenerative agriculture
Another alternative that people forget is glass. It use to be that drinks were sold in glass containers that were returned to the store.
And using biodegradable plastics means they can sometimes break down if stored for a long time, ruining the contents and limiting the shelf life. It would also mean that things like cutlery made from it would have a best before date and could mean a lot of it gets thrown out without being used.
I’d also point to aluminum cans, which, like glass are MUCH easier to recycle than plastic (though not as easy to just wash out and reuse) but still fairly cheap and convenient. I’ve recently seen some water sold in a can clearly based on a classic soda can but with a resealable screw-on top like a bottle, which seems like a nice option for vending machines or other places people are unlikely to return the glass bottles
@IONATVS aluminum cans have a plastic lining therefore making them a mixed material and thus difficult to recycle and as far vending machines and people not likely recycling them, one, more recycle bins around town, two, even if someone doesn't recycle glass at least it won't break down into micro glass as that's just sand
@@larshoneytoast722Do all aluminum cans have plastic lining and why ? It must be more of a thin plastic coating.
@williamgtimber2510 as I know it's all aluminum cans and yes it's just a thin coating on this inside. The reason is because most sodas are corrosive so without the lining it would eat through the can eventually
Not really. The amount of energy required to both manufacture and recycle glass makes it unattractive as an alternative to plastics.
The company I work for was selling plant-based compostable plastic bottles back in the '90s, but ran into a major problem. The same quality that allowed the plastic to decompose in landfills also caused the bottles to break down on store shelves or in warehouses. I imagine the same problem exists for any plant-based plastic containers designed to decompose under certain conditions -- premature deterioration and a mess in aisle 3...
This is the main reason we dont see more use of it - but also, one of the leading reasons if we do switch, they still will have to take something like 5 years. So finding something that can work in he middle is the hardest thing.
I saw that as a problem immediately after hearing about the rapid rate of decay. Gone after six weeks?! Those products would be lucky to make it out of the bottling plant. Any proposed packaging needs to survive at least as long as the 'sell by' date of its contents!
Another side to that is producing stuff that goes into the bottles that is safe to consume for years. If the bottle will last for several years, they can produce and store food/drink in them that will last years. I mean, if the bottles were only expected to last a few months, and the contents were only going to be fit for consumption for a few months, it might actually improve things on two fronts ;).
I remember hearing about how dominos pizza (or was it pizza hut?) basically made dough for only a few months a year. They had developed it to last for up to two years before they wouldn't ship it to the store. The preservatives etc to make that even salable isn't that good for us.
I always thought the most applicable use of the bioplastics SHOULD be food packaging, because we need to wean ourselves off all the insane amounts of sugar and salt in our food. No plastic AND healthier. But that sort of regulation has to start with our government, and until they're responsible for paying for healthcare for everyone, they won't bother. Just enjoy the economic benefits of keeping the population just sick enough to need a lot of drugs.
If the product in question needs to be stored for years, we already have glass and metal containers that are considerably more recyclable.
9:04 From the windows to the walls. 🤣🤣🤣
I know you sang it.
YESSSSSS Till the sweat drip down my 🏀🏉
hahaha
Haha. Did he do it on purpose?
@@fernandoaponte4149 I hope so. I'd love to know that Matt rocks some yin yang twins. 😭
Get Low everybody.
I recycle HDPE - 2 liter pop bottles myself
I bought the parts to turn empty pop bottle HDPE into filament to use in my 3D printer
That way I can print fishing lure bodies to make my own lures
That's actually one of the most badass things ive heard recently. Seriously! That's pretty durn cool!
How do you make filament. I have seen a machine but wasn’t paying attention because at the time I didn’t want a printer.
thats great - you can put your plastic lures directly into the sea with all the other plastic
I think it's PET you are using.
@@dagwood1327 My lady saw the kit online and ordered it for me , she will not tell me how much $ or where from
It has a heated nozzle that you draw the plastic through
First you cut a thin strip out of the bottle
After the plastic is drawn through the nozzle , there is a spool that the plastic filament is wrapped onto
“In 2024 we will have flying cars”
“The app for my water bottle just crashed again”
Literally nothing tech bros won't stuff an app into to collect more data on you
@@tacticalultimatum Hahaha! Also: "Want a greener alternative to buying disposable water bottles? This mega bottle with a huge carbon footprint made of dozens of materials and impossible to recycle (in an economicaly viable way). It also connects to your phone so you get tons of instagramable info you absolutely don't need!" 😂 🤦
Come on... how about a metal bottle that you can use and reuse f.o.r.e.v.e.r and even pass on when you die? 🤣
if you need app to remind you to drink water you got bigger problems
@@fvefve12 Cause that's not who these bottles are designed for or marketed to.
@@fvefve12 A timer on your phone would be sufficient. You don't need to build that into a bottle
We could also go back to using glass for a lot of things like bottles. Glass definitely isn't perfect, but it's more easily recyclable and it doesn't leech microplastics
How about its most disadvantage to plastic? It is fragile.
@@Evan-rj9xy during the Cold War in east Berlin, a company managed to take virtually unbreakable glass. At the time it was very expensive and would likely be more expensive today, but it’s very likely we could do it cheaper and more efficiently today if someone would brush off the patents.
@@OffgridApartmentthat glass became what we now know of as gorilla glass - the stuff your phone screen is covered with. It’s still expensive.
Glass is heavy, relatively fragile and it takes a lot of energy (heat) to melt down and recycle. I want glass but the detriments does not out-weight the benefits.
@@LazyLifeIFreak You can reuse bottles after a good wash and do not need much energy. 🙂
Huge caveat that I'm not a farmer/botanist/agriculture expert, but if we could replace a HUGE amount of the corn that we produce with Hemp, it seems like it'd be a very VERY worthwhile endeavor.
Corn is massively wasteful and overproduced because of ill-conceived corn subsidies. We straight up don't need all of it, and yet waste untold amounts of water and fertilizer producing it. So replacing a wasteful crop with one that not only cuts down on plastic production, but also can combat water and fertilizer waste seems like a very common sense thing to do.
@@Vort_tm yeah but if we grow less corn what would we put in the hemp packaging? Corn is in all the best snacks! 😂
we definately need to cut back on using corn for bioFuels. The amount of carbon released from the soil just to plant the stuff is far greater than what is reclaimed by the plants while growing.
ill-cornceived
Agree - a cut back on corn would be a good idea. As for more use of HEMP - I dont know, but if most of the plant can be used and it does suck up more co2 - then sure, but thats a lot of IFs. Yet, before we do, we need to start moving towards a better battery tech first as thats the only real way we drop the need for biofuels for transportation.
@@adr2t We definitely need to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be cutting down on corn, cutting down on plastics, increasing renewables, etc all in tandem. It's not an either-or proposal.
I've done a lot of commercial fishing, and creating some sort of biodegradable cordage for fishing nets would huge.
For several fisheries, those nets are trashed after 2-4 seasons anyway, so if there was a way to add an enzyme to a commercial composter for some sort of pla based cordage, that would eliminate literally tons of plastic pollution
I'm a big fan of the opportunities from Bamboo.
It's way strong along the grain, can be turned into fibers that can be used for clothes, grows extremely quick which captures a good amount of carbon in a short time.
Lots of possibilities.
I have shirts, pants, underwear, toilet paper, and more made out of bamboo as it's primary material.
Isn't the fibre used in clothing produced using highly toxic chemicals with potential pollution problems?
Bamboo textiles are often manufactured in a closed loop system, so the chemicals are re-used and never leave the factory. They use lye (sodium hydroxide) and carbon disulphide to access the cellulose in the plant matter, creating sodium cellulose xanthate, which is acidified, separating the cellulose (which is spun into fibre) leaving dithio carbonic acid, which decomposes back into carbon disulphide and water, which are reused.
The real enemy is spandex, which is mostly polyurethane (85% ish), drastically shortens the lifespan of the fabric it's blended with, and then - it's blended, so extremely difficult to recycle, etc. It's become ubiquitous - even in men's workshirts, because better fit I guess?
I have done research on PLA, wheat starch and chitosan in my career. I even made ice cream spoons for the University of Minnesota's milk shake booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Finding any biodegradable alternative to plastic is tough, because you want it to retain strength until the moment of disposal, then you want it to disappear nearly instantly. And before you ask, none of my work achieved these lofty goals, but I've seen some small progress.
And chitosan smells horrible when extruded.
The first time I ever heard of a non-petroleum plastic was in a video about farm/construction equipment maker JCB using soy plastics to make body panels.
They reduced weight versus the metal panels, The color went all the way through so scratched did not need to be painted, and one of the workers swung a sledgehammer over his head onto a panel and the hammer bounced.
Nanocellulose shows promise
@@MonkeyJedi99 I can't speak for the exact plastic you saw. But a lot of plant based plastic is more a 'marketing' thing and aren't any better then petroleum based plastics, in terms of environmental impacts or biodegradability. Many of them are chemically near identical and have the exact same problems as petroleum based plastics even though they are 'plant-based' which sounds eco friendly. What they are doing is extracting polymers from the plant material, and by the time the chemical process is done the end product is chemically the same or very similar as the petroleum products we compare them with.
Its worth remembering, oil, coal, natural gas - all of these originated from plants that just sat in the ground under the right conditions. So the components that make them up are the same components that make up live plants today. Plant-based is a deceptive term and should be treated with scrutiny. There are plant based plastics that break down, but there are many other they are just the same plastics we are trying to get rid of with a marketable cover.
@@golden--hand Good points.
Most amines do stink up to high heaven.🤮
I needed this news. This is the heart of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”
I agree those are some fantastic options currently in the works. As someone who works their day job finding enzymes and engineering microorganisms to convert corn-derived glucose to PLA and other bioplastics, people just underestimate the scale and cost parity required to compete with petrochemical-derived plastics. Most of these research groups/startups have excellent ideas and decent products, but getting funding for scale up is an uphill task. The price of oil largely dictates their feasibility and commercial success. With heavy political and societal headwinds (especially in US), lack of oil price controls is the key bottleneck for most if not all of these technologies to really be successful. Let's hope Europe and soon everywhere succeed with these alternatives and we make an actual dent in overall plastic usage.
Not to mention the fact that big oil isn't going to willingly let these startups compete on a much greater scale. They would take too large a bite out of the pie that is mostly consumed by big oil.
@devandestudios128 It is a byproduct of oil refining/production.. "big oil" could care less about it as it is pennies to their bottom line..
How about we stop subsidizing fossil fuels? That would be a great start! Maybe we could even spend the money on alternatives.
@jmr We should stop all subsidies...
This! It all depends on this.
We have the knowledge and technologies to move away from plastics... The thing is they are making a few fowks super rich. It happens with everything: if it isn't going to fill someone's pockets, you bet it ain't gonna happen. Recycling exists just because there's a profit to be made.
This is the sad truth about our society.
I worked with an engineer who had a plastic recycle business. He told me that it's easy to recycle but they could not make a profit at it. Cool viddy!
What was the issue preventing them from turning a dollar?
@@CaptainHarris-ip2kg Um, it cost more money for fuel than they sold the plastic for.
@@DonnyHooterHoot "Um" ... thanks for not condescending. Jerk.
Hempcrete is a fabulous, fireproof, building material. You can also build out of Hemp with a plastic core, but obviously, we don't want that, and it's not structural. Hempcrete is not labeled as structural either, but having a wood frame takes care of that. Hempcrete is my favourite building material.
Hempcrete is the SHIT...i wish i could invest in that company but they only take BIG BIG investments starting at 1 million last time i checked... but Hempcrete is an amazing product and company.
We are already using alternatives to plastics in Sweden. All residents in my region are getting free compostable "plastic" bags. We put all food scraps and compostable materials in them and companies are picking them up and turning them into biofuel. All busses in the region use biofuel.
The thing I would like to see most of all, is the ability to purchase non-packaged everyday grocery items without needing to go to a special store or pay significantly more. Many items this is already extremely easy to do with in theory - rice, dry beans, flour, and other granular/powder products along with liquids can easily be dispensed from a machine into any container. However very few stores offer this, and those that do are typically specialty stores that aren't affordable. But the advantage of using a reusable container don't stop at reducing waste. Reusable containers are also more durable, often look nicer, and might offer features like easily viewing contents or having an air-tight seal. Surely we have all seen the tik-tok videos where someone decants all their groceries into nice little bottles and boxes and trays and makes their refrigerator look like some kind of modern art? The only problem with that, is they then throw away (even if it's "recycling") all the bottles and packages that stuff came in. But if you could just go to the store, load up your containers, and take them home it would be great!
The "fill your own package" idea was tried and abandoned for candy and coffee because people suck.
Between just spilling the stuff onto the floor and "topping off a pocket" or snacking without paying, they ruined it for the rest of us.
I’ve worked on some projects that use hemp in construction and because it’s lightweight its not great at acoustics (sound insulation follows a mass law). The stuff seems kinda crumbly and a bit tricky to work with but the architects take lessons learned from each project
Excellent video, great to see we have readily available solutions. The problem now is industrial inertia. Plastics are so intertwined in global supply chains, they almost have a technological lock (like the qwerty keyboard). We need legislation, taxes and subsidies to help get us out of our local minima / maxima and towards the global optimal solution.
If I had the money I'd start planning a hempcrete house tomorrow. I think its an especially good option for steppe environments. Historically its been difficult to live a settled existence on steppes due the extreme weather and lack of building materials common elsewhere. With hempcrete you can use wood or masonry products sparingly for the structure and then fill in the gaps with it and have great insulation that helps keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I think it will making urbanism in the great plains and the eurasian steppe viable beyond the next few decades.
this channel has grown on me to be the only few channel I watch every video.
Great Work Matt and Co!
Down here in New Zealand, we used to use plastic bags for everything, but a few years back we changed all of that to reusable fabric bags. You'll be surprised how quickly people can adapt to new things.
Do ~40% of adult New Zealanders equate technological advancement that benefits the planet as a socialist/communist/liberal Californication conspiracy as in the USA? Promoted mostly by Australia's Rupert Murdoch's US media giant Fox "news" as in the USA?
@@yoh1914 those bags are made from plastic and have increased the amount of plastic pollution.
@@XKS99 Yes, I've seen the cheap plastic reusable shopping tote bags. (I doubt that using them *increases* the problem, though -- as long as they are actually reused.) But some people use shopping bags made from real fabric instead of plastics.
My family takes reusable bags to the store for grocery shopping & "cooler bags" are great for refrigerated items. (Yes, those have plastic, but it's still way better than one-time use plastic bags.)
@@miriamrobarts studies have been done on this. Reusable shopping bags roughly double total wasted plastic by mass.
@@XKS99 yeah, but I'd argue there are still improvements in making that switch, at least in smaller places like New Zealand. Yes the production process making those kinds of bags is worse in terms of CO2 production vs using single use bags your whole life, or whatever the exact numbers those studies have shown (Its been a while since I have seen those kinds of studies). But, reducing how much loose plastic litter that is just floating around can be a big improvement immediately for local nature. I think New Zealand is pretty good about not littering, but even when you do your best stuff gets out there, from the trash or landfills or however. Having reusable bags reduces that kind of accidental litter a lot. So for a place like New Zeland, which has a lot of unique and endangered wildlife and wants to do what they can to preserve it, policies like this make sense. Its an immediate improvement for particular goals.
Regardless of if they put the policy in place or not the reusable bags already exist or were being produced anyway. New Zealand didn't invent reusable bags technology or revive an already dead industry to start remaking the bags after society stopped so they could have the bags. Its like saying you won't refill a plastic bottle you have in your hand because the bottle is bad for the environment. If that makes any sense.
It isn't the world changing solution suited for every location, I agree. But some places it makes sense, and it should show that we need to take a lot of different strategies to make improvements where we can, that make sense where we are applying them.
I just come from different "all is lost, the future is awful" video and I have to see is nice seeing people focusing on the solutions and not in the problems. Loved the video!!
The best waste is still the one we don't have to produce in the first place. But let's face it : having all those potential solutions rising and slowly replacing petrol based plastics we use today is a win!
Thanks a lot for, once again, a great video!
Cheers from Switzerland
Too bad Red Lobster went bankrupt. They could have had a side hustle of selling leather generated from their All You Can Eat Shrimp promotion.
Went to red lobster for the shrimp, walked out with nifty new leather pants.
Haha ironic that the “All You Can Eat Shrimp” promotion that bankrupt them could also have saved them.
@@adamhodgson8851 that's actually a common misconception. Red Lobster was killed by a private equity firm, not the all you can eat shrimp
@@DissonusWren Yes, they also owned the shrimp supplier, who overcharged them for the shrimp, so it was an asset-stripping operation.
There are still Red Lobster stores open all over. I went into one and was able to get 6 cheddar bay biscuits in less than 5 minutes for less than $5. They were still warm in the bag. I gave them to my coworkers and everyone loved them. One of the few things all 5 of us agreed on. Despite being a deal, the 'Lob prob makes a great margin on those biscuits. If millions of people *knew* they could have fresh, hot biscuits to-go in less than 5 minutes for less than $5 I think THAT would save the chain. And, ya know, not getting screwed by private equity anymore.
I’ve tried to reduce/eliminate most of the single use plastics. I carry my own utensils/straw, I use laundry sheets, I use glass or silicone storage containers, I use a stainless steel water bottle and reusable mesh bags for produce. I do eat frozen convenience food (I’m single, retired and don’t like to cook) but buy those that come in compostable containers. I’ve been interested in alternative building materials and hempcrete has topped the list for several years. It was great to get an update on these alternative technologies.
Great that you bring this to the attention. I missed PHA in your story 🙌 A company here in The Netherlands started making great products (fossil free, real biodegradable, very durable) with PHA. Cups for coffee, festical usage etc. and various other things.
I suspect the problem with any kind of compostable or biodegradable plastic is going to be how long it lasts with food in it. If a Coke bottle was made out of it, then I'd worry that it would dissolve and leak before it was bought. However! For short term things, like sandwiches, bread, take-away food, cutlery, straws, pallet shrinkwrap and so on, it sounds excellent. And even if we can only remove half the plastic packaging, that's still a huge win, while we work on the other half.
It already exists, it's called PHA, it does not have any of those issues, and it's awesome.
@@billd4450 That's interesting - I'm impressed and surprised that it biodegrades nicely in the ground, but not when full of damp food.
Some companies are quietly removing the “reduce” out of reuse and recycle♻️ because they know that plastics are not 100% recyclable and reducible in part to that.
@@forcivilizaton5021 you obviously don't understand what reduce means
The "reduce" in "reduce, reuse, recycle" means reducing the amount of plastic you buy in the first place. For example, buying items in compostable packaging instead of plastic packaging, or using glass items instead of plastic, are ways to reduce plastic use.
Most plastics can be stopped just by using glass or other traditional materials and by changing certain habits. Install soda machines instead of bottled soda, install water fountains instead of bottled water, use your own cup for coffee, buy powdered detergents and soaps as they can be packed in paper/cardboard, pack grains in cloth or jute bags(what they do all over Asia including for smaller 2kg packs), pack cookies, bread and other consumables in paper and/or cardboard and so on. Plastic is here as it is a by product of petroleum refining and the industry around it is extremely profitable for corporations.
You mean go back to the 80's? GASP! But seriously... we've become too much of a throw away society. Not as bad as China but we're getting there.
Detergents are also a by-product of the oil industry.
Interesting how "liquid soap" (it isn't) has virtually replaced real soap.
Yes, this. Particularly reusable glass containers. Like in Germany, even yogurt containers can be returned for deposit, cleaned and reused.
@@JaneNewAuthorSoap is a type of detergent, and liquid soap is a real thing. Though a bottle of "liquid soap" might have non-soap detergents in it.
Plastic is also less expensive and/or more convenient than the alternatives mentioned. Until there's sufficient culture shift to being okay with less convenience and until something cheaper than plastic comes along, the current state of things is likely to remain unchanged. For the record, I do prefer to give up some convenience personally and would be okay with going back to deposits on bottles and such.
As someone who is allergic to mushrooms, fungi, crustaceans, shellfish and shrimps (or prawns as we call them Australia), I think the researchers are out to kill me! 😅 PLA with added enzyme(s) seems to the answer for me.😊
That explains why I keep seeing your name over and over again in plastic alternative research papers. 😜
@@UndecidedMF Ahh, the curse of having a common but also famous name! I used to work for one organisation where there were 4 people named David Jones, so we need our middle initial as the tie breaker in our email addresses. 😇😁
@@DavidJones-pi8rl thank God you are not allergic to weed ;)
I was a steward at a event many years ago. The food they provided us was low budget dhal ,basically
just spiced lentils. It was served in clamshell boxes. When I heard that the boxes were pressed from potato starch, I ate the box, which provided more satisfying bite than the dhal alone.
Glass seems like a viable alternative, because it is easy to recycle. However, it can take up to 4,000 years to degrade. We wont be able to fully eliminate the use of plastic, but we can greatly reduce the impact and waste caused by it.
The problem is only good glass sand is from river sand dessert, sea and ocean sands are unviable and compared to other types there is not much of river variety some shortage issues even caused sand mafias to form
Glass can simply become sand.
Recycling glass s very energy demanding.
Glass containers are also much heavier than plastic ones. That adds to enviormentall cost of transport.
Not to mention of safety concerns with glass breaking.
Glass used to be the main materials for making containers, there is a reason we moved from it.
glass breaks if you drop it, resulting in more waste. How many glass cups do you go through compared to reusable plastic ones? I don't think it's an alternative to the properties provided by plastic. And as another poster said, glass is Very energy intensive to recycle. Much more so than plastic unfortunately.
it's also brittle and dangerous when broken so less ideal than you'd think. plus sand for glass is becoming more and more rare.
I posted a comment about being a hemp farmer, but i thought id post one about being a mushroom farmer, too, since i did that before i grew hemp.
Basically we would sterilize oak sawdust subatrate, but it in a plastic bag, innoculate it, and seal it up in a sterile environment. You could track the mycelial growth just by looking through the clear plastic.
We had a weird case where we got a contaminating fungus in a batch, so we separated it for disposal. You cant just dump the stuff anywhere, or it could come back, and it ended up sitting in storage for a while. When i finally went to get it, it appeared as if the mycelia had eaten through some of the bags!
I was dumbfounded to say the least. Either wed just accidentally discovered a way to destroy plastic, or something weird was up. Long story short, we hadnt. In the cases where the bag had broken down and the fungus escaped, all of the bags appeared as if theyd been under vaccum, like a food sealer.
What had happened was the mycelia had sequestered a lot of the carbon in the substrate. A lot of fungi can survive in low oxygen environments, and some are facultive anaerobes, meaning they can get along without it. So whole the shiitake was consuming oxyen, the facultive anaerobes were consuming the co2. It was getting heavily sequestered, and eventually the atmosphere was depleted, essentially vacuuming the bag, which was then stressed by the substrate expanding and creating microfissures in the bag all around the substrate block.
Not exactly the breakthrough i was dreaming of, but at least the mystery was solved 🤷
The only things I'm wondering are: are they cheaper to produce; do they take more resources to produce and thus generate more pollution; what convenient singular and short word do we use to specifically refer to bio-polymers like we have the word plastic to refer to oil-based polymers?
So I'm an older guy who went back to school for an honours degree in interior design, which I'm in the midst of, but as I'm watching this video I'm writing a book on the history of architecture and interior design. 2/5 of the book is actually a lexicon/glossary/encyclopedia, and guess which section I'm writing right this moment? Interior finishes and textiles! I have a few thoughts. Hempcrete is a going to be a niche material, at least for the foreseeable future. One problem with it not mentioned is that it has to be rebuilt relatively frequently. However, I've been a huge proponent of hemp fibre for years. When I see the statistics on how many litres of water it takes to manufacture a pair of jeans, how much sheep fart methane into the sky per bale of wool, how much energy is used making bamboo into a usable fibre, not to mention how long most synthetic ffibres last in the landfill, I still can't believe hemp fibre isn't an industry standard. As for "natural" plastics, so far they either behave like synthetics by lasting forever, or they break down too quickly or at unpredictable rate. Store owners and customers alike I'm sure don't like seeing their Coke as a puddle of goo on the shelf. Regardless of current technical limitations, I still believe we're going to science our way out of our predicament, and change the fundamental philosophy of circular economies and commerce. I hope we all live long enough to see it!
I thought you would just plaster over the hempcrete - it shouldn't have any major durability issies, it looks comparable to straw bale construction, traditional plaster work, or lathe and plaster. All of which are traditional materials that can last a long time.
Like any architectural material, it may require maintenance over time.
I agree with you about the alternatives for plastic bottles etc... Just looking at things around my room, I have a plastic tube of tooth paste that expires in 2 years time. I don't plan to keep it that long, but if the tube started to decay in a few months, I fear it would just lead to more waste. Piles of drinks, cosmetics etc... stored in warehouses would end up going to waste because they could not be stored for long enough. Unfortunately one of plastics greatest qualities (it's durability) is also it's greatest problem. Finding a substance which can last for years but can also be broken down or recycled easily when no longer needed will not be easy.
@@JamesTurner-os7sw I obviously don't have all the answers, but there's another consideration to take into account that didn't even occur to me until a year ago. Plastic is lightweight. If many products were shipped in glass bottles, for example, think of millions of delivery trucks and the amount of energy they would use shipping the stuff, then collecting the recyclables. Yikes. That's why young people are so important. They don't have the rigidity in their thinking yet that older people do. I'm a little annoyed that my generation always complains about younger generations. I look at my son's and I think that wow, we've got some young clever people on case!
One unexpected thing this does, is put pressure on the oil industry to improve plastic.
Oil is natural substance and there's a better than average chance that it could be made into materials in a similar manner to chitin, fungi, or kelp.
The industry simply needs competition that pushes them to do so.
So far with a virtual monopoly there has been no reason for them to improve their products, with these new products now there may just be a reason to do so.
The best way to get away from toxic plastics, is to replace them with non toxic versions.
I'm hopeful that these products you mentioned will succeed, and in the process, force lazy oil, to innovate to improve their products as well.
If that happens we all win.
Thanks for keeping the message about single-use plastics going! It's staggering what we use once and throw away like plastic bottles, bags and straws. If just 10% of the US population stopped using plastic straws the impact could be huge. If you assume each person goes through about 200 straws a year, then 10% (33,000,000 people) would equate to around 6,600,000,000 plastic straws a YEAR kept from our landfills. For me, something like plastic straw waste that takes 100 years to break down is not what I want as part of my legacy since they are going to last a lot longer than me! :-)
I believe this is my favorite video I have seen from you. I have been so frustrated as I go through every day with plastic knowing that we can end it. And frustrated that I can only do so much. This is one of those issues I wish governments around the world would embrace so we can end all petroleum based plastics.
Something I've been thinking about for a long time now, is the amount of waste inherent in shipping products to our homes. And I don't just mean burning fossil fuels to transport stuff, I mean the boxes. Cardboard is recyclable, but remember the three Rs? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - they are in that order for a reason, recycling is supposed to be the last effort when you can't reuse something and couldn't avoid having it in the first place. But there's actually a great way that we could reuse shipping containers, a way that the greatest of sinners in this category is uniquely positioned to implement. Amazon, with their ubiquity and their own fulfillment network, could transition to delivering packages in reusable containers that they would simply pick up when your next delivery comes. I already have a service very much like this for water deliveries - I live in a city with really poor water treatment (we get boil water alerts at least a few times a year, and even when it's "safe" it's still pretty nasty), so I get water delivered in 5 gallon bottles. But these bottles aren't wasted, I put the empties on my porch and they take them away to clean and refill them. They don't recycle the bottles, they just use them again which costs much less and uses far far less energy. Amazon could do the same with plastic bins, drop off a bin of stuff you ordered then next time they bring something pick up the bins you left out waiting for them. Yes, I know if they do that we're now using more plastics - but plastic that isn't single-use is way less of a problem and cardboard just wouldn't hold up to repeated use very well in the way that plastic can.
There was nothing wrong with old fashioned paper wax lined milk carton type of containers.
AND they were bio degradable......
They keep trying to re invent the wheel.
were, what changed?
The paper part is what plastic was replacing because paper normally came from trees at the time. Paper also had other limits in terms of how much you could store and hold without increasing the amount of "weight" and design into making a paper container. So really all this is to find a way to replace the paper with something cheaper or less resource timing to product.
Was the wax paraffin based? If so then that wasn't/isn't biodegradable either, unfortunately
🔅Heat: hello? And not even intense heat. 🔸 paper and wax have higher carbon footprint, plus it is heavier, for things like plastics that are ubiquitous, it is a considerable increase of carbon emissions, from manufacturing and transportation. 🔸and plastic is much much stronger, there are products that just need that. 🔸it can be transparent.
The biggest problem of the wax lined milk cartons is that they never existed. The cartons were always lined with a plastic, both on the inside as on the outside. It looked as they where composting, but in reality they left a lot of microplastics.
Chitosan (from shrimp shell) is also a lifesaving product EMS use to help clotting (halves clotting time). We use granules of it or dressings impregnated by it.
One common plant-based material that people often conflate with plastic is cellophane, which is a transparent sheet material that is often used to wrap stuff.
I love the seaweed straws I've encountered before, I also purchased some metal straws for myself, and the straw becoming ice cold enhances the drinking experience IMHO
nothing worse than a soggy warm straw.
@@ge2719 the seaweed ones were hard even harder than a normal straw and didn't get soggy or mushy at all. Paper straws are awful.
@@alexanderdeburdegala4609 Metal straws always feel very uncomfortable to me, but I bought reusable silicone straws and they've worked very well for me.
There are so many holes in every plastic "alternatives" and they're ALWAYS cost.
Many plastics were probably an expensive luxury item when first produced
Retail needs to be convinced that they can still sell stuff without the onerous clear plastic packaging. It's terribly wasteful.
Thanks for the video! I love new technologies that solve real problems, but what I love even more is seeing it actually get used and this use grow quickly!
Imagine throwing out water bottle after drinking the water in it. I reuse my water bottles, refilling them for months, sometimes years on end and only throw them out if there's a leak or if it becomes internally crumpled without any way to uncrumple it.
Be careful of this, it can be worse for you to reuse a plastic bottle too much. It depends on the plastic used and how that was made. But plastic bottles are not a good item to keep using long term
This is not to say that the volume of plastic waste isn't a problem (it is, big time), but on the subject of something a little hopeful, Ideonella sakaiensis is known to consume PET polymers for energy. Basically there is a new potential source of energy in the environment and bacteria WILL find a way to eat it.
What would be absolutely cool would be a transparent to mostly transparent/semitransparent mycelium-based plastic that can hold drinking water, safely, for up to 2 years, but after the contents have been downed the bottle can be cut up, boiled or soaked in near boiling water for 3 to 5 minutes, then be cut up and used for either noodles or mushrooms in your Bolognese sauce.
I have to be honest. The Kawhi Leonard's legendary meme double entendre was so good it caught me off guard! Well done Matt well done!
Plastic water bottles in its self is not the problem. It is the lack of a return scheme that is the problem. In Scandinavia and Germany they have return schemes that catch up to 95% of the plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water
Your pronunciation of "codify" sounds a little fishy. :)
Finally a new jingle! And this time not something that every TH-camr use. A good upgrade for the channel.
When it comes to food we don't really have a choice. Fruit, vegetables, bread and many other things come in plastic. We can either buy them like that or not eat them.
NO NO BRING BACK THE OLD THEME TUNE
💯x💯 New one's brutal. Old one was chill af
The idea that recycling and renewable energy needs to be profitable before it's worth doing will go down in history as one of the most selfish aspects of this knowingly climate changing generation (lets not even think about car owners).
Government should be pumping money into large scale recycling and renewables.
Comrade, profitability is basically the only way anything has ever been accomplished, public works need to be paid for through taxes or revenue. I don't know what your way of paying for things entails
Military industrial complex would like to have a word with you and the current day usage of penicillin and NASA is sending you a letter of recall for those integrated circuits used in the mobile phone you have in your pocket.
Are you doing EVERYTHING you can to help? Have you abandoned ALL the things that aren't renewable? Do you give every spare cent to research making recycling cheaper?
No?
Then be quiet evil one.
^ good idea on paper - but this is also why we are at least 1 TB in debt lol
As an alternative insulation product, you could look into Airkrete (not to be confused with Aircrete). Airkrete is a magnesium oxide foam.
Another interesting building material is Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC). AAC is a concrete foam. Aluminum powder is mixed with the cement powder. When water is added, there is a chemical reaction, and hydrogen bubbles form. The hydrogen dissipates and is replaced with air. AAC is load bearing, 4 hour fire rated, insects wont eat it, it does not mold. It has a fairly decent R value, due to its thermal mass and the fact that it is a foam.
9:04 Lil John must be writing your scripts lmao.
I will take this seriously when LEGO moves. They are based in Denmark and are desperate for an alternative.
That's a good point. But at least Legos are not one time use and don't really create much waste. I still have Legos from 40 years ago that work like new.
I'd spend like 10x the cost for mycelium LEGO bricks than for plastic. They're seriously missing out on a market of people who will pay a premium for a more ecological option.
At least with LEGO very little is thrown away, I've passed much of my collection on to my great nephew and there are LEGO lending librarys/groups also.
@@darthdiculous6511 Absolutely. Some of my children's Lego dates back to the 70s.
Plastic is the one thing that everyday people can have an effect on.
I'm done feeling guilty about it. It's not our job to reduce the production of plastic.
I try to do my best but I'm done feeling guilty about it when I have no reasonably cheap alternative.
@@mattrinne if people have that mindset, it will never be fixed
@@racingfortheson I see what you mean since demand usually affects supply. But are there enough people demanding plastic alternatives? Legislation to curb the widespread use of single use plastic is going to be the only fix I see. Even then, legislation typically only happens when there's a demand from the population.
I just know that I feel stressed and guilty about using plastic. And I try to avoid it when possible, but I'm giving myself permission to turn that guilt into blame. It's a mental health solution for myself. I know I'm not the only person who feels this guilt and pressure.
@@mattrinne I’m definitely someone who believes in small government but this is exactly something the government could do. Put a date, 5 years, and say they are outlawed at that point. Gives people time to get used to the idea and companies time to figure it out. Then fine the 💩 out of products that break the law. Take that money and put towards clean up. Probably solved.
It is so important that you are bringing attention to these developments that plague the environment. So glad that you have 1.43M subscribers. You deserve all taht and more. Thank you for being a very well researched source for those who give a d*mn about the survival of life on our planet.
Thanks for sharing this information. Plastic waste is a blight on our planet that we are all contributing to. These alternatives offer hope that we can reduce our plastic consumption without causing a significant disruption which would in turn lead to a backlash against less convenient solutions.
We are putting everything to replace cement, but we're unable to completely replace for Structural purposes. is anything left to test in concrete?
Large building use of concrete is find - the main problem is finding a replacement for roads and smaller buildings as it cost more there than larger buildings that can hold more stuff.
Just like plastics, it's the unknown negatives that will get us.
Plastics problems where never unknown. Just ignored.
@@RasakBlood nonsense
@@RasakBlood
The plastics hazards that we knew of in the 1960's and 1970's were mostly related to the production of plastics. In many ways we thought of plastic as safer than glass at the customer or post customer part of the product life cycle. (Due to reduced broken glass.) The first I heard of research showing that some plastics mimicking hormones was about 1990. (I think that study was looking at frog reproduction.) We keep finding new hazards. So @longranger270's statement and concern is accurate and legitimate.
PFAS(s) (forever chemicals) are a different story. We have known about the hazards since the 1960's or 1970's if I understand correctly.
I try to cut back on 1 time use plastics as much as I can. Drink from the tap, try to go for a soda in aluminium, etc... Packaging is the big one that seems hard to do. All those products look good for the future. Let's hope they make it.
I still remember when the milk man picked up the used glass milk bottles and dropped of new bottles full of fresh milk. When I was very young we used to buy soda pop in glass bottles. We washed them out and exchanged them for new full bottles.
Agreed. And it was also done for store bought soda and milk. There was a deposit paided to encourage the return of the bottles. Bottle type pop vending machines would have wooden crates besides the vending machine for returning the bottles. (No deposit in that case.)
With standardized bottles and jars this could happen again. Reuse is more cost efficient than recycling. Standardization is needed to reduce the logistics costs. Masson and Atlas have basically set some standards for jars. This could be done. And the standards wouldn't need to be glass. It could be a lighter material to reduce transportation cost. Durability and the ability to clean and sanitizer are important factors. (Glass was used fifty years ago because it is a lot more durable than most people realize. It is durable enough to hold up to harsh cleaning and sanitizing processes. Lack of this durable is one of the challenges for reusable plastic bottles and jars.)
the little plastic spout on milk and juice cartons boil my blood.
Milk and juice cartons are generally plastic lined anyway
Especially as they make it harder, not easier, to pour the contents accurately!
Plastic is not the issue. Single use is the issue.
I think you should also consider the problem of microplastic
Blissful ignorance is the problem, "Live, Laugh, Love" Britney's of America that waste $50 a month on temu, and have 20 plastic multi-use plastic, and 10 metal bottles...
If I refill a "single use" bottle an average of 3 times before I "recycle" it as required by local sanitation, Britney needs to use ONLY her 30 bottles for the next 20 years (not buy 3 every year) to have an equivalent offset. Plastic grocery bags weren't an issue, since I had plenty of useful around the house reuses for them... now I have a pile of bright blue walmart bags, and get to see them all over... including along the sides of the Colorado River.
@@trixinreno419 Disposable shopping bags were definitely a problem here, because people mostly just dumped them and they end up on the local ocean, killing the wildlife.
@loganmedia4401
"Campaigners say these bag hoards are creating fresh environmental problems, with reusable bags having a much higher carbon footprint than thin plastic bags. According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag."
Reusable are a bigger problem when Becky needs one to match every outfit...
Reusable is a bigger problem when they get used once or twice by the homeless population before being used to shit in...
It's cute that you can't see outside of your bubble, and I appreciate that you have a neat little stack of Reusable bags and 15 heavy plastic or metal bottles... but if you look outside of your situation, not everyone has the capability to keep their walmart bags in the back of their leased "single use" PLASTIC car designed for programed obsolescence... maybe travel a bit, volunteer and donate your time... see that the world is full of different situations...
The rich that have the ability to make a change cause more problems than the poor... not sure when the last time any of the homeless in my community took a private flight for dinner in the Hamptons, but I'd venture to guess they could waste single use plastic for years and never touch the damage caused by (our congress) the rich elite... maybe regulations on the wasteful nature at the top should be addressed before policies that primarily impact the marginalized?
Something fun I learned recently regarding plastics.
BPA is bad for animals.
So, companies started taking it out of food packaging. And replacing it with something in the same "chemical family" that is possibly WORSE for animals.
This sort of research is a key part in resolving the problem of our consumer waste. I'm interested in all of it. Thank you for this video, I knew about some of these but was surprised by others, :)
Thank you for this! I am overwhelmed with the amount of plastic brought into our home from the grocery store alone. There has to be another way.
My former wife was a knitter and "fiber arts" type person. She actual knit with some chitosan-based yarn at one point.
When he said from the windows to the wall, did you finish that with a song perhaps?
While traveling for work at one point (we were in Bulgaria) a co-worker ordered a drink that I could swear came with a straw made out of noodle, something like a long straight piece of unboiled macaroni. He even ended up eating it when he was done, I've searched online from time to time and found nothing, but I'm convinced that what it was.
You covered a l-o-t of ground, because plastics are used in so many ways. It would be helpful to categorize use cases in different industries, food packaging, construction, packaging, etc. and address each in detail as each have significantly different requirements.
While you touch upon the use cases and their critical performance requirements, your whirlwind tour of the many ways plastics are used makes difficult to get down to the important part: taking action(s), e.g.…
- *investing* in companies that have solutions and are at a stage beyond the lab,
- how to *recognize/confirm* what you're seeing in the grocery store or hardware store, etc.
I do invest, and I actively watch what I buy and consume, so thank you for what you are doing.
I bought glass straws and I really liked them and somebody gave me aluminum straws that were just slightly bigger than the glass ones and they fit in them. I only needed to get little rubber end caps and now I have a portable glass straw that's not gonna break in transit.
I have always been carrying a water bottle.
There is so much waste out there that we really should be looking at uses for our waste to turn into other things because then you can get some thing that's literally free to build something else.
As usual, an excellent and well produced video. Here is the UK, politicians are at last (after centuries) realising that a superb and natural insulant is walking around. Lambswool is cheap, natural, does not burn, has excellent insulation properties and does not rot or degrade over time. Maybe some time in the future you may include this material in another video. Here in Wales, we have more sheep than humans, so there is no shortage of raw material.
you talk about hemp and construction, this reminds me that one of my cousins wanted to build her house using techniques inspired by those of the Middle Ages.
he spoke all the time about the "hemp and lime" technique as an ancestral technique but much less harmful to the environment than classic cement (lime requires temperatures 3X lower for its manufacture), it nevertheless has the disadvantage of being very slow; lime takes more than 10X longer to "dry" than classic cement (lime mortars have been found, sheltered from the air since the 11th century, which were still soft to the touch )
I think that there won't be one singular material to replace plastic. Plastic's perfect storm of properties are durability, versatility and cheapness. If we get several materials that are durable and cheap but also eco-friendly, but which fill the roles of different types of plastic, they may be able to, in combination, replace plastic.
The only problem with that is the same plastic can be made I to far different products with just a few additives, the same company can make the plastic for many, many companies that all make different products, so it's so very cheap
I love hemp. When you can use just about every part of the plant for something useful, it seems ridiculous that we aren't using more of it. I wish there could be more of a market for it in products so we could just incorporate more hemp into the food and product chains.
Another material which I have experimented with in my studio is nanocellulose. Recommend having a look at it. In the past the amount of energy required to produce it meant it was not feasible. But they have solved that issue. Unlike the LLM mess!
Thank you, fills my heart with hope of a cleaner future for all! What I don't understand is why these petrol owners aren't getting on board with these alternatives.
The biggest problem is getting people to change. Even if it is better and saves money some people will want to stick with the old way of doing things. But they will come around. Thanks for the video!
Hempcrete is cool, but Rockwool has a soft spot in my heart.
It's melted rocks spun into fibers, and it's 100% recyclable by melting it down.
It's literally volcano cotton candy. How metal is that?
While I've heard the process referred to as being similar to making cotton candy, I've never actually heard it called that directly. I think that's the only thing I'm going to call it now. Thanks!
"Put down that lighter"" my guy this bowl been packed since I started the video, i just FOUND my lighter ;)
What I think is that it isn't really a matter of consumer preference for most of these. With packaging, your average consumer just doesn't know what it is that projects their product until they open it. And accepting it, these materials will slowly find more and more use as they get cheaper until they reach a threshold of costing as much as regular plastics and then they'll just be everywhere.
Thanks for this video - it really gives me hope that we may move away from plastic and all the pollution it causes. I'm thinking the real issue is creating a polymer that can store food and liquids at a variety of temperatures without breaking down, yet breaks down easily once it's done being used. I like the idea of being able to compost stuff at home, but I'd have to be absolutely sure that what it broke down into was good for my garden. Speaking of which, you didn't mention whether these new plastic substitutions broke down into environmentally friendly molecules. Just because it starts with natural materials, that doesn't mean it stays that way once it's subjected to all the heat, chemicals, and pressures that make it into a new substance. We have to make sure we're not repeating the problem. After all, petroleum is technically natural, too.
I'm very grateful for the new upfront music. I found the previous music somehow difficult to listen to.
A sub shop near me uses straws that are compostable. They feel just like plastic straws, not like paper straws. I wish more restaurants and convenience stores would switch to these.
I do like hearing about these advances and they always show promise but they never seem to hit the big time. It seems that we are always years away from something being mainstream but it does not happen. I would love to see all plastics used for food packaging that can decompose.
as a 3d printer hobbyist I would love to see the PLA home recycle process come to production. I initially wanted to be able to reuse the wast to make more filament but realized you needed at least 50% of material to be new plastic. Not really ideal, but I can get on board with it being composted and added into a home garden.
Don't forget, hemp oil can be used to create compostable plastic. It's just crazy to me that hemp is the highest-cost item for hemp building materials. A carbon tax would pay farmers to grow hemp, and charge them to grow other crops, along with raising pesticide prices. Make hemp easy to grow, no permits, raw fields can never be used as proper medicine or recreational cannabis. Gov should subsidize hemp processing facilities near rail terminals so stalks, leaves, and seeds can be separated and sent for further processing & manufacturing. This would turn the stalks into a cheap byproduct instead of a boutique commodity.
I hope we get this new PLA in the 3d printing world soon. We do tend to create a lot of plastic waste (even though it doesn't compare to the broader plastics usage in food / clothes etc)
Shrimp Leather sounds cool. It's so annoying to me how much plastic-related packaging isn't recyclable.