6mo ago

Startup Replaces 6 Million Plastic Bags with Prototype Made from Corn Waste That Decomposes in 180 Days - Good News Network

www.goodnewsnetwork.org /startup-replaces-6-million-plastic-bags-with-prototype-made-from-corn-waste-that-decomposes-in-180-days/

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6mo ago

Startup [Bio Reform] Replaces 6 Million Plastic Bags with Prototype Made from Corn Waste That Decomposes in 180 Days - Good News Network

www.goodnewsnetwork.org /startup-replaces-6-million-plastic-bags-with-prototype-made-from-corn-waste-that-decomposes-in-180-days/

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31 comments

Paper and canvas bags already do this. What an engineering marvel.
- To be fair, corn is much faster to regrow than trees if we're talking about this vs. paper.
  
  Hemp as well. I'm certain we could make some sort of plastics with hemp, we can make practically everything from hemp. The added benefit of hemp is that it stores 85% of the excessive amount of carbon it consumes in its roots, so we can do whatever we want with the rest of the plant, harvest the roots, compress them into a cube much denser than water, drop them into the Mariana Trench, and not worry about that carbon for a few hundred million years.
  
  I like cannabis sativa for it’s medicinal and psychoactive properties, but I love cannabis sativa for its material, ecological, and agricultural properties. It’s a damn fine plant
  
  I've done the math, and we could totally reverse anthropogenic climate change with a reasonable amount of hemp production. It could be done in as little as a decade with an unreasonable amount of production. Something like 5 billion acres of production per year, but if we got just 500 million acres into production, and threw away the excess carbon, we would wipe out the excess carbon we've put into the air over the last 12,000 years in just over a century.
  At that point we could scale back production to use the hemp as a global thermostat, slowly adjusting the average temperature by a hundredth of a degree every decade or so.
  
  The maths for Kushtopia add up.
  
  It also takes a whole lot more energy and water to manufacture paper bags rather than plastic. I personally use synthetic reusable bags that will probably outlive me whenever possible.
  
  Yeah, maybe. The paper industry is a farming industry like any other, so growth is a consideration but not necessarily the only one.
- Whilst paper and canvas is biodegradable, plastic as a material has certain useful traits compared to paper and canvas, hence why making/developing similar biologically based and degradable materials helps reduce our reliance on it.
  Examples of such traits: Liquid resistance, non-permeable to water, see-through.
  
  And the #1 most important factor, and why plastic bags are the most common:
  The cost
  If we can't find a cheaper solution, it won't be adopted without regulations.
  
  100%, most contexts a use for plastic and should be replaced with paper or cloth through regulation.

31 comments