So the plastics industry has been pushing stories like this my entire life. Things never change because regular plastic is the cheaper option.
This is a news bulletin from RIKEN, a research center funded by the government of Japan.
This isn’t a story “pushed by the plastic industry”. The problem, I think, is that communication of scientific lab results is often overpraised (“It’s possible to do X!”).
It’s not wrong, but it also does not mean it’s always a good idea to do X, in the way it had been achieved in the paper.
Sadly, loud press releases does benefit funding. So it’ll continue to the detriment of your fatigue, and general distrust in r&d.
Interesting approach, for sure. We’ve had a bit of a problem with making plastics degradable, in that we don’t want them to degrade while they’re still in use. This approach would obviously be unsuitable for packaging salty food, but for many other single-use plastics, this might be a good solution.
Yacht gang: What the fuck is this? It costs 7% more to produce than the stuff we’re already using
Pretty much the reason why non-degradable plastics need to be restricted or banned, otherwise the cost of those ending up in the environment we bear on behalf of fossil fuel companies.
And we’ll never hear of it again
