Developed by researchers from China's Northeast Forestry University, the bamboo plastic can biodegrade in soil within 50 days and offers a pathway towards sustainable plastic alternatives.
Which have massive implications on weight and structural packaging. A plastic soda bottle is light and sturdy. A glass soda bottle is heavy and shatters. Also recycling of glass is not entirely straightforward in a lot of regions.
The world doesn’t (over) rely on polymers just because everyone wants to have a summer home in Alberta. They have materials properties that make them ridiculously good for storage and packaging. They just have very serious implications on the environment.
Reducing those environmental implications is VERY good and a lot of work is going into it. But doing so to the point it removes their beneficial properties… is kind of missing the point.
Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.
Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.
Then we should go back to glass bottles.
Which have massive implications on weight and structural packaging. A plastic soda bottle is light and sturdy. A glass soda bottle is heavy and shatters. Also recycling of glass is not entirely straightforward in a lot of regions.
The world doesn’t (over) rely on polymers just because everyone wants to have a summer home in Alberta. They have materials properties that make them ridiculously good for storage and packaging. They just have very serious implications on the environment.
Reducing those environmental implications is VERY good and a lot of work is going into it. But doing so to the point it removes their beneficial properties… is kind of missing the point.
There’s several big tradeoffs there.
Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.
Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.