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We also use it because it's super-easy to mold, and is incredibly suited to mass production. The ease with which it can be shaped might even be the single most compelling reason to go plastic.

Plastic takes the best aspects of wood (lightweight, cheap), ceramics (easy to shape, watertight), and metal (casual resiliency); and dodges some of the biggest issues with each (wood requires a lot of finishing and is very slow to shape industrially, ceramics tend to shatter, metal is comparatively expensive, prone to rust, and also electrically conductive). They're not perfect, but if you add up the stat points it's obvious why they're so prevalent.

A use case is already stated in the article:

"So far, paper packs have been the most common alternatives to plastic containers. But business experts have pointed out that consumers are less willing to buy goods in paper packs because they cannot see the contents. Transparent paper could overcome this problem, but bringing the material to market will require factories with the technology to mass-produce it."

Nobody likes plastic because it lasts "thousands of years". People care about storing food products well. If we can do that without lasting thousands of years that seems like a pretty good win.

That's not entirely true. I throw away a lot of cardboard packaging with a plastic window glued into it. Obviously this can't replace all plastic, but it can certainly replace some.

Plastics do a lot of things; no one material can replace them all. But this is certainly one meaningful niche of disposable plastics.

> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.

That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.

THere’s a lot of single use plastics for packaging that something like this could replace. Like buying prepacked fruit. Your fruit isn’t lasting thousands of years. So your packaging doesn’t need to either.

Plastic likes:

  'waterproof' (fluid proof for many things)

  Difficult to shatter (drop safe-ish) 

  Shows stuff off 'nicely'

You mean something like what Japanese scientists developed ? A sea-water dissolving plastic : https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/scient...

There’s quite a lot of packaging that’s mostly cardboard but with a transparent plastic window to see the product.

»We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.«

Depends on the type of plastic used.

Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.

We use plastic for a wide range of reasons depending on the application & one of them is transparency. The alternative in the case tends to be glass which ticks a lot of your boxes (rain proof, etc.) but is heavy & brittle.

It's not about finding a universal replacement, it's always going to be a multifaceted approach.

> We like it because it lasts thousands of years.

Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.

There isn't one replacement for plastic. Hence also we can't expect every single replacement to address every single use of plastic. Transparent paper is fine.

Singular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute.

In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.

We would like it for the vast majority of cases if it lasted for ten years (or 50) and not a thousand. Why don’t we have plastic that degrades away safely over some timespan like that yet.

Ideal would be a material that has all the properties, but biodegrades after a reasonable period (what is reasonable depends on the usecase of course).

Also something that doesn't slowly poison you over time like what plastics (microplastics) do with microplastics. There's almost no way to get rid of those from our body except breastfeeding, but in that case, it's actually even worse, since usually people don't breastfeed for fun.

Here is the original paper from the researchers:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads2426

Apparently they wanted to create a material that:

1. is transparent,

2. can be made thick enough,

3. and is purely cellulose-based.

Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.

The main application target seems to be food packaging.

I genuinely wonder if the Romans actually had peak technology all things considered & balanced.

Huh, I somehow never made the connection to cellophane being cellulose-based. I just thought it was plastic…

Sounds similar to cellophane. But the process to make it is very different. Maybe it has some new properties that cellophane doesn't.

"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."

> some countries simply dump their garbage in the ocean

And most other countries dump their garbage in these less fortunate countries for 'recycling'.

Can't really get mad at poor third world countries we have been using as dumpsters.

If you don't believe me or think this is hyperbole, no I'm being literal here. Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the the ocean somewhere far from you.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...

https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/industrialised-countries-are...

There are people working that angle as well[0], and they focus on prevention for this reason. We need all angles.

[0] https://theoceancleanup.com/

Its really hard to change people without using threats or force. Easier to change their environment.

It’s usually easier to solve a technical problem than a societal one.

Environmentally-sensitive garbage disposal is expensive. Not everyone can afford it.

“some countries” is doing a lot of heavy work to say “basically the Philippines”, which is a gigantic outlier in output per capita and just also absolute volume. China and India produce quite a bit, but not compared to how many humans they have.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

This is about dealing with reality.

I think that degradation of plastic is the larger concern. Storage of garbage is generally an overstated concern, while microplastic pollution clearly show the threat of plastics that break into millions of tiny pieces.[1] Stable plastics that last pose so many fewer problems when it comes to pollutants.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Eh, I think we just overshot our goals by 100x. We could settle on a plastic that degrades into harmless dust after 10 years, but no less (nor anymore than 100). That's good enough to keep going with all of it.

But then your bottles would fall apart on the shelf because they degraded enough to get a hole in them.

I would like you to qualify "didn't hold up well". Can you explain how? Can we get more detail?

Why?

They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem there.

They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes: sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a week.

Where is the terrible part?

Why? Will it get soggy like the regular paper straws?

From TFA it says it's only about 3x as expensive as normal paper packaging, just needs a factory. Implies that at least some people believe it's viable.

Apparently the total mass of plastic used in wrapping the same volume of goods is lower in japan than in other countries (using more bags, less hard shell packaging).

Video on this, as well as how much is used as incinerator fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6WogV6UEg

They briefly describe the process in the article, and very different from the "transparent wood" I think you are referring to. I'll try to summarise from my brief understanding.

- Transparent wood takes wood, dissolves the lignin (natural wood glue-ish) with a solvent, and replaces it with epoxy under pressure. It's a pain to make, but is very cool and preserves the wood fibre structure.

- This transparent paper involves dissolving very pure cellulose (long starch) and then allowing it to reconnect tightly (with heat) before drying. It appears to be composed primarily of cellulose at the end and exhibits plastic properties. I presume the chemicals change the cellulose properties to allow this.

"lithium bromide-water" is (apparently, I was corrected) not very toxic and lilley recycled in the process. If this can be scaled and the solvent process can be done safely, then its very clever. It's effectively plastic but using a more "natural" carbon chain, which nature has had a few million extra years to figure out how to break down.

They describe it as paper and compare it to polycarbonate... so my guess is that it is a bit brittle, and cannot nicely replace plastic wrap or plastic bags... but it has some nice properties to replace a group of plastics we don't have very good alternatives to. One open question I have is UV resistance. Most transparent plastics tend to become brittle over time... but I don't know my chemistry enough to know if cellulose has the same issue. Greenhouses would otherwise benefit from it (as they're often made from polycarbonate sheets rather than glass)

Different goals: - Developing transparent wood is about cutting costs - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/transparent-wood-c... - Developing this material is about reducing and eventually eliminating plastic

Can you share what knowledge you have of the materials and/or process that implies this is likely the case?

even if its viable, it would come down to cost

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In recent news: Japanese scientists produce plastic which dissolves in seawater within 2 hours.

So like sapphire (Al2O3) :)

Is it really biodegradable? Almost all varieties are not. They only fall apart in smaller plastic or need special heated environments. None of them will degrade if you simply throw them „into the woods“.