I don't have access to the full paper, but "Flexible and soft, the resulting material can be completely chemically recycled using heat and degraded by acid" doesn't inspire confidence that it would actually degrade well in nature. At least from that short description it does at least sound economically viable for deliberate recycling. At least with the right incentives.
They call it "bio-sourced material". Now I don't have a chemistry degree, but my amateur understanding is that most of the synthesis chains available here ultimately derive from oil. For example you can get DHF by catalyzing 1,4-butanediol on cobalt or aluminum oxide. Wikipedia lists a number of ways 1,4-Butanediol is made industrially, but they all boil down to oil product, natural gas, or the occasional "we mostly make this from oil, but sometimes ethanol is used instead". The most "bio-sourced" of those is via Butadiene, where wikipedia claims "While not competitive with steam cracking for producing large volumes of butadiene, lower capital costs make production from ethanol a viable option for smaller-capacity plants."
It reads like a nice material, but as usual temper your expectations
There are a few big challenges to be managed. One is material diversity—it's cool they got it to work with one monomer (most thermosets are two that you mix together), but it's a long road to showing the process works well in just one application let alone. To make a substantial impact, the process would have to be suitable to a bunch of different applications, likely requiring different material properties that would require many different monomers.
Then we can talk about value. While the value of fully recycling plastic can be managed as an externality by government taxes/fees, the big question is how much it actually costs in energy, time, money, and material waste that somebody has to pay for—there's no free lunch here, and it's rolling all those costs back up into the product. I have been secretly hoping that automated waste sorting and excess solar capacity could be used to run such waste management processes and close the business case, but energy demand and prices seem to only be going up due to AI. Still, it's good there's another example of it being possible but a long road to really reducing single-use plastics.
https://www.healthychoice.com/cafe-steamers
which are some of the tastiest frozen meals on the market, but they not only come in a plastic bowl, but there are two layers of the plastic bowl, one of which is perforated to separate the sauce from the food so that the food gets steamed. Boy is there a lot of plastic.
Thing is, these are all thermoplastics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Classifications
unlike the thermoset plastic that this article is about. I mean, if you make a plastic bowl out of this thermoset
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine_resin
and use it thousands of times the amount of waste generated is dramatically less than is generated by those steamers. The environmental risk people are most concerned out now is that some fraction of plastics are not recycled, burned, or landfilled and wind up in the environment where they get ground into microplastics. As much as people blame industry on blaming the consumer, it's a lot better to chuck plastic in the trash than to chuck it outdoors and a good idea to pick it up on the side of the road whenever you can. That black agricultural plastic is a disaster. (See also the risk of plastic car tires!)
Also, pulling from memory that may not be quite right, but I recall roads taking a substantial amount of polymer additives and that tire degradation is a major source of microplastic exposure for humans. The tire problem is poised to get worse with EVs being so heavy and accelerating so hard that the tires are bigger and wear faster, but I'm not aware of even any promising research there besides more bio-based feedstocks to improve the sustainability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Health_and_...
it’s like wanting a useful fuel which doesn’t burn. they mutually contradict each other.
Acidity breaks it down? What if some ketchup in bun or some other acidic part of food is wrapped with it? In 2 hours when you unpack you look at holes in that plastic wondering if you will eat that material (of course you will). Had enough BPAs and PFOAs scare to not trust novel chemical crap from companies that have no issue poisoning half the planet for profit and having real food safety only as an annoying afterthought.
https://chemsec.org/the-teflon-chemical-ptfe-is-often-touted...
Although it is claimed that very little migrates to food
https://www.fda.gov/food/process-contaminants-food/authorize...
The monomer used to make it is considered "probably carcinogenic"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrafluoroethylene#Safety
so occupational exposure at the factory and environmental release are concerns.
Yeah, this is what I heard before. That the coating itself isn't so bad, but the manufacturing process produces stuff that is awful enough that we probably shouldn't use it.
I don’t think that’s a strong argument. Asbestos is quite inert, and that is what makes it so harmful. A fiber will, over time, harm more and more cells.
... synthesis and characterization of a strong thermoplastic made from 2,3-dihydrofuran (DHF), a monomer made in one step from 1,4-butanediol, a bioalcohol already produced on the plant scale. ...
2. Even if we could, plastics are generally not made from hydrocarbons pulled out of the biosphere, so it doesn't counter CO2 emissions and global warming.
Not handling sunlight might not be ideal, but it is something instead of seeing our seas and beaches slowly turn into dumps and our bodies into plastic containers.
Indeed not a good thing for continued profits and the cartel of planned obsolescence.
Synthetic fibers are around a century old by now, other plastics applications more than that, and everyone has already been exposed to microplastics. If they were as harmful as the scaremongers want us to believe, we would've noticed long ago.
Just like non-ionising radiation from radio, this whole plastics scare is another nothingburger.