I really can’t wrap my head around this. With all the garbage created from plastics, can’t they just design and engineer green versions?
Update: Sorry guys, I know I’m oversimplifying everything here. Thanks for the great contribution. Really appreciate it. I didn’t get the answer i wanted, but it was worth a shot.
In: Chemistry
I make plastic resin for a living.
They can and they do make biodegradable plastics.
It’s just that they are so expensive to create, release C02, are structurally useless and or limited production due to the availability of raw materials.
You can’t just “engineer” shit. That’s not quite how the world works, else we’d colonize Mars by now.
Scientists have to find the working principles, we engineers make it practical, useful and in large scale. We are still looking for that working principles.
Lignin-based biodegradable plastics do exist and are slowly introduced. They come from trees basically which has it’s own economic worries, but it’s carbon neutral during bio degrading
This plastic though runs into problems though, since current plastic raw material price is low there is not incentive for companies to spend tens of hundreds of millions to build new plants or retrofit existing ones. Since the process is vastly different than other plastics being manufactured. So until petroleum based plastics become too expensive to produce large scale, they’re going to dominate the market
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