Goodbye Microplastics: New Recyclable Plastic Breaks Down Safely in Seawater

Top documentary of 2035 - Guanidinium: The Silent Killer

And we’ll never hear of it again

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.
- I have seen endless reports like this from every news source, labs, you name it. The reality is plastics have to be banned. Period. Only then can any of this work pay off.
This is obviously another lie like how easy it is to recycle plastics (it isn't) and is probably going to proliferate even more microplastics than regular plastic degradation.

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.
Then maybe introduce some incentives to make up for that 7% or else force their hand by introducing steep penalties for any plastics that are used which aren't up to a higher standard like this... Or a little bit of both.
- We unfortunately live in a world where people get elected simply by stating that they'll undo some progressive's green policy legacy.
  
  And technology as a whole has done more to destroy than preserve. A dozen die shrinks later, where's the promised efficiency, home computers hungrier than ever. Generative AI straining water supply. A couple apps have enough footprint and resources to make a compelling case against the traditional employee-employer contract.
  
  At some point people gotta start becoming skeptical of the notion that policy and technology will save the planet and that point was like 20 years ago
- I wrote a bill for my model congress that regulates all chocolate that melts at 30°C after 5 minutes the same as misbranded food

Breaks down... into micro micro plastics!

The point of this research was to avoid even that.

It's pretty awesome that it even breaks down in soil:

In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.
- But the problem is that phosphorus and nitrogen are actually bad for aquatic ecosystems: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/what-phosphorus-and-why-are-concerns-mounting-about-its-environmental-impact
Fun fact: Nano plastics do exist and are the most harmful kind as they can evade kidney filters, accessing your blood stream and doing all kind of hijinks at cellular level.

ITT: people commenting without reading the sidebar

Go, science! There will always be a need for some plastics, and having safer better options is a great thing for our future ♥️

This stuff again? What does it break down into tho?

It breaks down into safely.
- Ah yes. And how pure is the stuff? No paint on there?

I'm sure that when dissolved the molecular components won't affect the water in any way.

Is that the goal? I'm not sure that's even possible. You'd have to construct everything from the chemically inert like noble gasses. Yet by the very nature of them, they're hard to construct anything out of. Ceramics, I think, is the better material? Although they still last centuries.

So I'm confused what your utopia looks like?
- How do you infer me wanting utopia from this?
  
  The point is that because the plastics dissolve, it may just give license to people to continue dumping into the ocean because now it's out of sight and out of mind. Rinse, lather, repeat a few trillion times and now we have yet another chemical problem causing some unforseen thing.
  
  Look, dude, I get it. All of this is exhausting. But so is dealing with humans who refuse to spend 30 seconds asking themselves what the consequences of a thing are. The headline is eye-catching, but what does it mean for us in 20 years if this were widely adopted. Would it be OK or would it cause new issues? It's also misleading: "Goodbye Microplastics?" It's not like everything will suddenly disappear or there will be 100% global adoption of this technology.

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.