Posted on Oct 21, 2025
Bamboo plastic is strong, moldable, and vanishes in soil
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The future of plastics?
Bamboo plastic is strong, moldable, and vanishes in soil
Posted from earth.com
Science
Research
Plastics
Environment
Edited 2 mo ago
Posted 2 mo ago
Responses: 4
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If it seems too good to be true... I want this to be legitimate, but China fakes so much research, it's hard to trust ANYTHING they publish in a paper. I'll withhold judgement for now and continue using wood, metal, and glass instead of plastic any chance I get. Case in point: the disposable silverware on a couple of international flights I just took were basswood.
Since they were coy about the relative cost of this stuff, I did a little digging. Assuming that their stated price point of $2300/ton is accurate, which I do only for the sake of argument, It's not "between the cost of traditional plastics and bioplastics." It's in the low end of the price range of bioplastics. But there's sophistry even there. Traditional plastics mostly run from $1k/ton to $2k/ton. PP, which is used in food packaging and dishes because it's not supposed to leach chemicals and is supposed to be safe in the top rack of the dishwasher, is about $1300-1500 a ton. PET, used in blister packaging (not at all food safe), runs about $850 a ton in China/Korea/Japan, although it's more like $1300/ton in North America. Existing bioplastic alternatives, like PLA, PHA, and PBS, are 2-7x the price. It sounds like $2300/ton is actually a (probably excessively optimistic) projected cost per ton if produced at scale, and if accurate it's at the lower end of the cost of bioplastics, not "in between," as claimed.
Where I do see some promise in this stuff is that it's a biodegradable replacement for rigid plastics, like PVC. The only problem is that PVC is less than 1/3 the projected cost of this stuff. That probably brings other materials like aluminum back into the picture. So even if everything in the article is true, it may still not be an economically viable product.
What doesn't get enough attention is the environmental cost of producing the raw materials that go into bioplastics. The dimwitted Gaia worshiper in the street gets told all about the environmental cost of petroleum-based materials and is led to assume that there's no environmental impact to "green" alternatives. Anyone with half a brain, however, knows that there's only one answer to the problem: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Since they were coy about the relative cost of this stuff, I did a little digging. Assuming that their stated price point of $2300/ton is accurate, which I do only for the sake of argument, It's not "between the cost of traditional plastics and bioplastics." It's in the low end of the price range of bioplastics. But there's sophistry even there. Traditional plastics mostly run from $1k/ton to $2k/ton. PP, which is used in food packaging and dishes because it's not supposed to leach chemicals and is supposed to be safe in the top rack of the dishwasher, is about $1300-1500 a ton. PET, used in blister packaging (not at all food safe), runs about $850 a ton in China/Korea/Japan, although it's more like $1300/ton in North America. Existing bioplastic alternatives, like PLA, PHA, and PBS, are 2-7x the price. It sounds like $2300/ton is actually a (probably excessively optimistic) projected cost per ton if produced at scale, and if accurate it's at the lower end of the cost of bioplastics, not "in between," as claimed.
Where I do see some promise in this stuff is that it's a biodegradable replacement for rigid plastics, like PVC. The only problem is that PVC is less than 1/3 the projected cost of this stuff. That probably brings other materials like aluminum back into the picture. So even if everything in the article is true, it may still not be an economically viable product.
What doesn't get enough attention is the environmental cost of producing the raw materials that go into bioplastics. The dimwitted Gaia worshiper in the street gets told all about the environmental cost of petroleum-based materials and is led to assume that there's no environmental impact to "green" alternatives. Anyone with half a brain, however, knows that there's only one answer to the problem: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
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Cpl Vic Burk
LTC Matthew Schlosser Good analytics about the cost, Colonel. Today the cost may be high but as technology advances generally things get cheaper as they find more efficient ways to manufacture products. Take the VCR for example. When the first VCR's came out ~1974, they cost about $1800.00. As technology advanced and once the initial engineering paid off the cost came down to where near the end of the VCR era you could get a machine for around $100.00. Eventually it may become cost effective; just not today.
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LTC Matthew Schlosser
In general, I agree. But the quote of $2300 a ton appears to be not what it costs today, when it's not even in production, but is only a toy in a lab. It appears that $2300 a ton is an optimistic projection of what it might cost if and when the market forces you are referring to take effect. The $2300 equates more to the $100 VCR, not the $1800 one. Today, they don't even have an $1800 one, they have a prototype.
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LTC Matthew Schlosser
There's that. Used to be a lot worse, but it seems like using polypro for anything touching food helps quite a bit. It doesn't solve the problem of microplastics being in the food before we ever buy it.
The hilarious thing is that the same people who are simultaneously rooting for and warning against inflation caused by tariffs have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM with increasing the cost of things made out of plastic by 200-700%. To be fair, I'd love to go back and not have a plastic-based economy in the first place, but here we are.
The hilarious thing is that the same people who are simultaneously rooting for and warning against inflation caused by tariffs have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM with increasing the cost of things made out of plastic by 200-700%. To be fair, I'd love to go back and not have a plastic-based economy in the first place, but here we are.
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