NASA Exploring Future Moon and Mars Homes Made of Fungi

The habitats would grow with the help of some water.

By Loukia Papadopoulos January 19, 2020

NASA

What do you imagine life on the Moon and Mars might be like? Do you imagine futuristic buildings made of metal? Well, NASA imagines some a lot more sustainable options.

RELATED: UNDERGROUND FUNGI NETWORK MAPPED FOR THE FIRST TIME

The agency is working on buildings made of fungi. Yes, you read that correctly... Fungi!

Called the myco-architecture project and run by NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, this new initiative is seeking to "grow" habitats on the Moon, Mars, and even potentially Earth.
Like a turtle

"Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs," said in a statement Lynn Rothschild, the principal investigator on the project. "Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.



What they envision is straight out of a science fiction film. Space explorers would carry with them compact habitat built out of lightweight material with dormant fungi.

Once in their final destination, the explorers would simply add water and the fungi would grow across that framework creating a living habitat. Of course, we are a long way off from this happening.

Still, early-stage research is seeking to prove that such structures could be viable options. How would these structures look like?
Three-layered domes

NASA describes them as three-layered domes:

"The outer-most layer is made up of frozen water ice, perhaps tapped from the resources on the Moon or Mars. That water serves as a protection from radiation and trickles down to the second layer – the cyanobacteria. This layer can take that water and photosynthesize using the outside light that shines through the icy layer to produce oxygen for astronauts and nutrients for the final layer of mycelia.

That last layer of mycelia is what organically grows into a sturdy home, first activated to grow in a contained environment and then baked to kill the life-forms – providing structural integrity and ensuring no life contaminates Mars and any microbial life that's already there."

NASA also believes that their project has applications right here on Earth. It could provide a more eco-friendly and sustainable method of living.

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"Fungi from Yuggoth" by H. P. Lovecraft

www.hplovecraft.com › writings › texts › poetry

I. The Book The place was dark and dusty and half-lost. In tangles of old alleys near the quays, Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas, And with ...

Fungi from Yuggoth - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Fungi_from_Yuggoth

Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 ...

‎Style · ‎Themes · ‎Discography · ‎References

"The Colour out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

www.hplovecraft.com › writings › texts › fiction

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope ...

The Colour Out of Space - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Colour_Out_of_Space

"The Colour Out of Space" is a science fiction/horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in March 1927. In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" in the wild hills west of the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts.

‎The Case of Charles Dexter ... · ‎The Book of the Damned · ‎The Curse

Dancing dragon' feathered dinosaur fossil discovered in 

China 

 

About 120 million years ago, a "dancing dragon" lived in China's Jehol Province. The discovery of a fossil belonging to the small feathered dinosaur is new to ...

One-of-a-Kind Dinosaur Specimen Discovered in China Offers View Into Dinosaur-Bird Evolution
Wulong bohaiensis. The skeleton described in the new paper is remarkably complete. The name means “Dancing Dragon” in Chinese and was named in part to ...

One-of-a-Type Dinosaur Specimen Found in China Supplies Study about Into Dinosaur-Chook Evolution
Wulong bohaiensis. The skeleton described within the unique paper is remarkably entire. The name methodology “Dancing Dragon” in Chinese and turn out to ...

Fossil of dinosaur with feathers and 'face filled with sharp teeth' shows how they grew differently from birds
Paleontologists have discovered a new type of dinosaur in China that is shedding new light on how the ancient reptiles grew differently from modern-day birds.

Pocket-size raptor sheds new light on the links between dino and bird life
This "dancing dragon," a new species of feathered dinosaur, was discovered in one of the richest fossil deposits in the world.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/are-birds-dinosaurs-by-mindy-weisberger.html

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=FOSSIL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=DINOSAUR

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BIRDS

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CHINA

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=DINOSAUR+BIRD

Bored with Sunday Service? Maybe Nudist Church Is Your Thing
Or even mass from the comfort of your driver's seat. No matter your lifestyle, there’s a way for you to convene with God in America.

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM IS A HOME GROWN RELIGION WITH NO LINK TO EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITY
AND IT IS BASED ON THE BARNUM AND BAILEY AMERICANISM; THERE IS A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE 

PHOTOGRAPH: CYRIL ABAD
Visitors take a photo with an actor dressed as Jesus at the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida.

A nudist church in Virginia where the pastor delivers sermons in his birthday suit. A drive-in church in Florida where parishioners can attend services from the comfort of their cars. A 500-foot-long, “Biblically accurate” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. These wild and woolly corners of American Christianity are the focal points of French photographer Cyril Abad’s series In God We Trust.


While some two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as Christians, a declining number identify with any specific sect. In 2000, half of Americans belonged to a Protestant denomination; today, that number is down to 30 percent. Many of the rest—one in six Americans—consider themselves nondenominational. These unaffiliated worshippers are the ones targeted by the proliferating number of alternative churches and Christian recreational sites captured by Abad.

“Churches have adopted free-market principles to open up new niches in spiritual beliefs,” Abad says. “If you’re a surfer, there’s a church for Christian surfers. If you’re a biker, there’s a church for bikers. I’m less interested in big megachurches and more interested in these small churches designed to appeal to specific tribes.”

Abad sees these churches as a distinctly American phenomenon; there is no comparable phenomenon in France, he says. He spent almost a year researching churches and Christian-themed attractions all over America before settling on the seven included in the series, which he visited over the course of three visits to the US in 2017 and 2018. The most difficult to get permission to photograph was the Virginia nudist church; to make the parishioners more comfortable, Abad took off his own clothes while taking the photographs.

The series can certainly be funny, particularly the images of the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, a Biblical amusement park featuring a re-creation of ancient Jerusalem and daily reenactments of Jesus’s crucifixion. But Abad insists he doesn’t intend to ridicule the people who visit such attractions. “That’s why I don’t show people crying in the Holy Land Experience—I always show them from the back,” he says.

For Abad, the photographs are part of a longstanding interest in the sociology of religion. “I want people to be amused, but after that to be challenged and start asking deeper questions,” he says. Mocking is easy. Empathy—and understanding—are the hard part.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NUDIST

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAKED

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CHRISTIANITY


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AMERICAN+PROTESTANTISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NOAHS+ARK

A Surge of New Plastic Is About to Hit the Planet

A world awash in plastic will soon get slammed by more, as major oil companies ramp up their production.

  

PHOTOGRAPH: PAUL TAYLOR/GETTY IMAGES

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As public concern about plastic pollution rises, consumers are reaching for canvas bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles. But while individuals fret over images of oceanic garbage gyres, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are pouring billions of dollars into new plants intended to make millions more tons of plastic than they now pump out.

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic — which is made from oil and gas, and their byproducts — to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels, analysts say. Petrochemicals, the category that includes plastic, now account for 14 percent of oil use, and are expected to drive half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.

“In the context of a world trying to shift off of fossil fuels as an energy source, this is where [oil and gas companies] see the growth,” said Steven Feit, a staff attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, an advocacy group.

And because the American fracking boom is unearthing, along with natural gas, large amounts of the plastic feedstock ethane, the United States is a big growth area for plastic production. With natural gas prices low, many fracking operations are losing money, so producers have been eager to find a use for the ethane they get as a byproduct of drilling.

“They’re looking for a way to monetize it,“ Feit said. “You can think of plastic as a kind of subsidy for fracking.”

America’s petrochemical hub has historically been the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, with a stretch along the lower Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley” because of the impact of toxic emissions . Producers are expanding their footprint there with a slew of new projects, and proposals for more. They are also seeking to create a new plastics corridor in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, where fracking wells are rich in ethane.

Shell is building a $6 billion ethane cracking plant — a facility that turns ethane into ethylene, a building block for many kinds of plastic — in Monaca, Pennsylvania, 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It is expected to produce up 1.6 million tons of plastic annually after it opens in the early 2020s. It’s just the highest profile piece of what the industry hails as a “renaissance in U.S. plastics manufacturing,” whose output goes not only into packaging and single-use items such as cutlery, bottles, and bags, but also longer-lasting uses like construction materials and parts for cars and airplanes.

Since 2010, companies have invested more than $200 billion in 333 plastic and other chemical projects in the U.S., including expansions of existing facilities, new plants, and associated infrastructure such as pipelines, says the American Chemistry Council, an industry body. While some are already running or under construction, other projects await regulators’ approval.

“That’s why 2020 is so crucial. There are a lot of these facilities that are in the permitting process. We’re pretty close to it all being too late,” said Judith Enck, founder of Beyond Plastics and a former regional director for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “If even a quarter of these ethane cracking facilities are built, it’s locking us into a plastic future that is going to be hard to recover from.”

The impact goes beyond the waste problem that is the focus of public concern. Although plastic is often seen as a separate issue from climate change, both its production and afterlife are in fact major sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Global emissions linked to plastic — now just under 900 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually — could by 2030 reach 1.3 billion tons, as much as almost 300 coal-fired power plants, the Center for International Environmental Law found. If output grows as planned, plastic would use up between 10 and 13 percent of the carbon emissions allowable if warming is to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the center reported.

Those emissions come from nearly every stage of plastic’s life. First, there is the energy-intensive nature of oil and gas extraction. Then, ethane cracking requires enormous amounts of power, with a concomitantly large greenhouse gas footprint. The Shell plant has a permit allowing it to emit as much carbon dioxide annually as 480,000 cars.

An estimated 12 percent of all plastic is incinerated, releasing more greenhouse gases, as well as dangerous toxins, including dioxins and heavy metals. Industry is promoting an expansion of incineration in waste-to-electricity plants, which it describes as a source of renewable energy. What’s more, new research suggests plastic in the environment releases greenhouse gases as it degrades — a potentially vast and uncontrollable source of emissions.

The industry argues that plastic delivers many benefits, including environmental ones. It makes cars lighter and therefore more efficient, insulates homes, reduces waste by extending food’s life, and keeps medical supplies sanitary, among many other uses, said Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets at the American Chemistry Council.

“These things are going to continue to be important applications that protect our health and society going forward,” he said. “The key here is context. If you aren’t going to use plastics, what are you going to use instead?” Alternatives like steel, glass, and aluminum have negative impacts of their own, including carbon footprints that can be greater than plastic’s, he said. And while critics focus on disposable items that seem frivolous, much plastic is put to longer lasting use, he said.

Still, convenience — like consumers’ taste for eating and drinking on the go — is a big driver of plastic use in wealthy nations. And the developing world has become an important new market, too. In parts of Asia, international companies sell single portions of products such as shampoo, soap, and lotion to low-income consumers in individual packets. But while industry points to a lack of waste management infrastructure in poor countries as a cause of the ocean plastic problem, Americans use dozens of times more plastic per capita than Indians, five times more than Indonesians, and nearly three times as much as Chinese.

In addition to its climate impacts, petrochemical production can release airborne toxins such as 1,3-Butadiene, benzene, and toluene, causing cancer and other illnesses. Many plants are in poor areas, often communities of color, although as the fracking connection drives expansion into rural areas, poor white communities will likely be increasingly affected, too.

Fires and explosions are another problem. The day before Thanksgiving, a blaze at the Texas Petroleum Chemical plant in Port Neches set off two explosions, forcing 50,000 people to evacuate their homes. A week later, authorities issued another evacuation warning after air monitors detected high levels of carcinogenic 1,3 Butadiene.

It was the state’s fourth major petrochemical fire of 2019. “This is the nature of where we live, and the unfortunate side effect of all this production,” said Yvette Arellano, of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. “I think the general public has a misunderstanding of the full breadth of plastic impacts, especially regarding human health.”

Still, many welcome the jobs petrochemical facilities bring, particularly in areas hit by the loss of coal and other industry. Pennsylvania granted the Shell plant a tax break valued at $1.6 billion — one of the biggest in state history — and officials in Ohio and West Virginia are wooing firms eager to build more ethane crackers, storage facilities, and pipelines. IHS Markit, a data and analysis company, said the region could produce enough ethane to supply four more cracking plants like Shell’s.

One concern for the industry is the spread of laws aimed at reducing plastic’s proliferation. The European Union is banning single-use plastic items including cutlery, plates, straws, cups, and food containers starting in 2021. Eight U.S. states and a number of cities have outlawed plastic shopping bags, and so have 34 African countries.

“Despite those efforts, the demand for plastic is continuing to grow very rapidly” in both developing nations and richer ones, said Peter Levi, a lead author of the IEA’s 2018 report on petrochemicals’ future. Analysts predict annual demand growth of 4 percent. “The capacity additions are not there for no reason,” Levi said.

Annual production has already doubled since 2000, growth driven in part by plastic’s low cost and versatility. “It’s a bit of a dream material,” Levi said. “If you think about how much you can put in a plastic bag relative to how much it weighs, it’s remarkable. That means the substitutes for it have to compete at that level.”

In the case of plastic, though, demand doesn’t always come directly from consumers, but from companies in the food, beverage, consumer products, and other sectors who use it to package their goods.

The American Chemistry Council aims for all plastic to be recycled or recovered by 2040, although critics dismiss the goal as unrealistic greenwash. The EU, in addition to its ban on single-use items, will also require that plastic bottles contain 25 percent recycled content by 2025.

An IHS Markit report said recycling’s technical capabilities, logistics, and economics were inadequate to such ambitions. Plastic recycling is technically difficult, and China’s closing of its doors to foreign plastic waste in 2018 laid bare the inadequacy of global recycling systems, leaving many wealthy nations with mountains of waste.

Recycled material is unlikely to contribute more than 10 to 12 percent of future plastic production, said Robin Waters, IHS Markit’s director of plastics analysis and one of the report’s authors. And the kinds of items covered by bans like Europe’s only account for about 5 percent of plastic demand, he said.

The industry’s critics fear the expansion of supply is likely to guarantee additional plastic usage regardless of whether consumers want it. Once new ethane cracking plants are built, producers will want to keep them running to maximize revenue, Feit said.

“So then the next concern is that there will be an innovation in ways to get plastic on the market,” he said. “This is what we’ve seen [in the past] — more and more things come packaged in more and more plastic. There is a whack-a-mole issue.” Unless production slows, he added, “they’ll just find something else to wrap in plastic.”

---30---

THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/bioplastics-continue-to-blossomare-they.html

Space Photos of the Week: Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!

We're not sure when this star will go supernova, but one thing is certain: It'll be spectacular.
The star on the right shoulder of the Orion constellation is a red supergiant called Betelgeuse. (Don’t say it three times in a row or Michael Keaton will show up at your door.) This star, one of the brightest in the night sky, is easy to locate because Orion is such an iconic constellation. However, around 700 years ago Betelgeuse began to grow dimmer, and that light (or lack thereof) is only now reaching Earth. The star could be in one of its dimming cycles—Betelgeuse is classified as a variable star, a type known for growing brighter and darker—or it could be about to explode. And because scientists haven’t seen Betelgeuse dim this much in a very long time, they think the end might be near. And when it does go kablooey, which could happen next year or tens of thousands of years from now, it’s going to be about as bright as the full moon and visible even during the daytime.

Unlike our smooth, spherical sun, Betelgeuse is a churning hot blob of a star. And it’s one of the biggest stars we’ve ever found. It has a radius that’s 1,400 times larger than our sun. This photo, taken by the ALMA telescope in Chile, shows its irregular shape and was the first photo ever taken of the surface of a star.PHOTOGRAPH: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/E. O’GORMAN/P. KERVELLA

At only 8 million years old, Betelgeuse is burning bright, even against this tapestry of starlight. If one day Betelgeuse does go supernova, this image taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey would look very different. The star is already expelling material out into space, but the force of a supernova would fundamentally alter the star and its environment, forcing the star’s material far out into space and turning this photo from a peaceful image into a marvelous light show.PHOTOGRAPH: ESO

 

This image, taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, shows how huge and lopsided Betelgeuse really is. For scale, the very small red disk in the center is four and a half times the size of Earth’s orbit.PHOTOGRAPH: ESO/P. KERVELLA

This view of Betelgeuse shows the massive star and the curved arch of its bow shock (material that has been shot out from the star). See the wall to the left? That is a collection of dust likely connected to a separate magnetic field region. Scientists think that the curved bow-shock will collide with the dusty filament on the left in around 5,000 years, as the system moves through space, while the star itself will take another 12,500 years to cover that distance.PHOTOGRAPH: ESA

The constellation of Orion—the Hunter—is one of the most well known constellations. At the southern part of the constellation is the famous Orion Nebula, seen in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. At a mere 1,450 light years away, it is one of the closest star-forming regions in our “local” neighborhood.PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Beeline over here to look at more space photos.

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The star Betelguese is dimming... some fear it may go "super-nova" soon. It's the topic of discussion in this weeks #ScienceSays https://twitter.com/i/status/1217588364167217153

7 billion years: Scientists say Earth’s oldest solid material found

The stardust, formed five to seven billion years ago, came from a meteorite that fell to Earth 50 years ago in Australia, they said in a paper published in the journal PNAS.

Agence France-Presse Jan 14, 2020

Earth based on Nasa image.

(Getty Images/iStockphoto file photo for representation)

Researchers said Monday that new techniques have allowed them to identify the oldest solid material ever found on earth.

The stardust, formed five to seven billion years ago, came from a meteorite that fell to Earth 50 years ago in Australia, they said in a paper published in the journal PNAS.

It came down in 1969 in Murchison, Victoria state, and scientists from Chicago’s Field Museum have possessed a piece of it for five decades.

Philipp Heck, curator of meteorites at the museum, examined pre-solar grains, which are bits of stardust that become trapped in meteorites, making them time capsules of the period before the sun was born.


“They’re solid samples of stars, real stardust,” Heck said in a statement.

When the first stars died after two billion years of life they left behind the stardust, which formed into the block which fell to earth as the meteorite in Australia.

Although researchers first identified the grains in 1987 their age could not be determined.


But Heck and other colleagues recently used a new method to date these grains, which are microscopic in size. They are from silicon carbide, the first mineral formed when a star cools.

To separate the ancient grains from the relatively younger ones, scientists crushed fragments of the meteorite into a powder. Then they dissolved it in acid, which left only the pre-solar particles.

“It’s like burning down the haystack to find the needle,” says Heck.


When dust is in space it is exposed to cosmic rays which slowly change its composition. This allows researchers to date it.

A decade ago, only 20 grains from the meteorite were dated by a different method. Now, researchers have been able to determine the age of 40 grains, most of which are between 4.6 billion and 4.9 billion years old.

These ages correspond to the moment when the first stars began to break up, and since that type of star lived for two to 2.5 billion years, the stardust can be as old as seven billion years.

“These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy,” Heck said.

The new dating by this team confirms an astronomical theory which predicted a baby boom of stars before the formation of our sun, instead of a constant rhythm of star formation.

“We basically came to the conclusion that there must have been a time in our galaxy when more stars formed than normal, and at the end of their lives they become dust producing,” Heck told AFP.

The task now is to apply the same method on other meteorites.

But according to Heck, there are fewer than five known to be in collections and big enough to give up such secrets.

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Bioplastics continue to blossom—are they really better for the environment?

Replacing plastic looks hard, but alternatives to fossil fuel materials are on the rise.

TROY FARAH - 1/20/2020

Enlarge / Spilled garbage on the beach off the Black Sea in Bulgaria.
iStock / Getty Images

The English metallurgist Alexander Parkes never saw the widespread realization of his spectacular 19th-century invention, celluloid, the first plastic. While a revolutionary breakthrough, Parkesine, as it was called, was expensive and brittle. It was used in objects like buttons and combs, but ultimately quality control issues led Parkes’ company to bankruptcy in 1868 just 12 years after the discovery.

Parkesine, however, was also the first bioplastic—a plastic made from renewable plant material instead of fossil fuels. And today with the environmental impact of plastics increasingly on the public mind, bioplastics are making a big comeback. They’re proposed by some as the solution to beaches deluged with plastic and fish bellies stuffed with bottle caps. And perhaps bioplastics can replace oil-based polymers that commonly trash oceans with materials that can break down more easily and would protect a planet already smothered in these resilient substances

Bioplastic items already exist, of course, but whether they’re actually better for the environment or can truly compete with traditional plastics is complicated. Some bioplastics aren’t much better than fossil fuel-based polymers. And for the few that are less injurious to the planet, cost and social acceptance may stand in the way. Even if widespread adoption of bioplastics occurs down the line, it won’t be a quick or cheap fix. In the meantime, there is also some pollution caused by bioplastics themselves to consider. Even if bioplastics are often less damaging than the status quo, they aren’t a flawless solution.

So, could saving the planet simply come down to some design decisions? We may soon find out. Market demand for bioplastics is ballooning, with global industrial output predicted to reach 2.62 million tonnes annually by 2023, according to the Berlin-based trade association European Bioplastics. Currently, that’s only one percent of the 335 million tonnes of conventional plastics produced every year. But the European Commission, in its 2018 Circular Economy Action Plan, detailed bioplastics research as part of their strategy to drive investment in a climate-neutral economy.

“Sometimes we like to see the word ‘green,’ but we always should have appropriate awareness about the material we are dealing with,” says Federica Ruggero, an environmental engineer at the University of Florence, Italy. “It's a very good starting point in the production chain to have these new materials that can substitute plastics … but it's also important to consider the waste that comes from this material.”

To put it plainly: not all bioplastics are created equal. So which ones may be key to a genuinely “greener” future? In 2020, five candidates seem to be rising to the eco-friendly top.

Bioplastic basics

Bioplastics have come a long way since the days of Alexander Parkes. Today, these materials can be made from many renewable resources: cornstarch, beet sugar, kiwi skins, shrimp shells, wood pulp, even mangos and seaweed. They can function approximately the same as materials like vinyl or PET, the plastic most commonly used in drink bottles.

But if these polymers don’t actually have a smaller carbon footprint than plastics refined from petroleum, they may only be another example of greenwashing, a misleading marketing tactic more about image than outcomes. That’s one of the problems with the fact that there isn’t yet a universal definition of “bioplastic.”

“Bioplastic is basically anything that people like to call bioplastic,” says Dr. Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. The term can currently mean a material made from fossil fuels that can biodegrade, such as PCL, a plastic used in packaging and drug delivery.

Bioplastics can also be biobased and not biodegradable, like the PET bottles Coca-Cola made entirely from plants. But their end product is chemically identical to PET made from oil, so it can still take centuries to fully break down. In 2013, the Coca-Cola Company (considered by one environmental advocacy group as the “most polluting brand”) pledged to make all their bottles this way by 2020, but it later backpedaled to focus more on recycling, according to the The W all Street Journal. Greenpeace, the pro-environment non-profit, has said, “Plant bottles are not the answer.”

Additives mixed with conventional plastics to speed up biodegradation don’t seem to help either. Oxo-degradable products are standard plastics that are chemically treated to quickly fragment when exposed to sunlight and oxygen—but they don’t break down entirely. And because these plastics are otherwise no different from untreated versions, the microplastics they produce can still pose environmental hazards. The European Union is currently working to ban oxo-degradable plastics.

Generally, it appears the starting material is less important than what it’s turned into, making the ideal plastic both biobased and biodegradable. A few of these polymers do exist, but they disintegrate only under certain conditions.


Enlarge / A recycling factory worker in Thailand surveys the scale of plastics being disposed.
Pramote Polyamate / Getty Images

Polylactic Acid (PLA)

The most popular bioplastic is polylactic acid or PLA, which is typically made from fermented plant starches. PLA already sees widespread use, often as single-use cups labeled with something like “compostable in industrial facilities.”

FURTHER READING Making industrial chemistry green: catalysts, chemicals, and lifecycle

Therein lies the flaw: PLA only breaks down under ideal temperatures in industrial composts. In ocean water, where microorganism populations differ from landfills, PLA is as unlikely to fully disintegrate as a polyethylene plastic bag. Most home composts can’t manage PLA, and recycling it improperly can contaminate other salvageable plastics.
Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB)

In 1926, French researcher Maurice Lemoigne found that by stressing out Bacillus megaterium, a bacteria much larger than E. coli, the microbe would produce polyhydroxybutyrate, or PHB. This can be used to make a plastic that, when it breaks down, becomes nothing but CO2, water, and organic biomass.

Unfortunately, few things are made of PHB because it’s up to 100 times more expensive to produce than other plastics, and cost is not predicted to drop soon. To get around this, scientists have tried genetically modifying plants to produce PHB just like fermenting bacteria, but so far those experiments haven’t been able to lower the price by much.
Polybutylene Succinate (PBS)

PBS was yet another accidental discovery, this time in 1863 by the Portuguese professor Agostinho Vicente Lourenço, who wasn’t fully aware of what he uncovered when he fermented sugar and mixed it with toxic ethylene glycol. PBS was rediscovered in the 1930s and made into biodegradable plastic, but it was too brittle and largely forgotten for decades. It was investigated once more in 1993 by a Japanese company called Showa Denko that began producing 3,000 tonnes per year under the trademark Bionolle. Their improved recipe made a much stronger polymer than previous attempts.

PBS is a useful substitute for propylene, the second most widely used plastic, and can be used for bags and as a replacement for the long sheets of mulch film used in agriculture. However, its complex synthesis produces a large amount of greenhouse gases, which may not make it all that much better for the environment.

In 2016, Showa Denko ceased making PBS, saying they couldn’t compete with the “harsh market environment for biodegradable plastics.” A few other companies, such as Dow Chemical and Mitsubishi Chemical Corp, still make it, however, and the market is slowly growing.

Hemp

Kevin Tubbs, founder of the Hemp Plastic Company, says his customers are united by one thing: “They carry a purple-passion hatred for what's happening with fossil fuel-based polymer. They're tired of swimming in it, walking in it, they're just tired of that. There's got to be a better solution out there.”

Tubbs believes that solution is hemp, the non-intoxicating cousin to Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. Hemp is a fibrous plant that has been used for many centuries as a textile, but it only became fully legal again in the United States in December 2018. A lot of hemp is processed for CBD, a medicinal chemical swept up in the latest wellness trend, but the stalks and leaves that are left over can be processed into all kinds of plastics.

This year, Tubbs anticipates making about 50 million tons of hemp plastic pellets that can be used on regular plastics equipment, such as 3D printers or injection molds, which makes the switch for manufacturers a little easier. Some of the hemp plastics are like PLA, able to break down into vegetable material at the end of its life under the right conditions. Other varieties are a blend of one-third hemp, one-third petroleum plastics. But even a small amount is impactful, in Tubbs’ view.

“We believe that every bit of it we use is raw fossil fuel we didn't use,” Tubbs says. “We don't see it as the end-all solution at all but … If we only did 10 percent of the market, that'd be better than we've done as a country since plastic was invented,” citing the fact that less than nine percent of plastic is recycled in the US.
Enlarge / The complicated structure of lignin.
Wikimedia Commons

Lignin

Wurm says one of the most promising bioplastic candidates is lignin, a blackish biodegradable byproduct of paper manufacturing. Approximately 70 million tons of this stuff is pulped every year, but most of it is burned for fuel. It’s commonly said that “you can make anything you want out of lignin—except money,” as a 2017 review puts it before detailing how that is mostly no longer the case. These days lignin has become cost-effective for 3D printing or adhesives, and it can be plasticized or used to reinforce other bioplastics.

However, there is still a lack of investment in this market because it’s difficult or not worth the effort for companies to transition to using these materials. The cost of all bioplastics remains relatively high due to low oil prices.

“The biodegradable materials, regardless which kind of them [there] are, they cannot compete from the cost,” Wurm says, but adds that taxing less-environmentally friendly materials could help. “If the producers and the customers have to pay more for whatever gram of plastic, they might come up with lighter and more efficient ways of packaging things.”  

Enlarge / All of these Lego pieces will now be made of sugarcane-derived polyethylene.
Lego\

A better bioplastic future

Designing an effective bioplastic needs to focus not only on what the material is made from, but how it will die and how quickly, even if it doesn’t end up in the preferred environment. But studies on the different outcomes of bioplastics can vary based on waste management standards, as Ruggero has studied, so it’s not always known how effectively bioplastics will break down in various environments.

“It’s very difficult to say that bioplastics [are] degradable in every environment,” Ruggero says. “That's why there are many different standards for the assessment of biodegradation.” Unifying those standards is crucial for making bioplastics actually sustainable, as well as not confusing consumers who may not realize what to do with these plastics at the end of their life cycle.

“That’s the challenge,” Wurm adds. “To develop a material which biodegrades in a reasonable timeframe and also is good food for the microorganisms that they can really take it up into the organism and do something, make biomass of it, and not just [release] it out as CO2 or methane.”

In the meantime, both Wurm and Ruggero suggest that a cultural shift in consumption attitudes is more important than finding plastic alternatives. Less overall plastic consumption should be a central focus. Some research suggests bioplastics may actually incentivize littering because people may think it will dissipate in nature. Waste management systems may also be unequipped to handle some of these materials, so they wind up in landfills anyway. An overhaul of this system would require better separation policies, as the EU has proposed.

“The fact that it is ‘bio’ doesn't exempt us from a rigorous collection of product,” Ruggero says. “The best way to reduce the problem of plastics is not always to change the different kind of plastic, which doesn't exploit the fossil fuels or is biodegradable.”

If bioplastics do become the norm, the energy required to grow and process the plant material also needs to be taken into consideration. However, one statistic suggests that even if all plastics were to switch to biobased sources, it would only make up five percent of all agricultural space. Nonetheless, places like South America may be at risk of greater deforestation to grow sugarcane used in plastics, for example, to say nothing of emissions from harvesting, refining, or shipping the bioplastics.

FURTHER READING New Lego pieces: Still hard on your feet, but easier on the planet

Current polymer supply chains—from extraction to production to recycling and end of life— are tightly wound for max efficiency. Adding new materials to the mix would be a costly endeavor that many large corporations may not even consider without more interest from the public or government oversight first. But overall, research and development of bioplastics is a step in the right direction, Ruggero says. “It's good to try to have new materials that are more environmentally friendly and you know how they are defined, but it's also important to consider them into the production chain."

A smarter plastic is only part of the equation, in other words. But as consumer demand increases, prices drop, and new technology emerges, bioplastics—whatever the term may eventually indicate—are likely to become more pervasive, especially as companies like Lego, IKEA, McDonald’s, and Nestlé explore multi-million dollar investments in this space.

“Everything was biodegradable when polymer chemistry actually started in the 19th century,” Wurm says, until chemists discovered stronger, cheaper alternatives using petroleum. “But we go back with modern chemistry. I think this is a strength that we can use what we learned on the way.”

Troy Farah is an independent journalist from Southwest California. His reporting on drug policy and science has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, Discover Magazine, VICE and more. Previously at Ars, he shared the story of Dr. Aniru Conteh's battle against Lassa fever. He co-hosts the drug policy podcast Narcotica. Follow him on Twitter @filth_filler


MEANWHILE BIG OIL WANTS TO PRODUCE EVEN MORE PLASTICS
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