This is encouraging, but I couldn't find the word 'cost' anywhere in the article. Any technology that claims to replace an existing commodity like plastic needs to pass what Vinod Khosla calls the 'Chindia test': if it's not cheap enough to be commercially viable in China and India, it's not going to be successful.
Nor does it mention the actual energy required to make the stuff. It very well may require more fossil fuels in energy to make it than using the same oil directly in plastic.
That can't be true, there are people(like me) who are willing to buy this even if its 10-20 times the price of plastic. For one it would be bio-degradable, and you wouldn't worry as much keeping this stuff around children because this is natural material.
Sure there are extremely poor people who might not be able to afford the extra money, but anybody concerned with the environment and their health would have sufficient reason to use this material. Another argument is that since plastic is so cheap, even if this liquid wood is many times the price of plastic it can still be affordable.
Maybe it wasn't clear, but /more cost effective than plastic/ - which is all that's required.
Regardless, if this material is at all viable, like the other comment says the cost will go down anyway as production is further refined and volume scales up.
The ideal example of price to volume in manufacturing product is probably portland cement, it's produced in astronomical quantities and is literally cheaper than dirt.
I misunderstood your comment. Original comment deleted! I agree that it needs to be cheaper than plastic (and this thing might be). All I'm saying is that any articles talking about alternatives should attempt to discuss economics of production as well.
Due to the fact that this new plastic is made out of wood, I am curious to what extent it behaves as wood when burned. Will it melt, or will it go straight to combustion. In the case that it does burn, will it burn as clean as wood, or does it generate harmful gasses?
Oh yay, no more oil drilling... set deforestation to 400%!!! /sarcasm
Yes we're not going to belch out more CO2 by harvesting oil. However, we don't grow enough trees to begin with and exponentially increasing the demand for lumber will be a disaster for preventing illegal logging.
I mean global warming will kill off maybe a thousand or so species, where as completely removing the Amazon rainforest will probably kill a million species.
I'm sick of all this pro-green BS that 'saves the planet' whilst killing everything on it. I mean Wind Turbines supposedly reduce carbon emissions, however they're killing thousands of birds and bats which has a drastic effect on the food chain. Bats eat thousands of mosquitoes a day, imagine what'll happen to the rates of malaria and west nile if we expand wind power and extinct all the bats. Not only that but they're killing already endangered animals like the Albatross.
The ecological effect of wind turbines could be far worse than pumping CO2 into our atmosphere ever could be. It's possible for many species to adapt to environmental change, especially birds due to their migratory instincts, however bird's can't adapt to not get hit by rotating blades.
If this turns out to be cheap or not, I think there'll be drastic damage to the world ecology - especially in 3rd world countries.
Basically /every/ large-scale industry causes environmental harm. The question is to what extent.
The issue with climate change is that this is one of the things we think may have caused mass extinctions. So your number seems to be off by a few orders of magnitude.
The rainforest houses 80% of all the worlds species, how can deforestation not cause more ecological harm than global warming? I don't think my figures are off at all. over 20 million species at risk is accurate and deforestation will make easily 90% of them endangered because only a small amount thrive in different environments.
Not to mention, cutting down rainforests causes global warming to begin with so what's the point of reducing oil consumption if we're going to cause global warming by hacking down trees and thus reducing the worlds ability to remove CO2 and yes rainforests are responsible for 28% of all the worlds oxygen recycling.
Only around 20% of the worlds wood is harvested from sustainable forests, which means for this not to harm the environment sustainable forest use would have to be ramped up five-fold to meet present consumption. Not to mention the estimated demand for lumber is still increasing, meaning it would take around 6-7 times the present sustainable forests to cope with global demand by around 2020. Increasing demand through 'wood plastics' would make this even worse.
The product they are using to make this plastic is a byproduct of making paper. This does not necessarily mean more deforestation, just that paper-making will now generate other useful products.
