Developed by researchers from China's Northeast Forestry University, the bamboo plastic can biodegrade in soil within 50 days and offers a pathway towards sustainable plastic alternatives.
Even 50 days is relatively fine if it’s cheap enough to replace saran wrap for food products
well we already have that
and that’s 50 days total, so those big commercial rolls of plastic wrap are much harder because they’re now perishable too: you can’t just stock a warehouse up
The bioplastic is a rigid material with high tensile strength a bit higher than conventional rigid plastics
Made from acidic solvents to create a gel consisting of cellulose
Can be closed loop recycled by redissolving with the same solvent
Depends on soil microbials to break down the cellulose within 50 days
Cost analysis presented it at 2.3k usd per ton, with the cheapest plastic (HIPS) at 1.3k/t and the most expensive (PLA) at 2.6k/t. Though the cost analysis didn’t show all the plastics it used for material comparison.
You can basically think of it as a fancy wood structure, since it’s primarily cellulose.
Isn’t cellophane a flexible plastic? This one is more comparable to hard plastics, which was my mistake since my initial assumption before actually reading the research paper was that it’s meant to replace things like plastic bags
well we already have that
and that’s 50 days total, so those big commercial rolls of plastic wrap are much harder because they’re now perishable too: you can’t just stock a warehouse up
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63904-2
I went and read the paper, but the TLDR is:
You can basically think of it as a fancy wood structure, since it’s primarily cellulose.
Cellophane is almost 100 years old.
Isn’t cellophane a flexible plastic? This one is more comparable to hard plastics, which was my mistake since my initial assumption before actually reading the research paper was that it’s meant to replace things like plastic bags