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WCome back to Current Climate. Concerns about the health and environmental harms of petroleum-based plastic, particularly for its use in food, beverage and consumer product packaging, continue to grow and yet there is no sustainable, less harmful material to replace it. That could change.
In a new scientific studyA group of US researchers has discovered that an alternative material derived from hemp has malleability and stretchability that is equivalent to or superior to conventional plastic and remains durable even when in contact with boiling water. These properties make it an attractive alternative to plastic used for packaging. And unlike petroleum-based plastic, there is no evidence of toxicity in soil or water, as hemp-based plastic, which is made from low-grade CBD oil, breaks down, according to Gregory Sotzing, one of the study’s authors and a professor of chemistry at the University of Connecticut.
Clinical studies of CBD oils, such as for drugs to treat children with epilepsy, show no harmful environmental effects, and “when this plastic degrades, it will degrade like hemp CBD,” he said. “CBD will oxidize over time and degrade naturally in the soil.”
Another positive over conventional plastic: recyclability. While very little plastic packaging is recycled, a hemp-based version could be fully reused. “Because this plastic is made from CBD, you could recycle it and sell it, turning it back into CBD oil,” Sojing said. “You could take this thing and depolymerize it, remember the CBD, and probably do it cheaper than extracting it directly from a plant. So there’s added value.”
However, scaling up this new plastic won’t happen anytime soon because it will require much more production of industrial hemp to make it more cost-competitive. Sotzing, who created a startup called PolyC Plastics and Composites to push for commercial applications of the research, expects the first market for hemp-based plastic to be for things like medical implants, which require more expensive, highly durable specialty materials.
“It would start with a higher quality market than plastic bottles. This is a brand new material,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone else before has demonstrated a high-temperature polymer that is a thermoplastic natural resource that also comes from a non-food source.”
The big read
Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Advanced Solar Fuels Boost South Korea’s Jusung Engineering, Making New Billionaire
Shares of Jusung Engineering, a little-known South Korean industrial equipment maker, have risen about 80% since mid-April on reports that it stands to benefit if China curbs exports of solar manufacturing equipment. The stock boom made Hwang Chul-joo, the company’s founder, chairman and chief executive, a billionaire.
With a 26% stake, Hwang, 66, is the largest shareholder in Jusung Engineering, which is listed on South Korea’s tech-rich Kosdaq exchange. His wife, Kim Jae-ran, and son, Eun-seok, hold an additional combined stake of just over 4%. Forbes estimates the net worth of Hwang and his family at $1.1 billion.
Based in the city of Gwangju in Gyeonggi Province near Seoul, Jusung Engineering manufactures equipment for the mass production of semiconductors, solar cells and advanced digital displays. Its equipment specializes in thin-film deposition, which is the process of coating thin-film (atomic-level) layers of chemicals on a surface, such as a silicon wafer or glass substrate. The thin layers of chemicals help build the electrical circuits inside the microchips and maximize light absorption in the solar panels (raw silicon reflects little sunlight).
Read more here
Hot topic
Boyen Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, on adding new plastic litter ‘interceptors’ to Southern California waterways and using technology to combat the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
You are adding two additional garbage interceptor barges to the Los Angeles area. These are quite specialized machines. How much do they cost?
Every river is unique, so it varies. Initial capex per river averages around $300,000. The rivers here are longer than average. The flow rate is very high, so it requires a very heavy-duty type. These will be significantly higher costs, but on average, worldwide, it’s like 300,000 initial investment per river. And then on average, about $100,000 to operate. The numbers in the US, in Los Angeles, are higher again.
see. Your partners in Southern California reported that the cost of this program was $5 million or $6 million.
Doing things here is also a bit more expensive than in places like Indonesia. The labor cost is also higher and it is the heaviest type of interceptor we have to deploy. Also, you have all the studies that need to be done and lots of man-hours associated with licensing. … That probably costs more than the actual hardware.
It is not a lack of will on the part of local government. It’s just the complexity of the system.
Ocean Cleanup started by focusing on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but is now also developing interceptors to catch plastic trash before it reaches the ocean. How do you divide these efforts?
We work on both and they are both essential. You can’t solve this without doing one or the other. The thing is, we’re running things slightly more sequentially than we used to, just because in rivers, we’re really ready to scale, the technology is mature.
So for rivers, it’s all about scaling. In the Pacific, we still need two or three years of R&D before we can really scale there.
The Patch is not homogeneous, so you basically get patches within the Patch where you could take a boat through that water. There will be times when you see a lot of trash around you, and times when you don’t see trash around you… and your meter density is relatively low. Be able to effectively locate dense hotspots – that’s where the focus is now. So we use long-range drones.
We use artificial intelligence, a lot of models, a lot of drones to do it in a smart way. Essentially, we want to go from a brute-force approach to a more surgical approach, which should reduce the cost, the number of systems we need, as well as the duration.
Will autonomous cleaning vessels eventually be exploited?
Yes, some will be autonomous. We’ll have a fleet out there, and they’ll basically operate like a swarm. They would share data with each other about where the plastic is, and then you would use drones, which are programmed to fly through patterns to detect. It’s like a principle that finds fish.
What else are we reading?
Fervo Energy’s geothermal champion shares soar in trading debut (Wall Street Journal)
“So much worse than I thought.” Utah’s ‘hyperscale’ data center could create a massive heat island near the Great Salt Lake (Salt Lake Tribune)
Trump singled out some of the country’s biggest polluters from the air quality rules. All it took was an email (ProPublica)
Soundtrack of the sea: Divers use underwater speakers to help dying coral reefs (The Guardian)
