Sorry but why a polymer?
We have lots of natural hard fibers in the form of ground up pips and pits from fruits.
We don’t need to fix plastic, we need to replace plastic.
Baby oil already removes eyeliner, without being problematic for most users, and many things remove permanent marker, so what does this add?
Starch is a polymer. Cellulose is a polymer. Chitosan is a polymer, as is chitin. They’re just materials made of long chain, repeating units. One of the ways we can “fix plastic” is by making materials that have similar properties out of naturally-derived stuff that has nothing to do with fossil sources, like plants, arthropod shells, and fungi. We leave a LOT of possibilities just lying around in food production waste streams. This is exactly the same as “replacing plastic,” and the only real difference is which version writers like to use in their articles.
I mean that’s great and stuff but why are we manufacturing something to replace what we can just make from waste streams? I just don’t really get it because I’ve been using scrubs and soaps with natural pit as the exfoliant for like most of my life and microbeads were just a way to use waste plastic, so I don’t get the whole… any of this. We already have things that are fine. Why do we need to manufacture replacements when a pit grinder will do?
Let them find plastic replacements even if you think there’s enough peach pits for your face scrub. The important part is finding a way to replace plastic.
We need more alternatives to plastic, not the same number or fewer. Why wouldn’t we make sustainable materials from waste streams to replace the environmentally harmful ones that we banned ten years ago? Your preferences are one person’s preferences. You’re free to continue using apricot scrubs and baby oil, nobody’s trying to take them away from you. However, I would really like to find an environmentally sound, no-fossil-source, physical exfoliant with greater uniformity than the ones you like. (As an aside, milled pits, seeds, and shells (like nut shells) aren’t good exfoliants for human skin. They’re effective scrubbers, but the milling process leaves a lot of points and jagged edges in the resulting product which causes small tears in the skin barrier, reducing its ability to keep your insides safe from the outside.)
It kind of sounds like you’re neglecting the need for continuing innovation in materials science and engineering. We’re not just talking about replacing the horrific plastic microbeads in cosmetics, we’re talking about doing the work to develop entirely new materials that could potentially be used across a wide range of industries. Relying on pits and shells is definitely not the way forward here when we could be developing replacements for plastic wrap and styrofoam using stuff like food waste, fungi, and seaweeds.
We don’t need to fix plastic, we need to replace plastic.
Agreed!
The team tested how the spheres degraded in boiling water; after two hours more than 94 percent of the polymer had broken down into molecules related to sugars and amino acids.
This doesn’t really sound like the conditions we are going to need them to break down in…
