Do you know what day it is?
If I hadn't watched the hot search, I wouldn't know, it turns out that April 22 is Earth Day. This is a worldwide environmental protection activity, and it is also a United Nations resolution.
On Earth Day, the Voice of China, a subsidiary of China Central Radio, shared a piece of knowledge about environmental protection.
The Voice of China said that the emergence of plastic bags was originally intended to replace paper bags and allow people to cut down fewer trees. It's just that I didn't expect that plastic is so versatile, and when you need it to be "weak", it will break as soon as you pull it. When you need it to be "rigid", it's stiffer than steel. As long as Party A can make a request, regardless of color and shape, it can do it. In addition, its cost is lower than that of other materials, its performance is stable, and it is not afraid of acid or alkali, so it has soon become a "sweet spot" in all walks of life.
However, plastic also brings a great negative effect, a plastic bag in the natural environment, it takes 20 years to decompose. Disposable coffee cups with plastic film take 30 years to decompose. Plastic straws, plastic bottles, and some diapers take hundreds of years to decompose.
So how to deal with the new problems that plastic brings to mankind?
The answer given by the scientific community is plastic degradation. In a general sense, plastic degradation mainly turns the long chain of plastic molecules into many short chains. At present, biodegradation is mainly divided into biodegradation, photodegradation and chemical degradation.
Voice of China takes polylactic acid (PLA) as an example, its main ingredient is lactide extracted from plant sugars, which is relatively easy to degrade.
Does that mean that PLA can be degraded anytime and anywhere? No, PLA degradation needs to be sorted and recycled and centrally processed through industrial composting. Some studies have found that PLA bags have not been decomposed after soaking in seawater for 428 days. In addition, at 20°C, some PLA products can be completely degraded after being stacked in the garbage dump for hundreds of years. As a result, scientists are also actively exploring new degradable materials, enzymes that can break down plastic, or microbes that eat ocean plastic.
The above content is presented by Voice of China in the form of video, and it has also achieved a certain scientific popularization effect.
However, it is not exhaustive, and I would like to make some additions to the field of plastic degradation, hoping that everyone can have more understanding of the latest progress in plastic degradation.
In fact, the main mainstream degradable materials are divided into PLA and PBAT. They are all degraded in the traditional sense by turning the long chain in the plastic molecule into a short chain.
Now that we have a solution for degradation, why doesn't the state vigorously promote it?
The Voice of China also explained in the video that some PLAs take hundreds of years to degrade at 20°C in the garbage dump. To put it bluntly, this degradation efficiency is completely unable to keep up with the speed at which plastic waste is generated in modern society. The end result is that we will live in a mountain of garbage.
The Voice of China only said the difficulty of PLA degradation, but did not say the many shortcomings of PLA.
Disadvantage 1: The production cost is more than 70% higher. Compared with plastic products, the production cost of PLA is more than 70% higher, which also makes the cost of retail terminal use rise. Therefore, in many places, consumers need to pay extra money for degradable plastic bags when they use them. For consumers, just because a few cents of a bag may make them choose another supermarket where the bag does not cost money.
Disadvantage 2: Lack of mechanical properties. Although the plastic bag made of PLA is a conceptual degradable plastic, it has a much worse load-bearing capacity than ordinary plastic bags.
Disadvantage three: short shelf life. The owner of a plastic factory told me that he had produced a batch of PLA spoons for takeaway, but after only 6 months, the spoons became so brittle that they had to break at the slightest touch. This is not an ideal product for manufacturers or takeaway merchants.
Disadvantage 4: High difficulty in production. PLA cannot be directly integrated with plastic factories, and additional investment is required to build factories for mass production, which is too costly for plastic companies to try and error.
Disadvantage 5: High degradation cost. PLA takes hundreds of years to decompose in a 20°C garbage dump, why can it be called degradable? It is not much different from the ordinary plastic degradation cycle? The reason is that PLA can be degraded in a specific device, but the degradation cost is very high, the degradation cost per ton needs tens of thousands of yuan, and the high cost makes all landfills will not buy special equipment to deal with it, after all, no one pays for such a high cost.
Disadvantage 6: Produce a large amount of microplastics. Since the degradation principle is still the traditional degradation idea, it will produce a large number of microplastics, and microplastics entering the human body may cause many kinds of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and even induce cancer, leukemia, etc.
So is there a solution with low production cost, low degradation cost, long shelf life, good mechanical properties, and no microplastics?
Maybe the Voice of China doesn't know that this problem has been overcome by a new material company in Changzhou, Jiangsu.
The company's research team bypassed the traditional decomposition method of changing long chains to short chains, and used an anaerobic biodegradation (ABT) method to decompose the finished products in landfills through the enzymes in the environment, and finally decomposed into inorganic salts, sugars, alcohols and other products, avoiding the production of microplastics and reducing the harm to the human body.
What's more, cooperating with it does not require additional investment in plastic factories to build factories, and the production cost is much lower.
As far as I know, this company has completed a round of financing, is now expanding the plant, and has established cooperation with a number of domestic leading chemical companies, and the next is the era of the rise of China's degradable technology, praise for China's scientific research team!
This is the best era, but also the worst era, with capital thinking and new business model integration, the whole world is your stage!
In the world of new business, there is no eliminated industry, only the subverted out of the enterprise, and now all business competition will focus on "model innovation and capital operation".
A company or a boss, if there is a shortage of innovation ability and capital thinking, is destined to lose in advance.
Remember: without innovation, how can there be imagination, without imagination, how can there be competitiveness, if you want to break through, you must subvert the original business model, reconstruct a new business model!