

Liquid Wood Is Plastic of Tomorrow, Say Scientists  - mhb
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3938912,00.html?maca=en-tagesschau_englisch-335-rdf-mp

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anuraggoel
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.

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dominik
True, but cost depends on scale. And economies of scale can quickly make the
expensive cheap.

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anuraggoel
Cost goes down with scale only when scaling is cheap, but the article also
does not mention the production technology's ability to scale cheaply.

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noonespecial
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.

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johngunderman
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?

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anamax
Burning wood gives off harmful gases (other than CO and CO2 and H2O).

Never confuse "natural" with healthy. Arsenic (for example) is natural. So is
smallpox.

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johngunderman
Very true. However, burning wood is certainly less polluting than burning
plastic.

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jjs
Someone needs to figure out how to mass-produce this stuff from algae farms
and sell it as "LiqWood"... :P

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Silentio
So, when is tomorrow?

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electromagnetic
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.

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likpok
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.

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electromagnetic
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.

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johngunderman
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.

