5 BEST Alternatives to Finally Replace Plastic

Video script and citations:

Get my achieve energy security with solar guide:

Follow-up podcast:

Join the Undecided Discord server:

👋 Support Undecided on Patreon!

⚙️ Gear & Products I Like

Visit my Energysage Portal (US):
Research solar panels and get quotes for free!

And find heat pump installers near you (US):

Or find community solar near you (US):

For a curated solar buying experience (Canada)
EnergyPal's free personalized quotes:

Tesla Referral Code:
Get 1,000 free supercharging miles
or a discount on Tesla Solar & Powerwalls

👉 Follow Me
Mastodon

X

Mastodon

Instagram

Facebook

Website

📺 YouTube Tools I Recommend
Audio file(s) provided by Epidemic Sound

TubeBuddy

VidIQ

I may earn a small commission for my endorsement or recommendation to products or services linked above, but I wouldn't put them here if I didn't like them. Your purchase helps support the channel and the videos I produce. Thank you.

00:00 - Intro
01:37 - PLA
03:39 - Mycelium
06:00 - Seaweed
08:31 - Hemp
10:50 - Shrimp

[jopo]

The fact that mycelium based products can't be used for food, leaves mushroom for improvement.

[kstricl]

There is a commercial hemp manufacturer just down the road from where I live in Canada. One of the industries they serve is the automotive industry; their product can be used to help create things like interior panels, package trays, etc reducing the amount of plastic needed or replacing heavier wood based materials. Hemp is also good for land stabilization, weed control, etc. They even sell growing mats for starting seeds or even as a dirt alternative for growing microgreens.

[darthdiculous]

The mycellium IS the fungal organism. The mushrooms you see on the surface are just temporary structures that the organism builds for reproduction.

[writerpatrick]

Another alternative that people forget is glass. It use to be that drinks were sold in glass containers that were returned to the store.
And using biodegradable plastics means they can sometimes break down if stored for a long time, ruining the contents and limiting the shelf life. It would also mean that things like cutlery made from it would have a best before date and could mean a lot of it gets thrown out without being used.

[Nblades]

Commercial Hemp. It's been bouncing around in my head for ages as a next entrepreneurial career. The plant is hardy, doesn't require lots of pesticides, is not water intensive to grow, is fast-growing, and the fiber has many uses from hemp paper to hemp plastics products. The biggest barrier, as you say, is lack of production because Hemp is still considered a "Controlled Substance" and that creates a lot of hoops to jump through. It's stigmatized. The seaweed packaging is very interesting as well as shrimp/lobster shell extraction. I run a longtime family owned seafood business that deals in live lobster and we have above-ground tanks for holding live lobster. I have often wondered about using those tanks to grow seaweed... All that being said, I still think Commercial Hemp is still the most sustainable of those ideas...

[Mars-evqg]

A few years ago, an engineering student in Thailand built a machine that made disposable food containers out of rice straw. Rice straw is an extremely common form of agricultural waste in Thailand until recently, nearly all of it was burned by the rice farmers. Now, burning some rice straw in the fields produces a great natural fertilizer and is also helpful for controlling weeds and crop pests without using dangerous and expensive chemicals. However, the amount of rice straw that Thai farmers produce far exceeds what they need to do this. There's plenty of extra that left over that farmers could be selling for a much needed source of extra income and be used for many applications from traditional Thai homes to biomass energy production. It's not just Thailand that could benefit from this technology. China, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Myanmar, Japan, and even Louisiana all produce lots of rice as well. If this technology can be adapted to work with wheat straw it could be a game changer for packaging in the west, Ukraine, and Russia. I would like to know how the rice straw packaging industry is going in Thailand.

[Vort_tm]

Huge caveat that I'm not a farmer/botanist/agriculture expert, but if we could replace a HUGE amount of the corn that we produce with Hemp, it seems like it'd be a very VERY worthwhile endeavor.

Corn is massively wasteful and overproduced because of ill-conceived corn subsidies. We straight up don't need all of it, and yet waste untold amounts of water and fertilizer producing it. So replacing a wasteful crop with one that not only cuts down on plastic production, but also can combat water and fertilizer waste seems like a very common sense thing to do.

[tacticalultimatum]

“In 2024 we will have flying cars”

“The app for my water bottle just crashed again”

[jhouck]

The company I work for was selling plant-based compostable plastic bottles back in the '90s, but ran into a major problem. The same quality that allowed the plastic to decompose in landfills also caused the bottles to break down on store shelves or in warehouses. I imagine the same problem exists for any plant-based plastic containers designed to decompose under certain conditions -- premature deterioration and a mess in aisle 3...

[Evan-rjxy]

We could also go back to using glass for a lot of things like bottles. Glass definitely isn't perfect, but it's more easily recyclable and it doesn't leech microplastics

[johnharder]

I recycle HDPE - 2 liter pop bottles myself
I bought the parts to turn empty pop bottle HDPE into filament to use in my 3D printer
That way I can print fishing lure bodies to make my own lures

[lonjohnson]

I have done research on PLA, wheat starch and chitosan in my career. I even made ice cream spoons for the University of Minnesota's milk shake booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Finding any biodegradable alternative to plastic is tough, because you want it to retain strength until the moment of disposal, then you want it to disappear nearly instantly. And before you ask, none of my work achieved these lofty goals, but I've seen some small progress.

And chitosan smells horrible when extruded.

[JerryFlowersIII]

I'm a big fan of the opportunities from Bamboo.
It's way strong along the grain, can be turned into fibers that can be used for clothes, grows extremely quick which captures a good amount of carbon in a short time.
Lots of possibilities.
I have shirts, pants, underwear, toilet paper, and more made out of bamboo as it's primary material.

[louisjov]

I've done a lot of commercial fishing, and creating some sort of biodegradable cordage for fishing nets would huge.

For several fisheries, those nets are trashed after 2-4 seasons anyway, so if there was a way to add an enzyme to a commercial composter for some sort of pla based cordage, that would eliminate literally tons of plastic pollution

[yoh]

Down here in New Zealand, we used to use plastic bags for everything, but a few years back we changed all of that to reusable fabric bags. You'll be surprised how quickly people can adapt to new things.

[DJTI]

9:04 From the windows to the walls. 🤣🤣🤣

[RealMisterDoge]

I needed this news. This is the heart of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”

[DonnyHooterHoot]

I worked with an engineer who had a plastic recycle business. He told me that it's easy to recycle but they could not make a profit at it. Cool viddy!

[Krishna-utjl]

I agree those are some fantastic options currently in the works. As someone who works their day job finding enzymes and engineering microorganisms to convert corn-derived glucose to PLA and other bioplastics, people just underestimate the scale and cost parity required to compete with petrochemical-derived plastics. Most of these research groups/startups have excellent ideas and decent products, but getting funding for scale up is an uphill task. The price of oil largely dictates their feasibility and commercial success. With heavy political and societal headwinds (especially in US), lack of oil price controls is the key bottleneck for most if not all of these technologies to really be successful. Let's hope Europe and soon everywhere succeed with these alternatives and we make an actual dent in overall plastic usage.

[yay-cat]

I’ve worked on some projects that use hemp in construction and because it’s lightweight its not great at acoustics (sound insulation follows a mass law). The stuff seems kinda crumbly and a bit tricky to work with but the architects take lessons learned from each project