Looks cool. I wonder how it compares to classic plant fibres like hemp.
Also I think "vegan" is a bad tag to add, even if it was done by the journo. I don't want to open that can of soy worm-substitute, but the point of this doesn't seem to be avoiding the use of spiders or anything like that, rather it's just an efficient way to grow a cool material that bears similarities to spider silk.
Yeah, "artificial spider silk" would be better. "Vegan" underlines that no animals are involved in its production, but it should be pretty obvious that using real spider silk for such applications would be prohibitively expensive...
This being said, the word "vegan" is not properly used here, causing confusion. "Vegan" relates to diets and food in general according to the dictionary. The author probably simply meant "plant based" and erroneously used "vegan" instead. Unless they meant it's a dish in which case... yeah, I guess.
I'm inclined to lean towards reconfigurations of simple materials (cellulose in this case) rather than high tech solutions, for the sake of simple and scalable production and lower likelihood of simply laundering the ecological impact from the finished product to the manufacturing process.
That's just a rough heuristic though, I don't know whether this or cellulose-based plastic replacements would be definitively better.
> I'm inclined to lean towards reconfigurations of simple materials ...
This is just a reconfiguration of soy protein isolate. They dispersed it in an acetic acid solution, applied heat and used an ultrasonic homogenizer, then used glycerol as a plasticizer and dried it out. I was expecting something more exotic, but this doesn't seem difficult to scale.
Interesting! But when a material is described as "home-compostable", I immediately have to ask myself what stops it from composting while still being used as packaging? OTOH, if they make it stable enough to have a long useful shelf-life, they have the opposite problem, that it takes years to break down when in the environment. Ok, still better than most plastics...
Likewise, I find that home composting claims for most man made materials are claptrap as they require industrial operations with grind prep and high heat before they actually break down. Think mechanical digestors, not compost piles.
The actual paper also doesn't test the biodegradability of material.
That said, they don't use anything exotic. It's just soy protein, acetic acid, water and glycerol. It would be interesting to see how long it would last in a compost pile, but I wouldn't be surprised if it broke down fairly rapidly.
Also I think "vegan" is a bad tag to add, even if it was done by the journo. I don't want to open that can of soy worm-substitute, but the point of this doesn't seem to be avoiding the use of spiders or anything like that, rather it's just an efficient way to grow a cool material that bears similarities to spider silk.