[beaconstudios]

we already have substitutes for these kinds of plastics - like natureflex, which is made of wood pulp (found out about this from the tea brand I drink - https://www.teapigs.co.uk/pages/sustainability-values#plasti...).

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.

[papercrane]

> 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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23813-6

[wil421]

Last time I looked at organic milk containers I noticed even the brands with paper cartons still sprayed a plastic liner onto the cellulose.

Edit: Looks like your tea brand is actually plastic free.