Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)

zkmon

Some great soul said something like "God has given everything to meet your need, not your greed". As long as the greed continues to increase exponentially, no amount of innovation is going to support it. The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on. Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.

rajnathani

Why is this on the front page? It just seems like a meta-analysis on biofuels.

wewewedxfgdf

I vaguely recall reading that biofuels have been debunked as being insanely inefficient as a fuel source and consume land that would be better used to grow food.

spiclk

Petroleum is plant-based (just to nitpick).

boustrophedon

I recently learned that nylon 11 (sometimes aka PA11) is made from castor oil, which (I also learned) is just the vegetable oil extracted from the castor bean.

antonyragleap

Interesting overview. I’m curious how these plant-based replacements hold up on durability and moisture resistance long-term vs petroleum plastics, especially for packaging and outdoor use.

pfdietz

In a post-fossil fuel age, the problem becomes obtaining carbon atoms in usable forms. Biomass (or, waste streams ultimately derived from biomass) would seem to be a good source for this, although not in quantities sufficient to replace the fossil fuels being burned for energy. The amount of carbon needed for chemicals and materials is much smaller. This doesn't mean the biomass would be directly used; rather it could be converted to chemical feedstocks that could be purified just as petroleum and natural gas are fractionated, reformed, and purified to make such things. The outputs ultimately obtained might be little different from today's fossil fuel-based chemicals and materials.