Comment on Prusament launches "PA11 Natural" filament- plant based PA nylon for mechanical parts
MxRemy@piefed.social 16 hours ago
WHOAAAA this is so exciting!! Nevermind the awesome mechanical properties, let’s hear it for the somewhat better environmental impacts!
Materials science folk will hopefully weigh in on this, but it’s my understanding that PA11 is more sustainably produced, but breaks down at a similar rate to other polyamides? I think I heard they did find some things that’ll eat it though.
Either way, an improvement is an improvement. Now if only Prusament would get into PHA 😈
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
I don’t think there’s any positive environmental impact tbh. Plastics made from petrol tend to be made from by-products of the gas industry and are cheap and readily available. Plastics made from bio-sources sound eco, but actively require land and water to produce and it’s not like they break down somehow better when released in the environment so are in fact net worse. Sounds like green washing to me.
CyberTheProtogen@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Okay, but it means when the world runs out of oil we’ll still have PA
That’s what I was thinking about saying too… They’re probably still mostly right, in the sense that this is a company and companies are almost always primarily concerned with their profit margin, not the environment. However like you said, most things now are made out of plastic, most plastics are made from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels need to be retired like yesterday.
CyberTheProtogen@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Yeah the very extraction of oil releases more methane than we even know, methane being one of the most influencing greenhouse gasses.