Study shows potential for Earth-friendly plastic replacement
April 09, 2019
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The quest to keep plastic out of landfills and simultaneously satisfy the needs of the food industry is filled with obstacles.
A biodegradable replacement for petroleum-based products has to meet all sorts of standards and, so far, attempts at viable replacements from renewable sources have faced limited success due to processing and economic constraints. Among the obstacles, products to date have been too brittle for food packaging.
But new research from The Ohio State University has shown that combining natural rubber with bioplastic in a novel way results in a much stronger replacement for plastic, one that is already capturing the interest of companies looking to shrink their environmental footprints.
Almost all plastics - about 90 percent - are petroleum-based and are not biodegradable, a major environmental concern.
More:
https://www.brightsurf.com/news/article/040919480466/study-shows-potential-for-earth-friendly-plastic-replacement.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
History
The South American rubber tree grew only in the Amazon rainforest, and increasing demand and the discovery of the vulcanization procedure in 1839 led to the rubber boom in that region, enriching the cities of Belém, Santarém, Manaus and Iquitos, Peru, of 1840 to 1913. In Brazil, the initial name of the plant was pará rubber tree. The name of the tree derives from Grão-Pará and Rio Negro or only Grão-Pará (Great-Pará), the largest Brazilian province until 1850, the capital of which is Belém, where most of the fluid, also called latex, was extracted and exported. In Peru, in addition to the hispanic-speaking countries of the Amazon region, the name given was árbol del caucho, with the fluid extracted called caucho. These trees were used to obtain rubber by the natives who inhabited its geographical distribution. The Olmec people of Mesoamerica extracted and produced similar forms of primitive rubber from analogous latex-producing trees such as Castilla elastica as early as 3,600 years ago. The rubber was used, among other things, to make the balls used in the Mesoamerican ballgame.[6] Early attempts were made in 1873 to grow H. brasilensis outside Brazil. After some effort, 12 seedlings were germinated at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. These were sent to India for cultivation, but died. A second attempt was then made, some 70,000 seeds being smuggled to Kew in 1875, by Henry Wickham, in the service of the British Empire.[7]:55[8][9] About four percent of these germinated, and in 1876, about 2,000 seedlings were sent, in Wardian cases, to Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and 22 were sent to the Botanic Gardens in Singapore. Once established outside its native country, rubber was extensively propagated in the British colonies. Rubber trees were brought to the botanical gardens at Buitenzorg, Java, in 1883.[10] By 1898, a rubber plantation had been established in Malaya, with imported Chinese field workers being the dominant work force in rubber production in the early 20th-century.[11] Today, most rubber tree plantations are in South and Southeast Asia, the top rubber producing countries in 2011 being Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Vietnam.[12]
The cultivation of the tree in South America (Amazon) ended early in the 20th century because of blight.[3] The blight, called South American leaf blight, is caused by the ascomycetes, Microcyclus ulei[13] or Pseudocercospora ulei.[14]
. . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hevea_brasiliensis
Heard about Brazil because of the country's vicious assassinations of activists who tried to fight to protect the plantation workers who were wildly mistreated. I actually didn't know that the product collapsed in Brazil by now.
Here is the man made more famous through his assassination, unfortunately:
Chico Mendes
Francisco Alves Mendes Filho,[1] better known as Chico Mendes (December 15, 1944 – December 22, 1988), was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist. He fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest, and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and indigenous peoples. He was assassinated by a rancher on December 22, 1988. The Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation of Biodiversity (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade), a body under the jurisdiction of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, is named in his honor.
Chico Mendes and his wife,
Ilsamar Mendes, at their
home in Xapuri in 1988
. . .
—?Chico Mendes
To save the rainforest, Chico Mendes and the rubber workers union asked the government to set up reserves as they wanted people to use the forest without damaging it. They also used a very effective technique they called the 'empate' where rubber tappers blocked the way into rubber reserves, preventing their destruction.[7] [8]
The Rubber Tappers' Union was created in 1975 in the nearby town of Brasileia, with Wilson Pinheiro elected as president and Mendes as its secretary.[7][9]
Mendes also played a central role in the creation of the National Council of Rubber Tappers in the mid-1980s.[10] Mendes' group also had strong ties with the National Campaign for the Defence and Development of the Amazon, and helped locally organize Workers' Party support.[11]
When the first meeting of this new union was held in 1985, in the capital Brasilia, rubber tappers from all over the country came. The discussion expanded from the threats to their own livelihoods to the larger issues of deforestation, road paving, and cattle ranching. The meeting also had the effect of catching the attention of the international environmentalist movement, and highlighting their plight to a larger audience. The group embraced a larger alliance with environmentalism, rather than strict Marxism, in spite of the bourgeois associations of the former.[12] Another result of these discussions was the coining of the concept and the term "extractive reserves".[13] In November of that year, Adrian Cowell, an English filmmaker, filmed much of the proceedings of this meeting as part of a documentary he was making about Mendes, which aired in 1990.[14]
Mendes believed that relying on rubber tapping alone was not sustainable, and that the seringueiros needed to develop more holistic, cooperative systems that used a variety of forest products, such as nuts, fruit, oil, and fibers; and that they needed to focus on building strong communities with quality education for their children.[15]
. . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chico_Mendes
