125: Sea(weed) What We Did? The Future of Plastic

Show Notes

https://youtu.be/mIKkdCHmQZU

Matt and Sean discuss the potential of seaweed as a plastic replacement.

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, “Why Seaweed Could Be The Future Of Plastic”: https://youtu.be/901aQFR6Ft0?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi5LVxHfWfQE6-Y_HnK-sgXS

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

On today's episode, I'm still to be determined. We're gonna talk about pulling our water bottles outta the ocean. And I don't mean the used water bottles. I mean the brand new ones. Hey, everybody is usual. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci-fi and I write some books for kids and I'm inquisitive about things tech and luckily.

As you all know, I'm sure you wouldn't be tuning in. If you didn't know this already with me is my brother, Matt and Matt is the Matt from undecided with Matt Farrell. Matt, how you doing today? I'm pretty

good. How about you? Happy July 4th. Happy July 4th

to you as well today, we're gonna be talking about why seaweed could be the future of plastic.

This is Matt's episode from June 28th, 2022. Before we get into that, I wanted to share a comment on our last episode. Quick, shout out to everybody who's listening. Thank you so much. We've just passed the 4,000 listener mark on this little effort of just a follow up to Matt's main channel. And we appreciate the support.

4,000 listeners is not nothing and on Matt's main channel. He's 4,000 away from a million. So this, this is the little engine that could that, uh, yeah. Matt built. So congratulations to you, Matt. I'm very proud of you as your older brother to see what you've built out of. Literally nothing. There was no YouTube channel until you said, I'm gonna make this YouTube channel.

And here we go. So congratulations to you. As a quick reminder, all of you, people who are subscribing are supporting us. All of you, people who are listening are supporting us and all of you, people who leave comments are supporting us, you can also support us directly by going to still T B d.fm and click on the, become a supporter button there.

But if you're not able to do that, just leaving a comment like this one from Dave Yesi, from our last episode, And this was the episode where we talked about lasers drilling to the center of the earth, because that sounds like a great idea. and Dave rode in with this comment. So with geo and solar and wind, is it possible that it could provide all of our energy needs without the need for battery storage?

That would be really cool. Matt. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to weigh in on that. My knee jerk reaction. Matt's gonna say no, that we will need batteries. Yeah,

no, we need energy storage. Yeah. I don't, I don't care how you slice it. What kind of energy storage you're talking about? Energy storage unlocks pretty much everything.

So if you're talking about hydro, if you're talking about wind, like any energy that we're generating, that we don't need at that time to be able to store it away to use later is going to help the entire system. No matter what you're talking about. So my answer is no, we, we absolutely need energy.

And it to follow up on that you are also neutral on what mode production and what mode of storage you.

Yeah. I think if I were to put words into your mouth, it would be my brother's a great guy, but if I was to put more words into your mouth, it would be, use the right tool for the right. So if you have a wind turbine and you use an iron based battery system and that meets your needs more power to you, go for it.

And if you have an alternate scenario where, well, it's not windy enough where you are, you need geothermal.

Yep. Yeah. So use, use the right tool for the right job based on where you are and what your needs are. It's. If it's a battery or fly wheels or gravity, energy storage or whatever, it's like, it doesn't matter.

It's like it's, there's so many options out there. Right? Pick the setup that works for you. That's the bottom line.

And that's not to say that there aren't places where Dave's comment might make sense where you just have an excess of power being generated for your needs. And those are the places where maybe that energy is going back into the grid.

You might have an energy production, solar panels, let's say on your home. It doesn't mean you have to have a battery on your home. If your solar panels are going to be going back into the grid and you're comfortable with that, that's fine too. Correct. Exactly. Thank you for the comment, Dave. That was a welcome conversation starter for following up on last week's episode.

But now onto this week's episode where we're gonna be talking about seaweed as a potential source of plastic, and this one had some very interesting comments on it. Like this one from David BEWA who wrote a couple of questions, came to mind. As I watched the video. At one point, you mentioned seaweed, plastic film being more expensive at up to 3,600 a ton.

For those of us not in the know, it would be nice to know the cost of traditional plastic. For comparison. I

don't have that on hand , but it is more expensive. I can't remember what the exact number was, but I think it was something like 20% more expensive. I think that's what it, but don't, don't quote me on that.

I'd have to look it up. I don't have my notes in handy in

front.

That would be an interesting detail to be able to follow up with next week. I think if we can revisit that at that point. Yep. His other question is what is the shelf life for products packaged with seaweed plastic? You touched on it when you mentioned that seaweed plastic saches might break in shipping, but I'm wondering about this plastic will break down in two months in your home.

Compost. If product X is packaged in such packaging, does it have to be sold more quickly? Whereas the clock not start ticking until it is exposed to other elements such as water, heat, UV, and the compost. So what information do you have in that regard? Is this a thing where it's sitting on the shelf for two months and the store manager is staying there going, oh my God, if that doesn't sell today, No,

from, from what I have found.

And my team found it's that later comment of it's basically when it gets exposed to the proper, like when you're composting something it's about heat. It's about, uh, microbes. It's there's things that cause the decomposition to happen. If those aren't there, this stuff can last for months. Some of it could probably last for years, depending on what it's made of mm-hmm but it it's it's long lasting.

So it's like, if you're talking about sitting on a store shelf, You don't have to worry about it for three months. It's like, they're gonna be tossing that stuff by the expiration date of the stuff anyway. Right. So it's like, you know, they only sell it for so long anyway, it's not gonna accelerate.

Right.

There was a related comment. This one from, uh, cliff, dog, zero one who wrote, I think the biggest hurdle to plastic alternatives is durability. I'm a commercial cleaner and have used some of the compostable rubbish bags in the office. And they are awful. The moment coffee or tea leaks into them. They begin to break down and leak all over the bins for assuming to wash eight bins by hand in the end while they still get compostable bags.

I buy the plastic rubbish bags with my own money. This is a case of mm-hmm the wrong tool for the wrong job. I would argue that the managers who cliff dog is dealing with are purchasing a product. In a kind of performative we're doing the right thing as opposed. Yes. To actually evaluating whether this is the right thing, right?

The kinds of compostable bags that they are purchasing for rubbish bins in an office environment, might in fact be intended for things like if you're hauling off leaves or something like that. I imagine if it's. Well, depends on what it's made of it dissolving when it gets wet with coffee or tea, though, that, to me says, this is not the environment for that bag.

This may not even be the intended use.

I don't know if you've bought them, but like we've tried different brands of those compostable, like Ziploc sandwich bags and they are not created equal. Like there was one type that we got that was so like, you could just barely pull it and it would start to kind of stretch and deform and then tear.

It was, it felt very weak. And then there was a different brand. We tried that feels very durable. It's it feels just as durable as a traditional plastic, but it's still compostable. So it. Really depends on what you're buying. And it does feel a little performative from the managers of his business of, yeah.

They're ticking that box of we're buying something green check and it's like, well, did you test it for performance? Oh, this doesn't work very well. Maybe we should try one of these other three options over here. Yeah. To see if it's any better. So it sounds like they're not doing their due

diligence. Yeah.

And it also, it's unfortunate because it gives then yeah. You know, cliff dog is then walking away saying this is useless. And he is then sharing that information with other people. And there may be another brand that would fit the job perfectly. But his experience is now tainting the water and that's unfortunate.

Yeah. It's like, so here we are cliff, dog. We are not defending compostable rubbish bin bags, but we are suggesting if you're buying things with your own money, that's not a great solution either. I, yeah, we should never be in a position where we're buying our employers. Products for use in the office.

That's you're going another step beyond, I would urge you to maybe talk to whatever purchaser is in charge of this. Is there a different brand we can try cuz these aren't working. Yes, exactly. And uh, and if you do go that, go that route, cliff, dog, come back and let us know. Do you find, have you found one that works?

I'd be actually very interested in that there were also comments around styrofoam packaging and. Potential not necessarily direct use, but sister product, other things you've talked about around packaging and the change in the packaging industry. Mm-hmm, like this one from geek IWG who wrote I for one will be glad when we can finally get rid of styrofoam packaging.

It's so annoying to deal with it breaks apart in the tiny static clinging particle. It's difficult to compact without some sort of grinder, it cannot be melted down without releasing toxic fumes. It cannot be recycled. So it just ends up in the landfill. And I wanted to give you an opportunity here. This current video was about seaweed and seaweed that might lead to plastic.

I can imagine that there could be packaging. Implications here that this material could in fact be used for some kind of packaging material. But even if this material is not, do you wanna talk now about some of the other packaging materials that you've come across and talked about in some of your previous videos?

Yeah. This is one of those reasons. I, I, I keep I'm obsessing about plastic and you can see this in a front of my videos. I've talked about it a lot. But like this seaweed plastic, I don't know if could ever really be used for packaging, like for shipping materials, but I could see it being used potentially for maybe B blister packs.

I don't know if you've had those recently, but I . I bought some new power tools and they all came in blister packs and I was cursing the manufacturer the entire time. I was UN. Because they cut you and they're like very difficult to work with. Can't stand that, but understand why the industry uses it. Cuz it's so convenient.

It's so cheap. Yeah. But when it comes to like star form replacements, I've talked about my CEL, fungus, which is the one I am like very bearish about. Um, you probably can't see it behind me, but one of my shelves, I've got a little mys brick that I bought from a company called eco. Is can be molded just like styrofoam and to any shape you want.

And after I made that video, I have actually bought a couple of products in the months after I made that video. That were using this exact product. And I was so excited. I was like, like, oh my God, here it is in the real world, this company's actually using this thing. That's very cool. And it was, it was molded just like a traditional styrofoam holding the product I bought.

And all I had to do is toss it, the recycling bin, and it's gonna break down and a composed file someplace.

How's fantastic. I'm curious, I've got a couple of follow up questions to that. Were these products that you anticipated getting packaging that would be.

New that's nice. No, that's the thing. That's the thing that got me really excited.

It was, um, uh, anchor, um, the brand anchor that makes a lot of electronic chargers and stuff they've been doing interesting things with their plastics are compostable that they use, like the little bags that things come in now mm-hmm, all of their packaging comes in, just recycled, very thin form, uh, cardboard boxes that are very easy to cycle.

But this my CEL package, I can't remember what the company was, but it was an electronics company and it's like, I was not expecting to get this. And it's like a random. Company. I've never heard of before bought anything from before. And I opened the box and saw the, the MyUM packaging inside of it to protect the product.

And I was like, you go, it's like, it's like, you're some random little tiny company I've never heard of mm-hmm and you're doing the right thing here. It's pretty cool. It's like how I'm assuming we'll see this more and

more and more in the company years. Yeah. And I'm curious, how was the recyclability of.

That conveyed, was it printed right on the packaging material itself? Or was there something in the packaging that said, Hey, this is all compostable. You can just put this in the recycling. Yeah.

One of the two products I'm talking about, one of them had a little card that was open the box and a little card saying everything in this can be recycled.

And it was like, all right, they're they're doing, they're like very proud of what they're doing. Yeah. The other company, there was no mention of anything, nothing printed on the box, nothing. It was just, they're just kind of using these recyclable products and they're not bragging about it. Right. So I thought it was interesting about.

Two different approaches, right? One company going look at us and the other company going, we're just gonna do it. Cause

yeah. You know, and ultimately I guess it doesn't really matter because if the material's gonna be able to break down, then if you throw it in the garbage bin, it breaks down in with the garbage.

And if you put it in recycling or compostable situation, then it breaks down there. But six of one, half dozen of another, it doesn't really matter. It all

works. It

all works in the end. It doesn't matter. Which ultimately is the place we're trying to get to. I believe. Yes. Would you agree that that's the place?

If you wanna be able to be able to walk through your house and finish that bottle of water, throw it in the garbage can open up that delivery, throw that stuff in the garbage you want to be able to get to the place where recyclability, compostability, and garbage are all basically things we don't have to think about.

It's like the companies like Pepsi and Coke are working hard right now on new alternatives to their plastic bottles. And one of the forms that are using is it uses a remnants of sugar. So it's using sugar fibers, like from the sugar cane to produce plastic bottles. And those literally will just break down over time into nothing.

And so it's like, we're going to get there. It's just a matter of when and how long it will take. Right. But there's going to be a period where it's like, we will still get these single use products. And then you can literally just Chuck 'em in the garbage and forget about it. Cuz they will break down in 90 days.

Right. Or something like that. They'll just slowly break down. Right.

Or like this seaweed. You could finish your beverage and then eat the bottle you could eat, you could eat the bottle which suddenly I'm having flashbacks to growing up in the 1970s and those little wax bottles of colored water that we used to get that was supposed to be refreshing.

They never were, they were supposed to be fun to drink. They never were. And I used to convince myself that the wax that this little mini bottle was made out of. Was edible and flavored. I convinced myself of this. It was like some sort of like, I, I am convinced this tastes like grape and I would then chew on wax for a good five or 10 minutes trying to choke it down before I'd finally give up and be like, okay, this is just a ball of wax in my mouth.

the 1970s were a dark time people. That's what I'm trying to convey. These were, we used to chew on wax. this, the era that our children are going up in now. looked wildly different than mm-hmm than what it was like to grow up in the 1970s. When we were all feral, we were all filthy and our parents didn't know where we were.

So let alone did they know that we were eating the wax that our beverages came in, but here this is legitimately an edible product. Yep. So I wanna talk for a moment about wrapping your head. Around the idea that you could go to a taco bell yep. And get your hot sauce. Get yourself a Chalupa. Yeah. And some hot sauce and bite the corner off the hot sauce.

Squeeze it onto the Chalupa. And then pop the remains, the remains into your mouth. It's gonna be a big leap. Yes. For, for a first of all. Let me just say this. Nothing against any of our fast food worker brethren out there, you do good work. It's an important job. I, I don't mean this to be sear us to be SMUR anybody by saying, first of all, we're not advocating that when this product hits the market, you will necessarily want to eat packets.

You wouldn't know. Who's touched them. You wouldn't know yeah. How they'd been stored. Yeah. A box of these things sitting underneath the counter is not necessarily the, yeah. I'm just gonna snack on those. Like I, yeah. You know, if somebody told me today, this aluminum packet of ketchup is actually edible, I would not start eating those simply because the people who hand them to me, they're not wearing gloves.

Sometimes this is not a thing that, that we're suggesting should be the norm, but it is a fascinating. Element to this, that you could have a beverage with a container that is technically edible, that it is something that could break down in this way. So is there in your research, was there anything to indicate that there's a difference between what could be held safely in this kind of packaging, liquid chain liquid, like straight up liquid water?

Yes. Or a soda? Yeah. Could be held in. Would did that. They've done that. They did that.

Even something that's under pressure. It will not plow the company that did this for the London marathon was handing out energy drinks right in the packets. So it's like there were no cups as the runners were running, they weren't tossing plastic cups.

They could literally just pop the entire thing in their mouth. right. Get their Gatorade and then, or rip it open and then, and then tos it and

break down. Yeah. Right. Which then, I mean, I can't help, but think it's like something from Dr. Who the street is covered with these things. It rains, they all coalescent to one giant mass and then they eat London, but

I mean talk about, yeah, what's good for the goose. It's here. You were gonna eat us here we come. But what about something that's under pressure? What about something that might change volume based on temperature? Like, is this stuff delicate? If it gets too hot, is it too fragile? If it gets too cold? What are the impacts in like shipping?

You've got a container full of packets of something in this seaweed material. Are they going to be resilient in the way that we're accustomed to from plastic packaging? To me, that's the

part that's still to be determined to live at the name of the show. Good product drop. See what I did there. See what I did

there.

Yeah. Seaweed what you did there. Uh,

the, the packets are what they can manufacture. It's PLA it's plastic. So living up to the name of plastic, it is, has elasticity to it. It can stretch and adjust. So as the, if the things inside of it is changing volume slightly, it's going to be able to accommodate that.

But I do not know how that works for. Are you talking about like soda

yeah, shake. Definitely that that's my concern is that like you end up with a product that has very specific use. in like, okay, it's a mayonnaise's packet. That's great. It's mustard, it's ketchup. Or it's something like restaurants. I can imagine restaurants getting things like gravy, broths, things like that, that are going to be able to be like sliced open, quickly, put into a pot, heated up, and then served that's seems like a pretty straightforward use.

But then you get into our daily expectations around things like. Is it gonna be resilient to detergents? Could this be used to hold hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergents, could this be something that would be able to manage the pressure of a carbonated beverage? That those

are some of the things I couldn't find answers on and my team couldn't find answers on, on that.

Exactly. There was a little bit of a black hole

around some of that.

So. Just to make an assumption. I would say it's probably not appropriate for anything. Right. I mean, for everything, it probably does have limitations right now as to what you probably should store it shouldn't because there probably are materials that might break it down quickly.

Right. Like I could, I could see some kinds of detergents potentially being a problem. Right. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't work for some detergents. It's, it's a matter of. I, we were just talking about this earlier, right. Tool for the right job. So it's like, this is not going to be some kind of Pania solution for all forms of plastic.

There's you can use algae to create plastic. I've done that in another video. There's my CEL for foams. There's this for like, imagine ketchup packets. So it's, it's about choosing the right tool for the

right job, right? That seems to be the refrain for this episode. Yeah. So listeners, let us know. What do you think about the idea of edible food containers?

What do you think about the idea of this kind of solution and Matt? One last question for you. One of the comments that I spotted was that about seaweed, limitations of seaweed, basically mm-hmm, a seaweed shortage. This person. Stated that there's a seaweed shortage going on right now. I did a little bit of research on this.

I couldn't find anything claiming a seaweed shortage, but there was one, a couple of years ago in Japan, they didn't have enough. They weren't able to harvest enough to meet the demand at the time. And I think it was 2019 is the seaweed that's being used for this a particular kind of seaweed. And do you know where it is grown and how it is manage?

Well, there's in the video. I talk there's two different paths and yes, there are very specific kinds of seaweed. Like there's one that's using kelp. There's another one that's using. I can't remember the exact, like species of, of seaweed, but they are using very specific kinds. That, that is one of the limitations around this.

It's not that there isn't enough, but it's one of those. It's not like we could scale this up to satisfy all of our plastic needs today because there isn't enough being harvested today. Right. So this is one of those. You would basically need seaweed farms that would be set up like off of shallow coast lines where you could start setting up seaweed farms to actually produce enough of this in an ecological way.

That's ecologically safe, right. To do this. So it's, it's gonna be a slow ramp up because of how we have to ramp up production and harvesting as well.

Right. So, as I said, listeners, what do you think about this? And don't forget if you'd like to support the show. Doing what you're doing right now is a great way to do that.

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