All very good points Rob. I too have very little faith in mankind. Too many people with too many pressing issues. But, maybe technology can lead us out of this quagmire. Regarding an alternative to plastic..
I guess most folks didn't see it on TV or look at the link I provided to last night's 60 minutes piece about an alternative to our current non-biodegradable plastics. Again..
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marshall-me...0-minutes/
It really is a timely, and fascinating, story about a guy that has created a multi-billion dollar company that is poised to turn our energy, sugar, and plastics industries on their head. The company, Xyleco..
https://www.xyleco.com
has attracted major investors and has an all star lineup of board members, some of which include..
Robert C. Armstrong - Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Former Department Chair at MIT - Director of the MIT Energy Initiative
Steven Chu - Former United States Secretary of Energy - Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford
Sir John S. Jennings - Former Group-Managing Director of Royal Dutch/Shell Group; Chairman of the Shell Transport and Trading Company and Director of Shell Oil
Mario J Molina - Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1995) - Three-time Member of the U.S. President’s Council on Science and Technology
William J. Perry - Senior Fellow and Professor of Engineering at Stanford - Former United States Secretary of Defense
And there are others.. all with equally impressive backgrounds.
Xyleco has created a line of plastics, made from cellulose, that will fill all our needs with a type of plastic that is truly biodegradable. Not from fossil fuels, not with any CO2 emissions, and truly biodegradable. So much so that they can build an actual life expectancy into each run. They can create plastics, made out of plant material, that will dissolve in six months, and others that will last six years, twenty years. And none of it will be around longer than one wants it to be.
And the whole plastic story is secondary to what they are doing to replace our dependency on oil. Look at the article.. read their website. This is good stuff.
But I am sure many will say lets not embrace new technology when all we have to do is make sure the stuff we make today finds it's way into some landfill. I take that as the oil industry's propaganda. But, since that is the system we have now, how is it working out? How much of that plastic is somehow, magically, ending up in the ocean? On the beaches? in our food? Literally in our food! How good is that?