Food is a reasonable target for biodegradable packaging because you don't really expect the food to sit around for more than a year (for long-term food packaging you just wouldn't use a biodegradable material).

Packaging products that might have a long shelf life is more problematic. If the material breaks down in saltwater then it will start breaking down if someone picks it up with sweaty or recently washed hands.

It dissolves with salt. Our sweat will melt it

If the material has to be coated to keep it from breaking down too fast, what is the point?

Presumably you could only coat certain faces of the material (like ones touching food). Or maybe the coating could degrade in another more time-known fashion. So if the coating would be expected to last no more then 3 years then after the plastic could start to degrade.

Will that make it easier for our bodies to absorb it?

Or we can, you know, have waxed paper?

Also, I thought we've already mainstreamed starch-based plastics.

Last but not least, we've had cellophane pretty much since the industrial revoltion. The current issue has been the productionlike containing toxic materials, but the end product itself is biodegradable. Perhaps we can improve on that.

Depends on how much the salt content in the air at coastal places affect it. But if it doesn't that much, then sure, sounds good. Of course, also the intermediate products of decomposition should be nontoxic in that case.

What, you don't think 1cm² of product should be packaged in a 7×10 cm doubled-up plastic sheet?

Product packaging for non-foods

They are not really better than pure plastic, they're kind of a form of greenwashing because they appear to be environmentally friendly.

That's my impression, since all the "environmentally aware" companies use them.

The catch is that it’s useless in most plastics applications, where you really don’t want it to dissolve easily. Probably more catches, but that’s the one I see right away.

It dissolves...but into what? Sounds like a recipe for a petroleum salt water mix that's probably just as toxic as melted plastic, unless all the petroleum is removed.

Also probably gonna turn out it dissolves into smaller plastics, perfectly sized for penetrating the blood-brain-barrier.

Edit: I get it, no new technology has ever had issues with safety and efficacy uncovered after entering mass production and being discarded with reckless abandon in our environment

I apologize to the articles authors for my cynicism, it is clear from the article that nothing bad could possibly come from allowing this new plastic to dissolve in our oceans. It is nice to see plastic pollution has been definitively solved for the rest of time and we no longer have to worry about it.

Ah, of course. Although, they did mention coatings to protect the material, but it does sound like it will be more fragile than existing plastic.

I hope they can tune it to react only to a very specific type of salt water range or else it will not be applicable very often.

And I love this. More if this please

The perfect material for Tesla’s new cyberboat

Well let’s stop putting plastic into seawater and we won’t have to worry about it dissolving.

I have a name for that boat: Cybersunk

Its specifically sensitive to salt, so you can use it for anything with little or no salt without issue. Also it would be perfect for basically all packaging applications that dont involve food but do require an airtight seal. So you could probably replace the majority of all single use plastic packaging/containers with it.

It just accelerated the microplastic pipeline.