Does it actually break down?
Or does it just melt into a cloud of microplastics?

What does it dissolve into? 🪿 Wait, what does it dissolve into? ️ 🪿

For anyone wondering about where, just as an example, polyvinyl is: Polyvinyl acetate (i.e. PVA) is the stuff that wood glue is typically made out of. It's also the binder used for those bird seed bells.

...It does indeed dissolve in the water. In the rain, certainly, which any owner of a bird seed bell could tell you.

Yeah, fair enough. That’s a great point. I will update my opinion of this advancement.

That was my first thought, a tide pod also rapidly dissolves in sea water, we shouldn't be dumping those in the ocean though.

And then tow it outside the environment.

From the article:

Aida said the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt. Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics that can harm aquatic life and enter the food chain.

As salt is also present in soil, a piece about five centimetres (two inches) in size disintegrates on land after over 200 hours, he added.

The material can be used like regular plastic when coated, and the team are focusing their current research on the best coating methods, Aida said. The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

So I think the next thing the goose wants to know is, what's it being coated with?

But then how will we maintain the ocean breeze scent?

This seems like it could be a viable replacement for many plastics, but it isn't the silver bullet I feel that the article is acting as if it is.

From the linked article in the post:

the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics

The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

This is great. Good stuff. Wonderful.

From another article (this shows that this isn't as recent, too. This news was from many months ago)

the team was able to generate plastics that had varying hardnesses and tensile strengths, all comparable or better than conventional plastics.

Plastics like these can be used in 3D printing as well as medical or health-related applications.

Wide applications and uses, much better than a lot of other proposed solutions. Still good so far.

After dissolving the initial new plastic in salt water, they were able to recover 91% of the hexametaphosphate and 82% of the guanidinium as powders, indicating that recycling is easy and efficient.

Easy to recycle and reclaim material from. Great! Not perfect, but still pretty damn good.

In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.

You could compost these in your backyard. Who needs the local recycling pickup for plastics when you can just chuck it in a bin in the back? Still looking good.

using polysaccharides that form cross-linked salt bridges with guanidinium monomers.

Polysaccharides are literally carbohydrates found in food.

This is really good. Commonly found compound, easy to actually re-integrate back into the environment. But now the problems start. They don't specify much about the guanidinium monomers in their research in terms of which specific ones are used, so it's hard to say the exact implications, but...

...they appear to often be toxic, sometimes especially to marine life, soil quality, and plant growth, and have been used in medicine with mixed results as to their effectiveness and safety.

I'm a bit disappointed they didn't talk about this more in the articles, to be honest. It seems this would definitely be better than traditional plastic in terms of its ecological effects, but still much worse than not dumping it in the ocean at all. In my opinion, in practice it looks like this would simply make the recycling process much more efficient (as mentioned before, a 91% and 82% recovery rate for plastics is much better than the current average of less than 10%) while reducing the overall harm from plastic being dumped in the ocean, even if it's still not good enough to eliminate the harm altogether.

The tweenagers hosing on Axe in coastal cities will take care of that I think.

Is it made of snails?

(/s, in case anyone wants to take that seriously)

It dissolves into salt water.

Except it doesn't dissolve, this is not the term they should be using, you can't just dry out the water and get the plastic back. It breaks down into other things. I'm pretty sure an ocean full of dissolved plastic would be a way worse ecological disaster than the current microplastic problem...

I've seen like 3-4 articles about this now and they all use the term dissolve and it's pissing me off.