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Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)

69 points • by thelastgallon • today at 5:09 AM • 33 comments • view on HN

Comments

zkmon • today at 6:35 AM

Some great soul said something like "God has given everything to meet your need, not your greed". As long as the greed continues to increase exponentially, no amount of innovation is going to support it.

The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.

Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.

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wewewedxfgdf • today at 6:54 AM

I vaguely recall reading that biofuels have been debunked as being insanely inefficient as a fuel source and consume land that would be better used to grow food.

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boustrophedon • today at 7:48 AM

I recently learned that nylon 11 (sometimes aka PA11) is made from castor oil, which (I also learned) is just the vegetable oil extracted from the castor bean.

rajnathani • today at 6:42 AM

Why is this on the front page? It just seems like a meta-analysis on biofuels.

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spiclk • today at 7:31 AM

Petroleum is plant-based (just to nitpick).

antonyragleap • today at 8:13 AM

Interesting overview. I’m curious how these plant-based replacements hold up on durability and moisture resistance long-term vs petroleum plastics, especially for packaging and outdoor use.

m0rc • today at 8:51 AM

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soltanov • today at 9:37 AM

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