The rise of nanometers

The three major environmental protection groups and major beverage companies, which had been prepared for a long time, responded very quickly after the first episode of "Particles" was broadcast.

Through intensive TV, online advertising and public relations, the problem of microplastic abrasives in plastic bottles, plastic bags, cosmetics and toothpaste has been popularized.

Even Tetra Pak, which was almost fooled, has also received "in-depth and careful" science popularization. This sudden plastic environmental war has stunned Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and Tetra Pak.

However, as the world's beverage giants, Keke and Pepsi responded very quickly in crisis public relations.

On the official account of Xinlan Blog.

[In order to cooperate with environmental protection and protect the environment on which human beings live, our company has decided to invest 1.5 billion yuan in the research and development of new materials, produce degradable plastic bottles, and find suitable alternative materials...]

Pepsi’s official account also gave similar responses.

Tetra Pak, which has been suppressed many times by the Suiren Group, also announced that it will cooperate with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to jointly develop new biodegradable packaging.

At the same time, they also invested a large amount of public relations expenses and produced a large number of soft articles and popular science articles that avoided the important and trivial, hoping to reduce public doubts about plastic bottles.

It's just that the people's preconceived notions are difficult to reverse for a while.

In less than three days, domestic sales of the two major colas fell by 12.4% and 14.1% respectively.

Tianfu Coke and Very Coke, which were ready, took the opportunity to seize part of the domestic cola market, and other Arctic Soda, Bingfeng, Laoshan Coke, etc. also made efforts.

They plan to take advantage of the market decline of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to vigorously develop the domestic market and regain the previously lost market.

Three days later, the time came to April 1st.

The second episode of "Particles" was released simultaneously on Shandong TV Station and Time Blog.

The content of this episode is similar to the previous one about plastic particles, but the content direction has changed dramatically.

Last time, the main focus was on the pollution of plastic products, but this time the focus is on degradable plastics.

In the picture, scientific researchers began to prepare for experiments in June last year. They purchased various degradable plastics and non-degradable plastics on the market, and tested the conditions of these plastics in soil, water, landfill and garbage composting.

Currently, the traditional plastic products on the market are mainly polyethylene.

Degradable plastics are divided into petroleum-based degradable plastics and bio-based degradable plastics.

Among them, petroleum-based degradable plastics are plastics produced with fossil energy as raw materials, mainly including PBS (polybutylene succinate), PBAT (polybutylene adipate/terephthalate), PCL (polybutylene adipate/terephthalate), caprolactone) etc.

Biodegradable plastics are plastics produced from biomass, which can reduce the consumption of traditional energy sources such as petroleum. They mainly include PLA (polylactic acid), PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), PGA (polyglutamic acid) )wait.

Nearly three years have passed since the first domestic plastic restriction order was officially implemented on June 1, 2008.

Various domestic plastic manufacturing companies have successively launched various new plastic bags that meet standards, as well as biodegradable plastic bags.

However, the mixed market has brought real and fake degradable plastics. The reason why fake degradable plastics appear is because of one word - profit.

Taking polylactic acid, the most common biodegradable plastic, as an example, its raw material price ranges from 25,000 to 30,000 yuan per ton, while the raw material price of polyethylene is generally less than 10,000 yuan per ton.

The prices of finished products made of two different materials are more illustrative of the problem. The high cost of truly degradable plastics limits the promotion of degradable plastics.

What leads to a more serious situation is that many plastic products with the concept of "degradable" have gone to the opposite side of environmental protection.

Since there is a huge price range between non-degradable and degradable materials, there are enough "business opportunities" in the middle.

The scientific research team conducted tests to simulate the natural environment on these so-called "degradable plastics" on the market. After nine months and thousands of sets of comparative experiments, they came to an expected result.

That is, the vast majority of "degradable plastics" in use on the market cannot be completely degraded, and even accelerate the spread of pollution from plastic particles.

Among degradable plastics in a broad sense, in addition to biodegradable plastics represented by polylactic acid, there are also plastics that can be mechanically cracked, such as starch-filled, photodegradable, oxidatively degraded and other "pseudo-degradable" plastics.

Photodegradable plastic means that the material will automatically degrade under the action of light. Currently, many photodegradable plastics add photosensitizers to the material and become smaller powders under light conditions.

There are also some so-called degradable plastics that add a certain proportion of starch to polyethylene to cause the physical properties of the material to collapse through the biodegradation of starch.

However, these so-called decompositions, such as PE, PP, PVC and other microplastic particles, not only cannot be degraded by the environment, but because they are invisible to the naked eye, they will remain in the environment, causing greater harm.

These products, which are being sold as dog meat, were directly exposed in the simulation experiments conducted by scientific researchers. In the natural environment, they will produce a large amount of plastic particles faster.

On the other hand, materials such as bio-based polylactic acid, although in theory, can be completely degraded.

However, in the actual simulated natural environment, it still cannot achieve the expected rapid and complete degradation.

According to a joint study by Suiren Company and the Academy of Sciences, a very bad conclusion was drawn. If a polylactic acid bottle is in the ocean in the natural environment, it will take hundreds of years to be completely decomposed.

In simulated natural soil, the mass of polylactic acid plastics after nine months of testing was only 0.19% after 12 months; in seawater and fresh water, polylactic acid plastics only lost about 0.2% of their mass after nine months of testing. loss.

Scientific researchers have reached a highly consistent conclusion. Another current situation faced by many biodegradable plastics is that the theoretical degradation conditions are difficult to achieve in the real natural environment.

According to data from the scientific research team that developed polylactic acid plastics that year, polylactic acid plastics will decompose in industrial composting facilities and need to be heated to a high enough temperature so that microorganisms can quickly decompose polylactic acid plastics.

Polylactic acid plastic needs to be composted for degradation, but there are currently few dedicated composting plants.

Another big problem is that the manufacture of polylactic acid plastic requires the fermentation of corn and other food crops to produce lactic acid.

The output of grain crops is affected by many factors such as harvest conditions and international markets, and raw materials are subject to greater fluctuations.

Especially for ABCD, which China is eyeing, they are eager to promote biodegradable plastics, just like they promoted ethanol gasoline vehicles in Samba.

Therefore, biodegradable plastics represented by materials such as polylactic acid look very good, but there are still many insurmountable problems at this stage.

As this episode aired, the true face of real and fake degradable plastics in Lushan was analyzed inside and out.

The last scientific research leader of the Academy of Sciences said calmly to the row of plastic bottles and bags in front of him:

"Plastics are difficult to completely replace in our lives. Biodegradable plastics are not as permanent as imagined. We advocate reducing the use of plastics and cooperating with all-round recycling technology instead of blindly promoting degradable plastics."

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Tetra Pak planned to develop biodegradable plastic bottles, but fell directly into a passive situation.