The company Ecovative Design mixes natural ingredients such as oats or hemp with fungal mycelia, which grows and binds the mixture into a solid mat. The mushroom's mycelia, which look a bit like fine, white hair, have become the basis of a new kind of fungus-based packaging material. Ahead of this World Environment Day - to be celebrated around the world on June 5 - we bring to you five plastic alternatives, and you can decide for yourself if they're genius or outlandish! Mushrooms However, some alternatives are just as bizarre as they are promising. And once again, researchers have been busy creating alternatives to replace this indispensable polymer. To tackle this environmental issue, inventors began to look for new synthetic and semi-synthetic alternatives.īut history has a way of repeating itself, and the very plastic that was supposed to save the planet is now contributing to its destruction. In the mid-1800s, animal-derived products like turtle shell combs, ivory piano keys and billiard balls were becoming scarce, and so were the elephants and some species of turtles. But it was never intended to be that if anything, scientists created it as a part of a solution. Today, plastics are the objects of most environmentalists' most horrifying nightmares. What Leo could not have fathomed was that by spurring a revolution in plastic production, he was inadvertently getting his hands bloody. He had just perfected the first fully synthetic plastic by combining formaldehyde and phenol under heat and pressure that he'd christened 'bakelite'. It was the summer of 1907 when Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, was rushing to the patent office in New York.
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