You are concerned about whether to waste your time researching something without an obvious answer…. well it is perhaps far more important to figure out whether the whole bioplastics idea is scalable… otherwise it is just another dead end. Any investor will have this question… i.e. where is the “top knee” in the S-curve…. or in plain language, where will the cost of raw materials for bio-platics start to hit supply/demand resistance.

You are concerned about whether to waste your time researching something without an obvious answer…. well it is perhaps far more important to figure out whether the whole bioplastics idea is scalable… otherwise it is just another dead end. Any investor will have this question… i.e. where is the “top knee” in the S-curve…. or in plain language, where will the cost of raw materials for bio-platics start to hit supply/demand resistance.

You are concerned about whether to waste your time researching something without an obvious answer…. well it is perhaps far more important to figure out whether the whole bioplastics idea is scalable… otherwise it is just another dead end. Any investor will have this question… i.e. where is the “top knee” in the S-curve…. or in plain language, where will the cost of raw materials for bio-platics start to hit supply/demand resistance.

Thanks for being a bit more diplomatic on this one.

“I legitimately ( if not 100% diplomatically ) expressed my surprise that on a site such as this one, there was no mention of it in your article.”

By way of defense, if you even read a smidgen of what I regularly post on gas 2.0, you’ll find that I spend WAY more time than most digging into the details of things and asking the tough questions. But I only do it if there’s a way to answer those questions. If there is no way to answer the questions I typically (from experience) steer clear of delving more deeply. Believe me, it just leads to more trouble and wasted time that I don’t have (really this is just a hobby for me).

And, like I said (and you’ve proven), in my mind, that’s what the comments section is for.

This comment was, of course, meant to be ironic, as the rest of what I wrote should have made it obvious. The gist of it being that any non-food source of bio-material (grass, wood chips, etc.) still has to grow somewhere, that somewhere being a place where one could have grown food or where a rain forest could have continued to grow instead of being cut down. On a small scale, we could do this out of material that would have been thrown away, so in a sense, it is an interesting option for recycling.

I agree with you fully that the destruction of rain forests for palm tree plantations is horrible and it was actually part of my point. If we’re destroying rain forests today for palm trees to make cosmetics, bio-fuel and cooking oil, will we tomorrow be destroying any remaining rain forests to seed whatever plant helps us to make bio-plastics.

THAT is the gist of my comment and I legitimately ( if not 100% diplomatically ) expressed my surprise that on a site such as this one, there was no mention of it in your article. Mentioning it as a question would have at least shown some awareness of the possible environmental impacts of the technological possibilities you’re talking about.

After all, aren’t we in this mess in the first place because we didn’t think ahead of time about the social and environmental impacts of all these great technologies we developed ??

Marc P.

This comment was, of course, meant to be ironic, as the rest of what I wrote should have made it obvious. The gist of it being that any non-food source of bio-material (grass, wood chips, etc.) still has to grow somewhere, that somewhere being a place where one could have grown food or where a rain forest could have continued to grow instead of being cut down. On a small scale, we could do this out of material that would have been thrown away, so in a sense, it is an interesting option for recycling.

I agree with you fully that the destruction of rain forests for palm tree plantations is horrible and it was actually part of my point. If we’re destroying rain forests today for palm trees to make cosmetics, bio-fuel and cooking oil, will we tomorrow be destroying any remaining rain forests to seed whatever plant helps us to make bio-plastics.

THAT is the gist of my comment and I legitimately ( if not 100% diplomatically ) expressed my surprise that on a site such as this one, there was no mention of it in your article. Mentioning it as a question would have at least shown some awareness of the possible environmental impacts of the technological possibilities you’re talking about.

After all, aren’t we in this mess in the first place because we didn’t think ahead of time about the social and environmental impacts of all these great technologies we developed ??

Marc P.