> it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag

Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.

See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.

Most of these at least in my region are made from cornstarch. They decompose well/without "microplastics" but only under correct conditions.

Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.

I just threw one of those into my compost pile last month and it’s still there. No clue how long it’s supposed to take.

> but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it

It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.

Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.

Would be nice to have bags like that with their weight printed on them that machines trust.

we use these fresh and crisp bags. They sound like a gimmick but they really do work. We reuse a bag for months until its full of holes and not doing its job well anymore.

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/2824/fresh...

All of those need to hold hot and wet things for long enough without contaminating them.

Is your shipment of drink containers stuck in a hot truck in Texas for a month? No problem! They’re plastic

> it sounds like I'm just describing something like petrol in a solid form at room temperature

That's what plastic IS. That's why it sounds like it, because plastic is in fact solid hydrocarbon.

So not only is it not farfetched, it exists today, which is also why incinerating plastic for energy is the best possible way to dispose it. You remove the plastic from the world, you reduce the amount of oil pumped for fuel, and you get to use the oil you do pump, twice! Once for plastic, and again for fuel.

It's one of those environmental slam dunks with zero downsides. (Before you ask: Modern incinerators do not release any toxins from burning plastic, none.)

Petrol is really quite harsh and includes cancerous chemicals like benzene in sizable quantities. It’s not something you can soak something in and then use to expose to food.

Diesel and other oils tend to be (somewhat) less bad - but there are many oils in food which are nearly identical, and hence anything which breaks down in those situations is likely to breakdown while in food contact too.

I assume that anything sold today as waxed paper has plastic in on it, but I don't really know.

I don't think there are good or bad wine growing regions as much as there are places where people have figured out how to make good wines. The Finger Lakes had a bad reputation once but people figured out Rieslings and some more affordable whites that reputation changed. More recently it was famous for soda-pop sweet wines like Red Cat but I've had some dry reds lately that weren't as bad as what I had 20 years ago.

People are making progress in Utah too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_wine

It was a rhetorical question.

> optically clear and strong, which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose

You never heard of Cellophane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane

> which are not properties I would have expected from cellulose

You know why we've lost so much early cinema history to fire and moisture?

Because silent-film-era film is made of cellulose. It burns. Rapidly. Photography pioneers knew that. They used cellulose anyway because it's flexible and transparent. Right technological decision at the time.

We've known about cellulose properties for literally over a century. There's nothing new here.

> grapevine waste is a concern, and why it’s a particularly effective source of cellulose.

We have markets and prices. If cellulose became scarce enough that the cheapest source for it became agricultural waste, we wouldn't need the government to fund research into an extraction process. Industry would be all over it on its own.

State funding for research is there to solve the problem of industry incentives being aligned against foundational, long term research. What we're looking at here isn't anything like that. It's just one more organic extraction process, another entry in a long tradition of such things.

The point is that it’s like finding research into how to acquire air. It’s everywhere - just go collect some. Who needs this?

I think it’s a valid point.

We don't have a good mechanism for waterproofing cellulose without various complicated industrial processes. Finding a way to do that would be interesting research.

But anything involving grapeviles is just ecomasturbation.

Actually, no, it's worse, because it robs attention and funding from real problems. Plastic pollution isn't predominately plastic bags or (plastic straws for that matter) that seem important because the sort of person who writes articles on a laptop for online publication encounters them daily and doesn't see the stream of untreated industrial waste mostly from the big rivers in Asia.

IMHO, the best investment in mitigation of plastic pollution would be automatic cleanup mechanisms, especially for microplastics in the ocean.

Give it enough time and lack of opposition, and they'll... find a way.