Spain produces a lot of high quality wine, but also a lot of lower quality wine, used for mixing to make cheap “table” wine. Much of that is exported, often in cartons.
Many French winemakers have been importing that type of wine for decades to mix to increase volume in lower quality wines.
So fuck the more agricultural strong members, and benefit the more industrial ones? Nice.
(Some) People are up in arms about Russian meddling in the west, but Israel has been doing it since the 40’s and no one batted an eyelash.
The fact that some (many?) Jewish lawmakers and military are allowed to have dual Israeli/US citizenship is baffling to me.
I would depart Barcelona too.
Fuck! I rode that a few months ago!
If it breaks down into tiny pieces its not biodegradable. The definition of biodegradable is that its chemically “processed by nature”.
BTW, biodegradable does not necessarily mean innocuous. A lot of “natural” elements and compounds are toxic. Something may be biodegraded, and leave mercury as one of the resulting elements, for example.
The caveats you express are somewhat valid, but not totally correct. Printing correctly, with a food safe nozzle, path, and PLA formulation, is entirely possible. Simply printing in single layers, with a properly dialed in printer can eliminate your concerns. Medical items and implants are printed out of PLA, albeit with extreme production controls.
However, printing these single use items would be absolutely un-economical. 3D printing shines in short runs, bespoke items, like replacement part that are out of production, or which are very difficult to manufacture by other methods like injection or machining.
Its true that PLA, in unmodified form, has a much higher modulus than PP or PE, so squishiness is out of the question. What I have mentioned before is that I have bought single serve olive oil in PLA containers. From what I could see, these were injection molded and had a film top made from a plastic I never bothered to identify.
These containers were surprisingly elastic when crushed, not as elastic as other plastics, like PET, PP or PE, but much more than I had come to expect from my experience with the material. I’m going to attribute this to molding vs. extruding.
I never said that these should be produced via 3D printing, it would be both economically unfeasible, and very difficult to achieve food safety, as I have mentioned.
The process you are describing is injection molding, generally used for solid parts. In this case, a variation called blown injection molding, is used. In this case the material is injected into a mold, and then a gas is blown into the interior, to make the material stick to the inner mold, and create a cavity. Nozzles are involved, as they are used to inject the material into the mold. These nozzles can be made specifically to be food safe, with stainless steel, for example.
Remember that plane where the 1st officer locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew the plane into a mountain?
I believe the rule now is that for a pilot to exit the cockpit, a cabin crew member has to be in the cockpit, to prevent this sort of thing.
You may feel that Spain is in the same league as Portugal, but by most metrics, it’s objectively not. It’s one of the EU’s big 4, a top 20 economy, the world’s 8th largest arms exporter, etc. Not a superpower, but definitely a power.
Relative to the bow
I don’t know. As I mentioned elsewhere I’m not a chemical engineer, but I imagine that being made from starches, it may be decomposed into digestible compounds. Just guessing here.
I used to buy the olive oil containers for a restaurant I owned. They worked quite well. Small single serving cups with a peel off lid. I don’t know if the lids were bioplastic, though.
I’m definitely not a polymer expert, I also have my information from what I read as a hobbyist. My take is that while PLA will compost in commercial facilities, it will eventually biodegrade in a reasonable time frame, with minor impact to nature. Better than the alternatives, I guess.
Sure, but PLA will eventually biodegrade, unlike things like polypropilene or polyethylene, which are incredibly useful precisely because of their imperviousness.
EDIT: I’m willing to bet that PLA IS biodegradable in home settings if the correct method is used, like the Berkeley method, which produces much higher heat than “heap” methods. The Berkley method can produce compost in under a month, via endothermic processes that generate relatively high heat. All you need at home are the compostable materials, and a roughly 1m cube, which can be made out of pallets, for example.
Aren’t these biodegradable, though? I imagine the body would eventually process them, unlike hydrocarbon based plastics.
True, but at least glass breaks down into sand, and metal caps don’t pollute, they are just unsightly. The plastic cap liners can be made of bioplastics. The energy aspect could be mitigated by mandating 100% renewables in production and transportation, maybe? I know it’s not easy to transition to these, but we don’t have many options.
As I mentioned in a prior comment, there are companies making bioplastic containers, in commercial production now.
I love productive comments.
A Spanish company (I imagine there are a few worldwide) develops compostable bioplastic containers using PLA, polylactic acid, the most used plastic in 3D printing, in food safe formulations. I suppose there are limitations on what it can contain, and I don’t know if soy sauce is compatible. I know that it’s used for single serving olive oil, for example. There are challenges, like storage life, but it’s a good start.
I do a lot of 3D printing. Printing PLA things for food storage is not recommended, not because of PLA, but because filaments often have modifiers to enhance certain properties that may not be food safe, and because contact with materials and parts, like extrusion nozzles may add impurities that are probably not food safe…
Usual Chuck Lorre series lifecycle. Many are pretty good, for their 1st, 2nd, seasons. Then they should die gracefully.