Artificial spider silk provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics

Looks cool. I wonder how it compares to classic plant fibres like hemp.<p>Also I think &quot;vegan&quot; is a bad tag to add, even if it was done by the journo. I don&#x27;t want to open that can of soy worm-substitute, but the point of this doesn&#x27;t seem to be avoiding the use of spiders or anything like that, rather it&#x27;s just an efficient way to grow a cool material that bears similarities to spider silk.

we already have substitutes for these kinds of plastics - like natureflex, which is made of wood pulp (found out about this from the tea brand I drink - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.teapigs.co.uk&#x2F;pages&#x2F;sustainability-values#plasticfree" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.teapigs.co.uk&#x2F;pages&#x2F;sustainability-values#plasti...</a>).<p>I&#x27;m inclined to lean towards reconfigurations of simple materials (cellulose in this case) rather than high tech solutions, for the sake of simple and scalable production and lower likelihood of simply laundering the ecological impact from the finished product to the manufacturing process.<p>That&#x27;s just a rough heuristic though, I don&#x27;t know whether this or cellulose-based plastic replacements would be definitively better.

Interesting! But when a material is described as &quot;home-compostable&quot;, I immediately have to ask myself what stops it from composting while still being used as packaging? OTOH, if they make it stable enough to have a long useful shelf-life, they have the opposite problem, that it takes years to break down when in the environment. Ok, still better than most plastics...