QUICKPOST: Fish oil plastics

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/plastic-fish-waste-biodegradable-study-b1826844.html

This post explains how scientists have created an alternative to plastics created from petrochemicals using oils extracted from fish parts left over from food processing.  I always wonder though how truly sustainable such processes are, if they were to be implemented on a wide scale as an alternative to plastics.  This is because the world uses A LOT of plastic, and to be able to truly substitute fish plastic for petro-plastics you would then need A LOT of fish – which might then lead to people actually farming fish to be used in the production of pesca-plastics – which would then lead right back to the problems of farmed fish as discussed in the seminal post on this blog (or rather, not deeply discussed in the post itself, but rather the article it links to).  So for this to be a successful alternative to petro-plastics, I can only ever see it being extremely niche.  And from my experience with similar processes producing plastics from waste X, I also suspect that the process is so intensive that it would not really be commercially viable.  So in a way it is almost as if it was developed to prove that it is possible, but it can not realistically be considered a replacement for petro-plastics at any significant scale.

I would love to be proven wrong though 🙂