Is Timeplast better than recycling?
Recapturing plastic at 100% for burning, gasification or mechanical/chemical recycling will never happen, and even if we were to recycle all of our waste, (an impossibility), eventually earth will deal with the entirety of our materials, recycled or not. The more likely reality is that plastics end up in the environment/oceans fragmenting into microscopic pieces, and with that, the food chain and our bloodstream (according to many studies we ingest about the weight of a credit card in micro plastics every week
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247).
Plastics’ incineration takes solid carbon and turns it into gas carbon, which means that we’re taking a solid, local problem, and turning it into a global gaseous problem.
Recycling not only is not feasible but it effectively creates more pollution given that plastic is not truly recyclable but downcyclable, (https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2022/5/16/what-really-happens-to-your-plastic-recycling ) meaning that it loses quality (increased cross-links, micro-ash formation within the chain and with that its ability to micro fragment) every time it is recycled, unlike metal and glass which are truly recyclable. Not only that, but recycling implies reusing, and the reutilization of conventional (fossil-based) plastics may seem like another great idea, however it may possibly be the worst option of them all. Examples of why, are Kettles and baby bottles which shed micro-plastics with every use. Dunzhu Li and other researchers at Trinity College Dublin, reported last October in a paper published in Nature Food; “If parents prepare baby formula by shaking it up in hot water inside a plastic bottle, their infant might end up swallowing more than one million microplastic particles each day" the team calculated.
Circular economy (the dream of a utopian perfect recycling system) is not feasible unless we adapt it to a planetary level. For that reason, Nature developed water as the main chemical circular route to deal with waste through its universal solvent capabilities. Water is the key to all elements of life, and we should follow that chemical pathway. Microplastics exist precisely because they can be eroded down to nanometric particles without losing their molecular weight, if they were hydro soluble their molecular weight would drop to naturally occurring levels.
Timeplast’s vision is that all waste materials should be water-soluble, which is why we've patented the first co-polymer plastic material with programmable water solubility, so that we adapt our society to our planet’s Grand Chemistry.
We believe that instead of recycling, biodegradation, or any other solution, the actual sustainable gold standard is water-solubility. When you look at our planet from outer space it is blue for a very important reason, Nature developed water as the universal solvent, and just like Francis Bacon said; “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”.
