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A comment on Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar industry. Parent comment

Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by onlyrealcuzzo on Saturday February 03, 2024 @04:23PM (#39244886)
There's not enough cork, nor will there ever be, to make a meaningful dent in total plastic consumption (in current terms).

We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Cork has a very small part of the planet where it grows well, and basically everything else valuable grows well there, too...

The Nanocrystalline Cellulose market will be bigger than cork by 2030 probably - and even that is 25 years away from making a real dent in plastic consumption (aggressively).

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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by TotempaaltJ on Saturday February 03, 2024 @04:48PM (#39245093)
To be fair, we don't need it to overtake, or even come close to, the entire plastic industry. It'd already be nice if it, and other sustainable materials, could chip away at different uses of petroplastics.
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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by onlyrealcuzzo on Saturday February 03, 2024 @05:54PM (#39245602)
My point is that Cork is so laughably far away from making a meaningful dent.

It's orders of magnitude away from even taking out 1%.

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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by klipt on Saturday February 03, 2024 @06:43PM (#39245915)
Would be nice if we could invent a way to produce and 3D print cork in factories.
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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by mc32 on Saturday February 03, 2024 @06:58PM (#39246003)
Like artificial “meats” there’s going to be a lot of artificial things in “printing” “cork” plain old plastics might be better.
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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by davkan on Sunday February 04, 2024 @01:07AM (#39248016)
I don’t know about printing but there’s various methods for liquifying and expanding cork. E.g. spray cork insulation and moldable cork ski boot liners.
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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by wolverine876 on Sunday February 04, 2024 @12:48AM (#39247942)
> We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Any material looking to fulfill that demand will start from that position; why would anyone be producing the material if they didn't already have that market? Every new thing starts from zero; plastics were at zero too, at one time.

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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by onlyrealcuzzo on Sunday February 04, 2024 @10:07AM (#39250727)
Cork has been in use by humans for 10,000 years...

It's not a new market.

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Re:Cork is displacing plastics and creating a billion-dollar... by wolverine876 on Sunday February 04, 2024 @01:45PM (#39253069)
That confuses the market with the product. Oil has been used for a long time too, but the modern oil market didn't exist until the last ~~150 years. If cork became a substitute for plastics, that would be a new market.
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