Question: Do plants make good and useful plastics and if they do how did you achieve this?

Polly Keen answered on 8 Oct 2022:

Materials made from plant can make very good replacements for plastics for lots (but not all) applications.
They are good in dry environments, and for wrapping materials which don’t cause reactions or big changes in the material. Good things to wrap are things like clothes, metal things, solid plastic things and lots of solid foods. Oily and fatty products are also easy to wrap.
We are working on changing the properties so that we can wrap everything, and be stable in lots of environments, for as long as needed, but without changing the biodegrading!
To achieve these properties, we use the proteins in the plant. We change the structure of the proteins by using gentle natural chemicals (like vinegar), so that the proteins fold into structures like those in conventional plastics. This gives them similar properties.