"...eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals..."
Would someone be able to explain to me why metal isn't "eco-friendly"? I understand that some plastics degrade into small, unfriendly particles over time (and others can't be recycled), but I always thought that metals were fairly easy to recycle with a very high recovery rate.
Mining ore, processing metal is difficult and energy intensive and produces waste tailings. Steel doesn't grow on trees while wood does. It is unclear from my reading whether or not the process in the article produces a lot of waste, or if the chem bath they use can be recycled in-situ, but the reduced ecological cost of material acquisition alone makes this idea worth pursuing.
Could be a matter of embodied energy. Growing trees, when done right, comes with a free CO2 sink (not enough to off-set the CO2 produced in harvesting and processing, but it still helps). Metals can be very energy-intensive to refine, even from recycled metals.
Would someone be able to explain to me why metal isn't "eco-friendly"? I understand that some plastics degrade into small, unfriendly particles over time (and others can't be recycled), but I always thought that metals were fairly easy to recycle with a very high recovery rate.