alt Hacker NewsThere appears to be a bamboo-derived plastic out there with high tensile strength, but I don't think it'd work for this application, because it degrades within 50 days of being buried in soil. I wonder if being in gravel would delay that, due to the different microbes present?
It seems like there are usually biobased solutions out there, but they aren't as cost-effective or easy to procure as the forever plastics, so organizations don't bother with them. Perhaps some kind of incentive would get us moving in the right direction.
Replies
There are species of wood that do very well buried. Black locust is known to last 100yr buried. I wonder if you could scale up the effect using a larger grid of black locust 2x8s [edit] or even smaller dimension mill scrap.
You can have material that biodegrades, or material that doesn't biodegrade. But you can't have material that doesn't biodegrade that biodegrades. Plastic is a wonder material because it's a forever material.