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Comment by anuraggoel | Hacker News Reader

This is encouraging, but I couldn't find the word 'cost' anywhere in the article. Any technology that claims to replace an existing commodity like plastic needs to pass what Vinod Khosla calls the 'Chindia test': if it's not cheap enough to be commercially viable in China and India, it's not going to be successful.

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True, but cost depends on scale. And economies of scale can quickly make the expensive cheap.

Cost goes down with scale only when scaling is cheap, but the article also does not mention the production technology's ability to scale cheaply.

Nor does it mention the actual energy required to make the stuff. It very well may require more fossil fuels in energy to make it than using the same oil directly in plastic.

That can't be true, there are people(like me) who are willing to buy this even if its 10-20 times the price of plastic. For one it would be bio-degradable, and you wouldn't worry as much keeping this stuff around children because this is natural material.

Sure there are extremely poor people who might not be able to afford the extra money, but anybody concerned with the environment and their health would have sufficient reason to use this material. Another argument is that since plastic is so cheap, even if this liquid wood is many times the price of plastic it can still be affordable.

Read the article before you make health claims.

If it in fact does not use petroleum products, the rising price of petroleum will at some point make it more cost-effective.

Plus it has other properties that are desirable in some situations, such as a wood-like finish.

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