Agree, but I don't see any mention of that in the article, so I don't have enough information to argue for that.
I'm sure we can agree though that having 17-day decomposing plastics that don't contaminate with heat and water is a good thing, so I hope it is that.
Decomposing isn't a binary process where you wait 17 days and then the plastic disappears. Something that decomposes in 17 days will have ~0.25% disintegrate every hour which means there is now contamination in your food. Personally I'd rather not wait for that contamination to be shown to cause health issues.
I’m pretty sure 17 days is far too short for most serious uses.
Who cares. If 50% of the usage is short term stuff like takeout, grocery bags, etc then this wipes out that waste.
If even 5% of the time it fails, no one will buy it for those purposes.
I would've said that about ChatGPT, but...
I know that's not true because takeout containers certainly leak more than 5% of the time.