Cellophane meets 1 and 3 but is hard to be made thick. Paper satisfies 2 and 3 but is not transparent. Celluroid is not explicitly mentioned in the paper, but I gather it does not satisfy 3 since it's hardly pure-cellulose.
The main application target seems to be food packaging.
We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.
Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from getting fused to the previous page.
I have a hard time using "balanced" and Roman in the same sentence.
Maybe the technology was "balanced", but the society certainly wasn't. It relied on continual expansion and devolved from a republic into an empire along the way. When the empire couldn't expand anymore, it collapsed and fragmented.
I also don't think their technology level was stable. IMO, they were only about 200 years away from developing a useful steam engine and kicking off their own industrial revolution. They knew the principals, they even had toy steam engines. They were already using both water wheels and windmills to do work when available. They were just missing precision manufacturing techniques to make a steam engine that actually did useful work.
They were mining coal and using it for both heating and metal working.
They also deforested large sections of Europe for fuel (especially to make charcoal for smelting iron), building materials and to clear land for crops. They didn't really practice much in the way of sustainable forests, unless they ran into local shortages of fuel wood.
They also mined by tearing apart mountains, and threw noticeable amounts of lead into the air doing it.
> Roman-era mining activities increased atmospheric lead concentrations by at least a factor of 10, polluting air over Europe more heavily and for longer than previously thought, according to a new analysis of ice cores taken from glaciers on France's Mont Blanc.
A lot less than modern technology manages, but a lot more than nothing. And that with a much smaller population.
53 million amphoras... That is ceramic containers chugged to a pile... Not exactly sustainable or efficient choice either. Well there is lot of clay, but still not exactly sustainable approach...
I dunno I read it somewhere that some other thing in the pipes formed a protective layer that prevented the lead from actually seeping into the water or something
Same thing happened in Flint Michigan, the lead pipes weren't the issue; They stopped treating the water a certain way and the slight acidity in the water caused (iirc) some sort of calcium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate layer to be washed away until the acidic water started leaching lead into the water.
Given that their society only functioned through massive amounts of theft from their neigbhours and slave labor, that would be very unfortunate if true.
"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."
The viscose process used to produce cellophane is highly toxic. The lyocell process is safer because the chemicals used are less volatile. But both require a lot of fine chemicals (carbon disulfide or N-methylmorpholine oxide or, recently, 1,5-diazabicyclo[4.3.0]non-5-enium acetate). This is why cellophane is typically used in small amounts and rayon likewise.
By contrast, lithium bromide is a stable salt and is basically as cheap as the elements used to produce it, so it can be easily scaled up and recycled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celluloid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane