We all use ‘em - some of us a little too much, but we can’t live without them. You know what I’m talking about. Those wicked little pieces of plastic, which, after they expire get cut up and tossed in a landfill. And now, with the massive credit crunch might going down, many companies have rendered several of your credit cards useless. On a large scale - that equates to millions of plastic cards being thrown out, taking thousands of years to degrade while polluting natural resources like water and soil.

However, the good people over at Discover have found a new way to make money off us without destroying the environment while doing so.

Discover announced the launch of a biodegradable Discover Card option, made of biodegradable PVC, a substance that allows 99 percent of the card plastic to be safely absorbed when exposed to landfill conditions. The company also offered card holders an additional opportunity to help the environment by enrolling in paperless statements.

Now a credit card may seem like too small a piece of plastic to worry about, but with 1.5 billion cards in use in the United States, well, that’s a lot of plastic to throw into our landfills.

A Discover spokesperson says, “We are well pleased with the interest we’ve seen from consumers and our cardmembers about the biodegradable card.”

German researchers have developed a manufacturing technique for making toys and even speaker boxes from a new renewable source, liquid wood. It’s derived from wood pulp-based lignin and can be mixed with hemp, flax or wood fibers and other additives such as wax to create a strong, nontoxic alternative to petroleum-based plastics. The bio-plastic has been named Arboform.

The institute began looking for alternatives to oil-based products in the mid-’90s to lower the dependence on oil, however, any alternative material would need to be relatively abundant. Lignin offers an ideal candidate because tens of millions of tons are often discarded as a byproduct of the papermaking process.

The expanding list of health problems linked to plastic ingredients, such as heavy metals and softeners known as phthalates, also has ramped up the need to find a good substitute for manufacturing toys and other products.

Buckypaper is a material that ten times lighter than steel, but 500 times stronger when sheets are pressed together to form a composite material. Made of carbon nanotubes that have been disbursed in a liquid suspension and filtered through fine mesh to make a thin film, scientists think buckypaper will lead to consumer applications possibly within a year.

Buckypaper is excellent at conducting electricity and dispersing heat, and could be used in electromagnetic shielding and lightning protection on airplanes, for fuel cells, batteries and a more efficient ways to disperse heat in laptops. In the near future, the Buckypaper’s best potential could be in building light-weight, energy-efficient airplanes and cars.