What Are Biodegradable Plastics?

Biodegradable plastics undergo digestion by microbes to form natural bi-products and what is known as humus (a sludge that makes an excellent plant fertiliser). It also produces gas which is officially known as biogas. Biozone’s landfill-biodegradable plastics have proprietary additives that help them biodegrade naturally in landfills. Once the biodegradable packing ends up in a landfill, it attracts the necessary microbes that break down the plastic into its natural components.

Fuels Generated During The Biodegradation Process Of Landfill-Biodegradable Plastics

In the deepest areas of a landfill, there is little oxygen available, so the microbes that are there live on hydrogen instead of oxygen. The biogas they give off there is methane CH4 (otherwise known as a ‘natural gas’ in layman’s terms). This is a good fuel and if harnessed and can be used to generate electricity or drive gas-powered vehicles etc. If the biodegradation occurs near the top of the landfill or in a managed compost pile where there is plenty of oxygen, then the biogas is CO2 –  i.e. carbon dioxide.

Both CH4 and CO2 are vented to the atmosphere unless the landfill operator actively collects the CH4 to be sold. Most modern landfills capture CH4 these days as it is worth money. CO2 emissions are not worth anything and are just vented. Unfortunately, if CH4 is vented to the atmosphere it is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 – about 20 times worse.  However, it has a short life of about 7 years in the atmosphere until it gets broken down to CO2.  Hence why it’s so important to capture CO2.

How To Know If a Product Is Biodegradable

For a biodegradable claim to be accurately made on a product, it should state where it has to be disposed of in order to biodegrade. This is why at Biogone, the products we offer are always labelled as Landfill-biodegradable.

What are Recyclable Plastics?

The term ‘recyclable’ refers to where the used items are sent to a facility where they are processed into a raw media form that a manufacturer can then use to make more products.

Taking the example of plastic bottles, if recycled, they are sent to a regrind facility that grinds them up to chips or powder.  Then a bottling maker company may buy those to make more bottles.

Why Most Plastics Can’t be Recycled

However, plastic is not like metal. Aluminium can be recycled to make more aluminium cans a million times. The technical reason for this is metal is formed by atoms of the metal bonding together. So, when you melt a metal then cool it again the metal atoms just bond to their adjacent atoms again quite happily.

Plastic on the other hand is made of molecules that bond together in long chains of atoms. Generally, chains of Carbon with hydrogen atoms along the sides. When plastic is remelted some of this structure gets irrevocably damaged and the plastic molecule loses some of its strength (and other) properties. This can only be done 2-3 times before the molecules are so badly damaged that the new plastic product does not have the desired properties anymore.

So, recycling plastic sounds good but the reality is it is only delaying the inevitable to be thrown out. The plastics industry is spending a fortune on marketing recycling, recycling to make people think if they are buying plastic items or packaging that it can be recycled, and all is good. But the industry well knows it does not work and they will keep selling virgin plastic media all the time.

Biodegradable vs. Recyclable Plastics: What’s Better for the Environment?

in Blow Molding Materials

In creating an environmentally sustainable plastic product, you’ll encounter different kinds of eco-friendly resins. Here’s an introduction to the advantages and disadvantages of biodegradables and recyclables in plastic moulding.

Biodegradable Plastics

Biodegradable plastics are made from traditional petrochemicals treated with biodegradable additives. Under the right conditions, these additives attract microbes that do the hard work of breaking the plastic down more quickly than traditional plastics.

Biodegradable plastic is ideal for items that are meant to be disposable, such as:

• single-use food containers
• Packaging dunnage, and
• plastic utensils that don’t have to stand up to repeat use.

Choosing biodegradable resins

Not all biodegradable resins are equally biodegradable. Some don’t degrade well in landfills — they’re better off in an industrial composting facility. Also, because of the chemical treatment that makes them biodegradable, most can’t be recycled alongside traditional plastics.

If you’re considering biodegradable plastics in your blow moulding project, it’s crucial that you pick the rights ones:

• Make sure the resins your supplier uses meet American Society of the International Association for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards for biodegradability.
• Consider biodegradable plastics that perform well in anaerobic environments like landfills.
• Stay informed about current eco-plastic trends.

Bioplastics vs. biodegradable plastics

Biodegradable plastics are often confused with bioplastics, but the two are very different.

• Biodegradable refers to plastics made from treated petrochemicals.
• Bioplastic refers to plastics made from renewable feedstocks, such as wood, corn, soy, sugar cane, and grasses

Bioplastics are often compostable. Composting takes biodegradability a step further by breaking down rapidly into matter that can be used to support plant life. Bioplastics are best suited for products that are often thrown away with food and other organic materials:

• Straws and party cups
• Disposable plates and bowls
• Single-use utensils

Cost is currently the main drawback of bioplastics, especially when crude oil and natural gas prices are so reasonable. According to John Standish, the technical director of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, “Making polymers directly from traditional petroleum sources is by far more economical, so as appealing as this strategy is, it’s not economically practised very much today.”

For larger products and other items that are more likely to be reused, you may want to consider recycled resins.

Plastics made from recycled resins

Recycled plastics are made from resin processed from post-consumer and post-industrial virgin plastics. Going with recycled resin is ideal for blow moulding products that are not meant to be thrown away. Many common blow moulding items can be made from recycled materials:

• Large items with a long lifecycle, such as furniture, play structures, and sporting goods
• Industry-specific parts, such as medical equipment, auto parts, and device shells
• Plastic utensils, flatware, and cups that are durable enough for repeated reuse
• Products that consumers are used to recycling, such as food containers, water and juice bottles, and other common packaging materials

Americans recycle over 3 billion pounds of plastic bottles alone each year. In 2014, the total annual pounds of plastic bottles collected increased by 97 million pounds. Recycling plastics saves non-renewable resources, offsets the amount of waste that would end up in landfills, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Saving resources

Conserving valuable non-renewable resources is paramount for sustainability efforts. As plastics recycling levels increase, so does the amount of PET, HDPE, and PP resins recovered. This, in turn, saves fossil fuels: recycling one ton of plastic saves 16.3 barrels of oil.

That means that each year, more than 24 million barrels of oil are saved in the United States just from recycling blow moulded plastic bottles.

Freeing up space in landfills

Keeping recycling out of landfills and incinerators is also a boon for the environment. Landfills take up space, leach harmful chemicals into the ground, and emit greenhouse gases.

The amount of waste that goes to landfills in the United States has dropped from a high in 1990 of 145.3 million tons each year to 134.3 million tons in 2013. Recycling efforts are a big part of this reduction. In 2013, 65 million tons of waste were recycled.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions

Reducing greenhouse gases is key in the fight against climate change.

The process of extracting, mining, and producing new resources emits carbon dioxide, a harmful greenhouse gas. Every ton of plastic that’s recycled saves about a ton of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere. Further, making recycled plastic resins generate only half the greenhouse gases of making virgin resin.

With many people heading to the beach for their last hurrah of the season and red tide alerts along with parts of Florida’s coast and seemingly, everywhere you turn, marine pollution is on the mind of late. While we can’t get the images of hundreds of dead fish out of your mind, we can at least offer hope for our oceans and waterways with the latest innovations and technologies to help improve the situations we are seeing on the news today.

Some companies like Disney, Starbucks and McDonald’s are working on alternatives to plastic straws and cups, for example, and moving to biobased plastics, but others are looking at the basic building blocks of bioplastics and finding ways to make them even better. While we covered many of these key players recently in “Plastics Proliferation Transitioning to Bioplastics Boost,” there is even more news of late, especially related to marine life.

Marine biodegradable plastic

One marine pollution solution was recently announced by Idaho-based BioLogiQ, Inc., a bioplastic resin manufacturing company, which developed its NuPlastiQ MB BioPolymer, produced by blending NuPlastiQ GP with PBAT (polybutylene adipate terephthalate).

The new plastic compound is BioLogiQ’s NuPlastiQ GP General Purpose BioPolymer which is a 100% natural, renewably-resourced, a plant-based resin that has been certified by TUV Austria to marine biodegrade in 28 days. When PBAT is mixed with NuPlastiQ GP, it will also biodegrade in marine environments.

Test results showed the new bioplastic is marine biodegradable with a 97% biodegradation rate in ocean water within a one-year period, according to ASTMD6691 standards for marine biodegradability.

Brad LaPray, President and Founder of BioLogiQ, said, “Our ability to produce a marine biodegradable film using a material that was previously not marine biodegradable is a huge technical accomplishment that can significantly reduce both plastic marine debris and the negative effects this debris can have in our oceans.”

How’s that for hope?

He added that “Given the current concern regarding plastics and ocean pollution, we are working on NuPlastiQ MB marine biodegradable formulations of NuPlastiQ GP with polyethene and polypropylene. Our target applications are drink cups, straws, lids, and grocery sacks.”

When asked about certifying the new resin, LaPray said that “The ability for plastics to biodegrade in a marine environment is so new and unusual that acceptable certification standards do not exist. We plan to work with industry and governments to develop new standards.”

BioLogiQ has come a long way from its 2011 roots of using excess starch from potato processing for bioplastics. According to BioLogiQ’s press release, their “goal is to help build a world free of pollution caused by fossil fuel-based plastics.”

In other good news as reported by the Digest in April, scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Biology, successfully tested a biodegradable, super-thin “shield” that could be used to prevent coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. The shield is made out of calcium carbonate—the same material found in coral skeletons—and is 50,000 times thinner than human hair.

Ok, not ok

Not everyone thinks bioplastics are okey-dokey, hunky-dory and the answer to ocean waste problems. Take Greenpeace for example, which is concerned that bioplastics will contribute to the problem of marine waste and insists that the only solution is to reduce the use of plastics altogether.

“Over periods of days, weeks or even months, a bioplastic item could present just as much threat to marine life as a conventional plastic item,” Fiona Nicholls of Greenpeace tells The Hindu. Reducing the use of plastics is the only real solution, she adds.

Science estimates that 8 million metric tons end up in the ocean annually. A number of initiatives—ranging from government bans on straws and plastic bags to fast food packaging swaps based on bioplastics—have been introduced to address the issue.

Several experts, however, insist consumer behaviour changes and not bioplastics are the solution. “People think that biodegradable means nothing is dumped in nature. But that’s not the case at all,” said engineer Virginie Le Ravalec of the French Environment and Energy Management Agency. Separate collection systems for bioplastics would be required.

Another example of things not being all hunky-dory with bioplastics is, as reported by the Digest in November 2017, 150 organizations in the United Kingdom that are calling for a ban on oxo-degradable plastic packaging because it falls short of protecting marine life from microplastics.

“The available evidence overwhelmingly suggests oxo-degradable plastics do not achieve what their producers claim and instead contribute to microplastic pollution,” Rob Opsomer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation told Triple Pundit. “In addition, these materials are not suited for effective long-term reuse, recycling at scale or composting, meaning they cannot be part of a circular economy.”

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…

So what’s the solution to the marine pollution problem? Bioplastics? Overall plastic reduction? Both? As Bob Dylan so aptly said in one of his famous songs, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

What exactly does that mean? Where is this answer that is blowing in the wind? How do we get it?

Bob Dylan had this insight to offer, “Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some …But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong.”

The good news is companies like BioLogiQ see the answer blowin’ in the wind and are grabbing it and doing something about it. We hope to see more companies like that making a difference to bring about marine pollution solutions.

CMP is constantly innovating machines that can run as much as recycled plastics so that it can contribute to saving the planet earth