Bioplastic items already exist, of course, but whether they’re actually better for the environment or can truly compete with traditional plastics is complicated. Some bioplastics aren’t much better than fossil fuel-based polymers. And for the few that are less injurious to the planet, cost and social acceptance may stand in the way. Even if widespread adoption of bioplastics occurs down the line, it won’t be a quick or cheap fix. In the meantime, there is also some pollution caused by bioplastics themselves to consider. Even if bioplastics are often less damaging than the status quo, they aren’t a flawless solution.
So, could saving the planet simply come down to some design decisions? We may soon find out. Market demand for bioplastics is ballooning, with global industrial output predicted to reach 2.62 million tonnes annually by 2023, according to the Berlin-based trade association European Bioplastics. Currently, that’s only one percent of the 335 million tonnes of conventional plastics produced every year. But the European Commission, in its 2018 Circular Economy Action Plan, detailed bioplastics research as part of their strategy to drive investment in a climate-neutral economy.
“Sometimes we like to see the word ‘green,’ but we always should have appropriate awareness about the material we are dealing with,” says Federica Ruggero, an environmental engineer at the University of Florence, Italy. “It’s a very good starting point in the production chain to have these new materials that can substitute plastics … but it’s also important to consider the waste that comes from this material.”
To put it plainly: not all bioplastics are created equal. So which ones may be key to a genuinely “greener” future? In 2020, five candidates seem to be rising to the eco-friendly top.
Bioplastics have come a long way since the days of Alexander Parkes. Today, these materials can be made from many renewable resources: cornstarch, beet sugar, kiwi skins, shrimp shells, wood pulp, even mangos and seaweed. They can function approximately the same as materials like vinyl or PET, the plastic most commonly used in drink bottles.
But if these polymers don’t actually have a smaller carbon footprint than plastics refined from petroleum, they may only be another example of greenwashing, a misleading marketing tactic more about image than outcomes. That’s one of the problems with the fact that there isn’t yet a universal definition of “bioplastic.”
“Bioplastic is basically anything that people like to call bioplastic,” says Dr. Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. The term can currently mean a material made from fossil fuels that can biodegrade, such as PCL, a plastic used in packaging and drug delivery.
Bioplastics can also be biobased and not biodegradable, like the PET bottles Coca-Cola made entirely from plants. But their end product is chemically identical to PET made from oil, so it can still take centuries to fully break down. In 2013, the Coca-Cola Company (considered by one environmental advocacy group as the “most polluting brand”) pledged to make all their bottles this way by 2020, but it later backpedaled to focus more on recycling, according to the The W all Street Journal. Greenpeace, the pro-environment non-profit, has said, “Plant bottles are not the answer.”
Additives mixed with conventional plastics to speed up biodegradation don’t seem to help either. Oxo-degradable products are standard plastics that are chemically treated to quickly fragment when exposed to sunlight and oxygen—but they don’t break down entirely. And because these plastics are otherwise no different from untreated versions, the microplastics they produce can still pose environmental hazards. The European Union is currently working to ban oxo-degradable plastics.
Generally, it appears the starting material is less important than what it’s turned into, making the ideal plastic both biobased and biodegradable. A few of these polymers do exist, but they disintegrate only under certain conditions.
Read More: Bioplastics continue to blossom—are they really better for the environment? – Ars Technica
Pandemic prompted states to temporarily ban reusable grocery bags and stalled legislation aimed at reducing plastic packaging
2020 was supposed to be the year America revolted against plastic.
Consumers were refusing straws and toting their own coffee mugs. Legislators had proposed an unprecedented wave of laws to ban single-use plastics. Even companies like Coke and Pepsi were opening up to the idea plastic might not be the future.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Now activists worry the anti-plastic movement is once again back in the trenches.
The fight has stalled on a number of fronts across the US. Fears about the virus spreading on surfaces prompted several states to temporarily ban reusable grocery bags, sending single-use bags flooding back into the marketplace. Major legislation aimed at reducing plastics packaging has stalled as lawmakers’ priorities shifted elsewhere. Disposable masks and gloves have become the harbingers of pandemic life, along with plastic take-out food containers and the debris of Amazon packages.
Meanwhile the plastics industry ramped up its lobbying, urging federal agencies to declare the sanitary benefits of disposable plastics, and arguing that plastic bag bans went against public health.
“The plastic reduction movement was in full swing and moving faster than any environmental issue I’ve ever worked on,” said Martin Bourque, who runs the Ecology Center, the recycling program in Berkeley, California, that has spearheaded waste reduction since the 1970s. “Since March, it’s all been on hold.”
California has long led the way in anti-plastic efforts, banning single-use bags in 2014. But when the pandemic hit the state suddenly reversed course, suspending the law. Numerous California county health departments took it a step further and banned customers from bringing their own reusable bags into stores.
“When Covid-19 came out, we were worried about everything,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the environmental group the Last Beach Cleanup, and a member of California’s newly-created recycling commission.“There was all this conflicting information. The health crisis brought everything to a halt.”
The result has been 500m additional plastic bags handed out per month in California alone, estimates Mark Murray, the executive director of Californians against Waste.
At least five states – including California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Maine – suspended or delayed bag bans and other laws designed to reduce disposable plastics because of the pandemic, according to a count compiled by the Product Stewardship Institute, a national non-profit committed to reducing the environmental impacts of packaging. New Hampshire and Illinois, which do not have statewide plastic bag bans, nevertheless banned customers from bringing their own reusables into stores.
The group’s tracker also found more than two dozen local jurisdictions – from Hawaii county, Hawaii, to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – have suspended their bag laws.
While some of the states, including California, are starting to reinstate their old bag laws, some environmentalists fear it could be tough to get consumers back on track.
“It’s taken us five years to really cement the behavior of bringing your own bags,” said Borque, whose center handles the recycling for the City of Berkeley. “From a recycler’s perspective, the change has been huge. To go back and think we might have all those plastic bags clogging our storm drains, littering our pasture land and cluttering our streets is really chilling.”
The fear of reusable bags seemed logical at first. Little was known about how the virus spread, and plastic lobbyists quickly capitalized on this knowledge gap.
From yogurt containers to bath mats, stuff you use every day may come with hidden risks. Here are tips to minimize exposure.
Most of the plastics that consumers encounter in daily life—including plastic wrap, bath mats, yogurt containers, and coffee cup lids—contain potentially toxic chemicals, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
The researchers behind the study analyzed 34 everyday plastic products made of eight types of plastic to see how common toxicity might be. Seventy-four percent of the products they tested were toxic in some way.
The team was hoping to be able “to tell people which plastic types to use and which not [to use],” says Martin Wagner, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and senior author of the new study. “But it was more complicated than that.” Instead of pointing to a few problematic types of plastic that should be avoided, the testing instead revealed that issues of toxicity were widespread—and could be found in nearly any type of plastic.
The results help illustrate just how little we know about the wide variety of chemicals in commonly used plastics, says Wagner.
To be clear, the plastics found to have some form of toxicity aren’t necessarily harmful to human health. The researchers tested the chemicals in ways that are very different from how most people come into contact with them. Extracting compounds from plastic and exposing them directly to various cells does not mimic the exposure you get when you drink from a refillable plastic water bottle, for example.
But the results do call into question the assumption that plastic products are safe until proved otherwise, says Wagner.
“Every type of plastic contains unknown chemicals,” and many of those chemicals may well be unsafe, says Jane Muncke, Ph.D., an environmental toxicologist who is the managing director and chief scientific officer for the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, which works to strengthen understanding of the chemicals that come into contact with food.
Here’s what the study found, what we know about how plastic could be affecting human health, and what you can do to reduce your exposure to some of the chemicals that researchers are concerned about.
The 34 products tested were made from seven plastics with the biggest market share (including polypropylene and PVC), plus an eighth type of plastic—biobased, biodegradable PLA—that doesn’t yet have a huge market share but is often sold as more sustainable and “better,” according to Wagner.
Because there are millions of plastic products available, this study is not fully representative of the entire market, but it included a sampling of commonly used products made from the most widely used plastics.
The researchers detected more than 1,000 chemicals in these plastics, 80 percent of which were unknown. But the study was designed in part to show that it’s possible to assess the toxicity of plastic consumer products directly, even without knowing exactly which chemicals are present, Wagner says.
In the lab, the team checked to see if the plastics were toxic in a variety of ways, including testing for components that acted as endocrine disruptors, chemicals that can mimic hormones. (Elevated exposure to endocrine disruptors has been linked to a variety of health problems in humans, including various cancers, reduced fertility, and problems with the development of reproductive organs.) Almost three-quarters of the tested plastics displayed some form of toxicity.
Despite the large proportion of products that displayed a form of toxicity, Wagner says it’s important to note that some products didn’t show any signs of toxicity, meaning that many companies may already have access to safer forms of plastic.
It’s not yet clear from this work that any type of plastic can be consistently made in a nontoxic way; every type of plastic tested in this study sometimes displayed toxicity. That could happen due to chemicals added to the base plastic for color or flexibility, because of impurities in ingredients, or because of new chemicals that emerge in the manufacturing process.
By evaluating consumer products themselves and all the chemicals they contain, this study takes a very comprehensive approach to measure plastic toxicity, according to Laura Vandenberg, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, who was not involved in the study. That’s because it’s testing plastics as people encounter them, not just by isolating individual chemicals.
The fact that plastics are made of mixtures of thousands of chemicals is important, says Muncke, who was also not involved in the new study. That’s because a combination of chemicals can make a product more or less risky. Individual levels of one concerning chemical, like BPA, might be below the threshold of concern. But if other chemicals that raise similar concerns are present, they could combine to create a hazardous effect.
Most people don’t understand how little we know about the safety of the chemicals found in plastic, Muncke says.
But in recent years, consumers and public health experts alike have increasingly expressed concern about the potential health effects of our ongoing exposure to ordinary, everyday plastics and to the microplastics that people are inadvertently exposed to through food, water, and the air.
“We’ve surrounded ourselves with plastic. The stuff has been used to package foods for the last 40 years; it’s everywhere,” says Muncke. “It’s fair that the average citizen would say, ‘Well if it wasn’t safe, it wouldn’t be on supermarket shelves.’ ”
In practice, however, “it’s actually not really well understood,” she says, and “we are still using known hazardous chemicals to make plastic packaging that leaches into food.”
Some of the best-known examples include BPA, found in plastic water bottles, plastic storage containers, thermal paper receipts, and the lining of food cans; and phthalates, found in many PVC products (such as pipes) and added to many plastics (such as imitation leather and inflatable toys) to make them more flexible, says Vandenberg.
In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a report saying that some chemicals in plastic, including bisphenols (such as BPA) and phthalates, may put children’s health at risk, and recommended that families reduce exposure to them.
Studies in humans link BPA to metabolic disease, obesity, infertility, and disorders like ADHD, Vandenberg says. Studies in animals have also linked BPA to prostate and mammary cancer, as well as brain development problems. Phthalates are known to affect hormones, she says, which means they can alter the development of reproductive organs and alter sperm count in males.
“You’re not going to just drop dead [from hormonal activity in plastics], but it could contribute to diseases that may manifest over decades, or it could affect unborn embryos and fetuses,” Vandenberg says.
And there are many more chemicals that we know far less about, as this latest study showed. Sometimes, when chemicals associated with known problems (like phthalates) are phased out, we later discover that the replacement chemicals cause similar problems, something Vandenberg describes as “chemical whack-a-mole.”
Because there are so many unknowns, we should take a more precautionary approach to decide whether or not plastic is safe, Wagner argues. Instead of taking something off the market after it has been proved to be unsafe, manufacturers could test for toxicity before products are sold. “Better to be safe now than to be sorry in 10 or 15 years,” he says.
Totally avoiding plastic is almost impossible, but it’s possible to reduce your exposure to concerning chemicals found in these products.
Eat fresh food. The more processed your food is, the more it may have come into contact with materials that could potentially leach concerning chemicals, says Muncke.
Don’t buy into “bioplastic” hype. Green or biodegradable plastic sounds great, but so far it doesn’t live up to the hype, Wagner says. Most data indicate that these products aren’t as biodegradable as their marketing would imply, he says. Plus, this latest study showed that these products (such as biobased, biodegradable PLA) can have high rates of toxicity, he says.
Don’t use plastics that we know are problematic. But don’t assume that all other products are inherently safe,either. The American Academy of Pediatrics has previously noted that the recycling codes “3,” “6,” and “7” indicate the presence of phthalates, styrene, and bisphenols, respectively—so you may want to avoid using containers that have those numbers in the recycling symbol on the bottom. Wagner adds that “3” and “7” also indicate PVC and PUR plastics, respectively, which his study found contained the most toxicity. But products made from other types of plastic contained toxic chemicals, too, which means that reducing your plastic use overall is probably the best way to avoid exposure.
Don’t store your food in plastic. Food containers can contain chemicals that leach into food. This is especially true for foods that are greasy or fatty, according to Muncke, and foods that are highly acidic or alkaline, according to Vandenberg. Opt for inert stainless steel, glass, or ceramic containers.
Don’t heat up plastic. Heating up plastics can increase the rate through which chemicals leach out, so try to avoid putting them in the microwave or dishwasher. Even leaving plastic containers out in a hot car could increase the release of concerning chemicals, says Vandenberg.
Vote with your wallet. Try to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic in the first place, says Vandenberg. “We need to make manufacturers aware that there is a problem,” she says. “There are products that could provide the benefits we need to make the food chain safer.”
Source: Most Plastic Products Contain Potentially Toxic Chemicals, Study Reveals – Bioplastics News
Reusable bags, also known as “bags for life,” are trendy among the environmentally conscious consumers. Consumers who are thinking they are cutting down on plastic waste don’t know that they are actually contributing to plastic waste even more. In some grocery stores, these bags are required unless you want to pay a high price for the single-use option, in other stores, there is no other option.
The problem with reusable bags is they are made up of a much thicker and denser plastic than single-use bags. Not only that, but people aren’t even re-using them much. This means we’ve replaced cheap single-use plastic bags with more expensive, thicker single-use bags.
Since people are using the “bags for life” a few times, then discarding them, it adds more plastic overall to our landfills. In addition to thicker plastic, the bags are woven with fine plastic fibers. These fibers become microplastics that can potentially enter our food chain through bioaccumulation.
A report from Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) investigated the statistics of reusable bag sales. The researchers looked into grocery stores in the United Kingdom and found that the top stores sold 1.5 billion plastic reusable bags so far in 2019. That means each household acquired around 54 “bags for life.” In 2018, the top eight grocery stores sold 959 million of these bags, so from the previous year, the number of sales has risen significantly.
The report says:
Our survey reveals a huge rise in the sale of plastic ‘bags for life,’ demonstrating the inadequacy of the current policy which is clearly not providing a strong enough incentive for people to stop using ‘bags for life’ as a single-use option.
Since these statistics are annual numbers, people are replacing the reusable bags regularly, at a rate that’s increasingly approaching single use. “We have replaced one problem with another. Bags for life have become bags for a week,” said one of the report’s authors, Fiona Nicholls.
These reusable bags are still too cheap, which may be the problem. Since they’re cheap, they’re easily discarded after a couple of uses. One solution could be to set the price higher on re-usable bags. If the bags are very expensive, people will most likely hold on to them longer to avoid paying for a new one.
Ultimately, there is one real solution –to stop using plastic once and for all. If single-use bags were not made of plastic, then consumers could use them all the time, and it wouldn’t matter. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Therefore, if you want to be an environmentally conscious individual, then bring your own reusable bags when you go out shopping. If you have a reusable bag, reuse it until you can’t anymore because it’s falling apart.
Source: Reusable Plastic Bags Are Worse Than Single-Use Bags
Colorado lawmakers have a decision to make: Ban single-use plastic bags and foam takeout containers from many restaurants and retailers, or keep the plastics as an option but have food service packaging distributors pay fees to boost state recycling efforts by $75 million in five years. Or do both at the same time.
The first bill is backed by environmentalists and is a longstanding priority for Democrats. The competition, introduced one week later, comes from the American Chemistry Council, which represents DuPont, ExxonMobil Chemical Company, 3M and other large producers of plastic products.
The proposals present alternate courses for Colorado, which has a recycling rate twice as badas the national average. Plastic regulation is a climate issue, as these products pollute air, soil and water sources, and emit greenhouse gases as they idle in landfills.
These dueling bills are also an example of the impact that lobbyists have in the statehouse.
“It is the plastic industry’s attempt to draw people away from the ‘reduce’ aspect of pollution prevention,” said Rep. Alex Valdez, a Denver Democrat and a lead sponsor of the ban bill. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, look over here.’ That’s all it is. Does it actually want to solve a problem? No, because their business is selling plastic, and our intention is reducing plastic going into landfills and into our bodies.”
But Valdez’s co-sponsor, Sen. Julie Gonzales, thinks that view is short-sighted. Though she also believes that the alternative bill amounts to an interference campaign, she said the legislature should take the industry up on putting more money into the plastics problem — even if plastics recycling is a fraught topic, considering China recently stopped taking tons of U.S. plastics to be recycled.
“I think it’s ridiculous that there are policymakers in this building who think that we shouldn’t be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” the Denver Democrat said. “They’re both good bills, they both should pass and be signed into law.”
The Democratic majority of the Colorado Legislature seems to be in general agreement about the harmful nature of products like single-use plastic bags and polystyrene food containers. These products are difficult and costly to recycle, and the measure to ban the products follows a similar but stalled effort in 2020.
Plastics industry representatives argue bans are ineffective because whatever is prohibited is often replaced by something equally expensive or difficult to recycle.
So much plastic trash is flowing into the oceans that 90 percent of seabirds eat it now and virtually everyone will be consuming it by 2050. That finding revealed in a new study published this week, tracks for the first time how widespread plastics have become inside seabirds around the world.
“That was shocking,” says Chris Wilcox, a research scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and lead author of the study. “Essentially, the number of species and number of individuals within species that you find plastic in is going up fairly rapidly by a couple of percent every year.”
Plastic found inside birds includes bags, bottle caps, synthetic fibers from clothing, and tiny rice-sized bits.
Scientists have been tracking plastic ingestion by seabirds for decades. In 1960, plastic was found in the stomachs of fewer than five percent, but by 1980, it had jumped to 80 percent.
The most disturbing finding, Wilcox says, is the link between the increasing rate of plastics manufacturing and the increasing rate at which the material is saturating seabirds.
“Global plastic production doubles every 11 years,” Wilcox says. “So in the next 11 years, we’ll make as much plastic as we’ve made since plastic was invented. Seabirds’ ingestion of plastic is tracking with that.” (Learn more about marine pollution.)
Wilcox and his team reviewed research dating to 1962 for their report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists then combined that data with maps showing the range of 186 species of seabirds and the global distribution of marine debris to construct a model that predicts which species consume the most plastic.
The highest concentration of plastic in birds, Wilcox says, can be found in populations in southern Australia, South Africa, and South America — where coastlines are closest to loosely-concentrated collections of ocean debris in the southern Pacific, southern Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
“It’s at the edge of the gyre and the edge of the seabird distribution that are at the highest risk,” Wilcox says.
Large birds, such as the albatross, eat large amounts of plastics. But that doesn’t mean large birds eat proportionately more plastic. Parakeet auklets, a small, diving bird that lives in the Northern Pacific near Alaska, shows the highest predisposition toward eating plastic, Wilcox says.
Albatross are more prone to eating plastic because they fish by skimming their beaks across the top of the water, and inadvertently take in plastics floating on the surface. Petrels and shearwaters, which live on offshore islands and forage over large areas of sea, also contain large amounts of plastic in their stomachs.
Plastic found inside birds includes bags, bottle caps, synthetic fibers from clothing, and tiny rice-sized bits that have been broken down by the sun and waves.
The health effects of plastics on seabird populations have not been fully measured. But observational data collected is troubling enough, Wilcox says.
Sharp-edged plastic kills birds by punching holes in internal organs. Some seabirds eat so much plastic, there is little room left in their gut for food, which affects their body weight, jeopardizing their health. One bird examined by scientist Denise Hardesty had consumed 200 pieces of plastic.
“If you add more plastic to the gut, it will eventually make a difference,” Wilcox says. “The trend suggests that it’s going to keep increasing.”
A recent study found a 67 percent decline in seabird populations between 1950 and 2010.
“Essentially seabirds are going extinct,” says Wilcox. “Maybe not tomorrow. But they’re headed down sharply. Plastic is one of the threats they face.”