Green Plastic: Is it Really Green?

With the growing trend in environmentally safe products, many of you have probably seen a rise in Eco-safe products from the cups at Starbucks to the plastic cutlery at fast food restaurants. Plastic, especially, has begun to be made with the environment in mind. Many plastic products are being made from plants like corn or potatoes. Some plastics are compostable while others are biodegradable. Both sound pretty good for the environment, but which one is the best option?

According to greenlivingtips.com, biodegradable products "break down through the action of a naturally occurring microorganism, such as bacteria, fungi etc. over a period of time". In other words, the product eventually becomes part of the earth in a safe, natural way. Biodegradable products are usually made from plant or animal sources like corn starch or potatoes.

Compostable products, on the other hand, are considered to be "greener" than biodegradable products. The American Society for Testing & Materials states that for a plastic to be considered compostable, "it must be able to break down into carbon dioxide, water and biomass at the same rate as paper. It also needs to look like compost, should not produce any toxic material, and should be able to support plant life".

Both seem like pretty good choices for anyone who wants to protect the environment. Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages, especially for anything considered biodegradable. When biodegradable materials are dumped into a landfill, it is put in a place which has little oxygen, thus preventing "good" bacteria from thriving. As a result, methane gas, a greenhouse gas with over 62 times the GWP (Global Warming Potential) of carbon dioxide, is produced. In addition, some biodegradable plastics can contain harmful toxins.

It would seem, then, that compostable plastics are the greenest choice of plastics. But are they really? While the plastic itself is created with green materials such as corn or potatoes, the production of compostable plastics, or any plastic for that matter, requires a lot of energy. In fact, greenlivingtips.com claims that the amount of fossil fuel consumed in the creation of green plastic is more than that consumed in the production of regular plastic. This article on green plastics by mindfully.org says that every year, the US consumes 80 million tons of fossil fuel in the production of plastics. So that means, even though you're using potato based silver ware or eating out of a compostable Corn Chips bag, you are still using a lot of oil and energy to do it.

The articles goes on the say that when researchers calculated "all the energy and raw materials required for each step of growing [polyhydroxyalkanoate] PHA in plants--harvesting and drying the corn stover, extracting PHA from the stover, purifying the plastic, separating and recycling the solvent, and blending the plastic to produce a resin--[they] discovered that this approach would consume even more fossil resources than most petrochemical manufacturing routes."

The idea of green plastics, while a step in the right direction, clearly needs some improvement, especially in the area of production. In order for a product to be truly green, the entire production of the product needs to be environmentally sustainable. If the companies creating green plastics could find a way to use renewable energy along with renewable materials, perhaps plastics will become even more green. And this is in fact the case for many companies that purchase from wind farms or have installed solar panels on their facilities.