The environmental impact of creating and disposing of large quantities of plastic for food consumption is becoming a major topic. It impacts our favorite brands from Starbucks to McDonalds and touches our lives every time we get a meal to go. 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”. That’s a pretty tall order for something that is also supposed to withstand heat and liquid contact… think coffee cups or soup bowls.
One area where biodegradable products really struggle is in the landfill. When these products are buried they receive very little oxygen which prevents good bacteria from thriving and breaking the materials down. As a result, methane gas, a greenhouse gas with over 62 times the GWP (Global Warming Potential) of carbon dioxide, is produced.
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 substantial amount 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 states that every year, the US consumes 80 million tons of fossil fuel in the production of plastics alone! 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 in the process.
The article above goes on to 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.” This is bad news for the environment and consumers who might feel mislead. What is worse? Wasting energy or producing products that will take hundreds of years to break down?
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 product life cycle needs to be sustainable. If the companies creating green plastics can 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.
