Bioplastic

We all know how much we rely on plastic in our everyday lives (if you don't, just look around you!). Plastic is made from oil, and this tends to bother environmentalists. As well as being non-renewable (i.e. it will run out someday), oil is rather polluting when dragged from the ground and "used" - read: burned. And of course, besides all that polluting the C02 it emits also contributes to climate change.

One of the lowest hanging fruit (in this culture's mind's eye) concerning the struggle to be more sustainable is the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag and wrapping that food products are sold in. To replace conventional plastic bags and packaging, bioplastics have been invented. These are plastics manufactured from "renewable" sources - mainly glucose which normally comes from refined maize (or potatoes or beets). Increasingly you will see advertising on shopping bags saying that they are biodegradable, these are invariably made from bioplastics. With regards to there biodegradability, my aunt and uncle (who actually have a very functioning compost heap - nice) have tried to compost them, but have been unsuccessful up until now, apparently they persist long after the rest of the food scraps, paper, etc. Biodegradability is only a measure of the amount of time it takes something to breakdown anyway - but that's another blog post.

So bioplastics are becoming increasingly popular, especially by those who *really* want to be seen to be doing something good for the environment. At my local supermarket, all the organic fruit is placed on a recycled cardboard tray and wrapped in a very loud crinkly bioplastic (the normal fruit of course gets the conventional thin plastic bag - which are somehow exempt from laws banning plastic shopping bags...). The problem with bioplastics is that there production consumes a lot more energy than conventional plastics. The actual production of the plastics obviously takes energy in both cases, and it seems that bioplastics consume more energy in their production, but it also takes energy to produce the feedstock. Oil obviously requires drilling, transport, etc. But glucose (or starch - made of lots of glucose molecules) needs all the inputs required to grow it on top of the energy intensive refining process. And when you boil it down, these inputs are essentially oil (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, petrol for the tractor) - I'm assuming a company will use the cheapest glucose around, which with our skewed subsidies is more than likely not organic!

So it turns out that at the end of the day the more environmental choice would probably be conventional plastic. Of course neither of these are really environmental choices at all, and if I was writing this post for my other "live simply it will help the planet" blog I would probably end off by saying we should all be re-using our cotton, hemp or plastic bags. In this case though I imagine you can guess what my solution will be...