Bioplastics

Bioplastics

   Back in the day, the latest announcement was the development of a new diaper, a disposable one.  No longer would mothers have to rinse and store and wash their cotton diapers, for now they could simply throw them away...no worries, except one.  The landfills began filling up with them, billions of them and virtually none of them recyclable or able to break down (for the most part, this hasn't changed since they sill aren't recyclable and take nearly 500 years to break down).  Ah well, that's a problem from long ago (we thought) so might as well go have that one cup of specialized coffee, the one you make yourself in the tiny pod...go ahead, and welcome to the newest disposable problem.

   It is estimated that many of the things we really don't "see" are problems catching up with us as our landfills grow ever larger and begin to leach through holding liners and drip down into water tables.  Those Keurig and Sensio and other coffee pods you see, not only in homes but in stores and waiting areas (almost all of the pods are proprietary and unable to be used in other manufacturers makers, the sensor at the top recognizing the color of the pod's cover...yes, you can fool the sensor so that your maker becomes a universal one), will soon reach 100 million annually...and none of those pods are recyclable.

   This was the subject of a 3-page advert, primarily sponsored by BASF and Meridian MHG and featured in Fortune.  Despite the rapid compostability of coffee, the grounds are trapped in a non-biodegradable plastic cup, topped with non-biodegradable foil, all of which caused the above companies to notice a potential market.  What if a new form of plastic, one that could biodegrade, could be made simply and profitably (the MHG video gives a simple explanation of the process)?  Originally tried with corn (not profitable unless highly subsidized, which remains true for almost all corn products, from ethanol to high fructose corn syrup), biodegrable plastic, or bioplastic, is not a new idea...the new idea came in the form of proftiability, that and air.

   The numbers are staggering since we have produced more plastic (a petroleum product which means more oil) in the past 10 years than we have in the past 100 years.  This means --not counting the billions of plastic diapers and plastic-wrapped pallets and plastic covers on farm fields and plastic trash liners and plastic cushioning in packages and plastic wrappings on store displays-- 50 billion plastic bags (hooray to those countries and cities that have banned them) and 35 billion plastic water bottles tossed out every year (Elizabeth Royte has written extensively on these subjects with her books, Garbage Land and Bottlemania and her blog alone makes for interesting reading).

   If a plastic could be made, in this case from the canola plant (canola oil in itself is getting another look as the new oil to benefit our health, supposedly better than olive oil and other newer trendy oils, due to its interaction with our blood), then the market would be huge.  And already some of the plastics are FDA approved meaning that those countless plastic cups and forks and plates could soon be safely tossed away without guilt.  But then we come to the other part of the equation...air.

   Our landfills today are, for the most part, so dense and so compact that they're being tapped for the methane being produced at its bottom (successfully so, in many cases).  But landfills are not large compost piles.  Once buried, the trash stays buried and close to pristine (one instance had a 40-year old newpaper dug up and was quite readable).  So no matter how biodegradable the product, if there is no air or interaction with air, the trash will take its time breaking down (currently, the UK leads the world in landfills).

   Still, the move to biodegradable plastic is a good start for our world seems to show little sign of stopping the consumption of this easy to get product.  We appear to be coming full circle to the decades-old phrase of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle;  but as with the climate, we are finding ourselves hard-pressed to slow the usage overall.  The population grows, the time available slows, and convenience becomes a guilt-free exception to our good intentions.  We put out the trash at the end of the week and poof, like magic it is gone.  Somewhere. 

   How much longer we can continue to toss and throw away our resources is something few of us want to think about.  But this time, it truly just might start with that small capsule of coffee in the morning.