Posted in EcoRI.org by JOANNA DETZ/ecoRI News staff 
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Click infographic to enlarge. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI News staff)
Maybe you’ve seen them in the supermarket. Or maybe you’ve seen the ads. Maybe you were skeptical. Or maybe you thought, Cool!
We’re talking about plastic bottles that are made from plants. Dasani’s PlantBottle is one.
The claim on the bottle and on Dasani’s
website,
which shows an image of a water bottle emerging from a dew-flecked
green leaf, is that its plant-based PET (polyethylene terephthalate)
bottles are made from up to 30 percent plants and are 100 percent
recyclable.
But buyers of Rhode Island’s post-consumer plastic consider
plant-based PET plastic to be a contaminant, according to Sarah Kite,
director of recycling services for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery
Corporation (RIRRC).
"Until they (our buyers) tell us that plant-based plastics are OK, we
have to say that they are not recyclable in Rhode Island," Kite said.
For now at least, the place for Rhode Islanders to put these bottles is in the trash, not the recycling bin.
Perplexed that Dasani’s marketing claims weren’t matching up to reality, ecoRI News contacted Steve Alexander at the
Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers
(APPR), a national trade association representing companies who
acquire, reprocess and sell more than 90 percent of the post-consumer
plastic in North America.
Alexander, who said APPR worked with Coca-Cola, Dasani’s parent
company, to design the PlantBottle to meet current recycling
specifications, was blunt when told that RIRRC’s customers consider PET
made from plants to be a contaminant. “You’ve gotten some bad
information,” he said.
“These bottles are the same as other PET bottles and can be recycled
as PET,” Alexander said. “If it has the same molecular components, it is
recyclable.”
To make sure the facts were right, ecoRI News contacted its science
expert and composting guru, Michael Bradlee, founder of Earth Appliance.
He backed up Alexander's claim.
"Purified chemicals do not retain any memory of their origin;
monoethylene glycol (MEG), one of the components in PET, derrived from
petrolium is absolutely identical and cannot be distinguished from
plant-based MEG," Bradlee said.
ecoRI News went back to Kite, who stood by her earlier statement that
plant-based PET is not accepted by RIRRC customers at this time.
And so, with Rhode Island rolling out its new single-stream recycling
system this week, a system that aims to simplify recycling for
residents and calls on them to put all plastic containers of 2 gallons
or less in their recycling bin, we already have an exception to that
rule. Actually, we have a few, all of them bioplastics.
PET plastic made from plants, along with PLA plastics and
biodegradable plastics, are all considered trash in Rhode Island, at
least for now.
Head spinning yet? Welcome to the complex world of bioplastics.
What is this stuff?Bioplastics have been around
since the 1950s, but with awareness growing as to the scourge of
traditional fossil fuel-intensive plastics and with the cost of
petroleum on the rise, companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi are looking
for alternative ways to create plastics and, parenthetically, a
marketing buzz.
Because they rely less on greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuel and
more on renewable plant-based sources, bioplasics are generally
considered to be more sustainable than traditional plastics.
A bioplastic can have one or all of the following attributes: bio-based (made from plants), biodegradable and/or compostable.
Currently, bioplastics represent less than 1 percent of all plastics
on the market today, but you can expect that percentage to increase as
new innovations come online and as more companies adopt bioplastic
packaging.
Bioplastics can be a PET (or an HDPE)The Dasani
bottles mentioned above are PET bottles. PET is made up of two
components: monoethylene glycol (MEG) and terephthalate. MEG accounts
for 30 percent of the weight of PET and this is what Coca-Cola, with its
PlantBottle, is producing from plant sources, such as sugarcane grown
in Brazil.
Historically, MEG was created using petroleum.
Odwalla, the smoothie-producing subsidiary of Coca-Cola, now sells
its drinks in an HDPE, or high-density polyethylene, plastic bottle made
almost entirely (at least 96 percent) from molasses and sugarcane.
Though the raw materials for plant-based PET and HDPE come from
renewable, lower-carbon sources, the resulting plastics are chemically
identical to traditional plastic bottles. And, as plastic, the
plant-based bottles carry all the same environmental impacts as those
made from fossil fuels, and they don't biodegrade.
So, are they better for the environment? That is a complicated
question and one that depends on how the plants used to make the plastic
are grown: Are they grown with petrochemicals? Are they produced from
GMOs? And so much depends on the afterlife of the bottle — in Rhode
Island plant-based PET (and HDPE) bottles go in the trash.
Even in states or municipalities that do recycle these bottles,
manufacturers typically peg the recycling rate for PET at 27 percent.
And so, even if a PET bottle made from plants isn’t front loaded with
carbon, it could still wind up in a landfill, or, worse, in the ocean,
where it will pollute just as a traditional plastic bottle would.
Communication breakdownBiodegradable plastic, a
plastic that can be plant or petroleum based, is appealing to consumers
because there is the promise that the bottle they’ve just purchased will
— Presto! — disappear.
ENSO Plastics,
an Arizona-based company that produces one such biodegradable plastic
bottle, claims that its bottles are biodegradable in both landfill and
compost environments. The company creates material for its bottles by
injecting the polymers that make up plastic with additives that attract
microbes, which, in turn, break down the plastic.
But not much breaks down in a landfill, which lacks oxygen. And, even
if biodegradable plastics do break down in this oxygen-free
environment, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent
than carbon dioxide.
To properly degrade, biodegradable plastics need to be sent to a
commercial composting or anaerobic facility. But, most places, Rhode
Island included, lack such facilities. Because of the biodegradable
additives, these plastics are universally considered to be a contaminant
among recyclers.
"It is difficult to impossible in some cases to properly identify the
plastics with the additives," Kite said. "This means that all the
selected plastics are sent to the remanufacturer. The plastics with
additives are reblended into the new plastic, compromising the plastic's
integrity."
There also is concern, among environmental groups, that biodegradable
plastics may actually encourage litter and increase consumption if
people think that these plastics will degrade.
PLA it forwardYou’ve perhaps seen compostable
plastic at eco-minded cafés, where compostable to-go cups are used for
iced coffee or other cold drinks.
These cups are made from PLA, or polylactic acid. Producing PLA uses
65 percent less energy than producing conventional plastics, according
to an independent analysis commissioned by
NatureWorks, the Cargill-owned company that produces PLA from corn.
PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a
“controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. A controlled
environment is a large facility where compost reaches 140 degrees for 10
consecutive days.
But again, here in Rhode Island, residents have no access to
commercial-scale composting, and so the promises of compostable plastic
breaking down are fleeting. Instead, these plastic bottles are either
erroneously put in the recycling bin, where they are considered a
contaminant, or tossed into the trash and ultimately buried in the
landfill, where they will not break down at all.
"Here at our MRF (materials recovery facility), we are unable to sort
for PLA or bioplastics, just as no other MRF is able to do," Kite said.
"Keep in mind how biodegradable works: You need the proper conditions
for materials to break down (air, light, water), and in a sanitary
landfill, those conditions do not exist. Compostable plastics need to be
composted in a commercial composter, which doesn't exist in Rhode
Island."
Is there a great future in bioplastics?The
marketing claims on bioplastics ring hollow in Rhode Island. And all the
green ad-speak hoodwinks uninformed consumers into thinking they are
being environmentally responsible by purchasing these materials.
For now, bioplastics in the Ocean State, be they compostable,
biodegradable, recyclable or all three, are considered trash. But this
could change if the market shifts to accept bio-based PET or if Rhode
Island gets a large-scale composting facility. If these “ifs” come to
fruition in Rhode Island and elsewhere, bioplastics might offer some
solutions to the scourge of plastic waste.
Athena Lee Bradley, projects manager at
Northeast Recycling Council Inc., a
multi-state organization committed to responsible solid waste
management, is skeptical of bioplastics. "There has not been enough
research done to know what kind of an impact these bottles will have on
the recycling stream, so any company marketing and selling the
bottles, is in my opinion, being irresponsible," she said.
