Making packaging greener - biodegradable plastics

Our whole world seems to be wrapped in plastic. Almost every product we buy, most of the food we eat and many of the liquids we drink come encased in plastic. In Australia around 1 million tonnes of plastic materials are produced each year and a further 587,000 tonnes are imported. Packaging is the largest market for plastics, accounting for over a third of the consumption of raw plastic materials - Australians use 6 billion plastic bags every year!

Plastic packaging provides excellent protection for the product, it is cheap to manufacture and seems to last forever. Lasting forever, however, is proving to be a major environmental problem. Another problem is that traditional plastics are manufactured from non-renewable resources - oil, coal and natural gas.

Plastics that break down

In an effort to overcome these shortcomings, biochemical researchers and engineers have long been seeking to develop biodegradable plastics that are made from renewable resources, such as plants.

The term biodegradable means that a substance is able to be broken down into simpler substances by the activities of living organisms, and therefore is unlikely to persist in the environment. There are many different standards used to measure biodegradability, with each country having its own. The requirements range from 90 per cent to 60 per cent decomposition of the product within 60 to 180 days of being placed in a standard composting environment.

The reason traditional plastics are not biodegradable is because their long polymer molecules are too large and too tightly bonded together to be broken apart and assimilated by decomposer organisms. However, plastics based on natural plant polymers derived from wheat or corn starch have molecules that are readily attacked and broken down by microbes.

Plastics can be produced from starch

Starch is a natural polymer. It is a white, granular carbohydrate produced by plants during photosynthesis and it serves as the plant's energy store. Cereal plants and tubers normally contain starch in large proportions. Starch can be processed directly into a bioplastic but, because it is soluble in water, articles made from starch will swell and deform when exposed to moisture, limiting its use. This problem can be overcome by modifying the starch into a different polymer. First, starch is harvested from corn, wheat or potatoes, then microorganisms transform it into lactic acid, a monomer. Finally, the lactic acid is chemically treated to cause the molecules of lactic acid to link up into long chains or polymers, which bond together to form a plastic called polylactide (PLA).

PLA can be used for products such as plant pots and disposable nappies. It has been commercially available since 1990, and certain blends have proved successful in medical implants, sutures and drug delivery systems because of their capacity to dissolve away over time. However, because PLA is significantly more expensive than conventional plastics it has failed to win widespread consumer acceptance.

Plastics can also be produced by bacteria

Another way of making biodegradable polymers involves getting bacteria to produce granules of a plastic called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) inside their cells. Bacteria are simply grown in culture, and the plastic is then harvested. Going one step further, scientists have taken genes from this kind of bacteria and stitched them into corn plants, which then manufacture the plastic in their own cells.

What’s the cost?

Unfortunately, as with PLA, PHA is significantly more expensive to produce and, as yet, it is not having any success in replacing the widespread use of traditional petrochemical plastics.

Indeed, biodegradable plastic products currently on the market are from two to ten times more expensive than traditional plastics. But environmentalists argue that the cheaper price of traditional plastics does not reflect their true cost when their full impact is considered. For example, when we buy a plastic bag we don’t pay for its collection and waste disposal after we use it. If we added up these sorts of associated costs, traditional plastics would cost more and biodegradable plastics might be more competitive (Box 1).

Biodegradable and affordable

If cost is a major barrier to the uptake of biodegradable plastics, then the solution lies in investigating low-cost options to produce them. In Australia, the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for International Food Manufacture and Packaging Science is looking at ways of using basic starch, which is cheap to produce, in a variety of blends with other more expensive biodegradable polymers to produce a variety of flexible and rigid plastics. These are being made into ‘film’ and ‘injection moulded’ products such as plastic wrapping, shopping bags, bread bags, mulch films and plant pots.

Mulch film from biodegradable plastics

The CRC has developed a mulch film for farmers. Mulch films are laid over the ground around crops, to control weed growth and retain moisture. Normally, farmers use polyethylene black plastic that is pulled up after harvest and trucked away to a landfill (taking with it topsoil humus that sticks to it). However, field trials using the biodegradable mulch film on tomato and capsicum crops have shown it performs just as well as polyethylene film but can simply be ploughed into the ground after harvest. It’s easier, cheaper and it enriches the soil with carbon.

Pots you can plant

Another biodegradable plastic product is a plant pot produced by injection moulding. Gardeners and farmers can place potted plants directly into the ground, and forget them. The pots will break down to carbon dioxide and water, eliminating double handling and recycling of conventional plastic containers.

Different polymer blends for different products

Depending on the application, scientists can alter polymer mixtures to enhance the properties of the final product. For example, an almost pure starch product will dissolve upon contact with water and then biodegrade rapidly. By blending quantities of other biodegradable plastics into the starch, scientists can make a waterproof product that degrades within 4 weeks after it has been buried in the soil or composted.

Landfill sites aren't compost heaps

To maximise the benefit of the new bioplastics we’ll have to modify the way we throw away our garbage - to simply substitute new plastics for old won’t be saving space in our landfills.

Although there is a popular misconception that biodegradable materials break down in landfill sites, they don't. Rubbish deposited in landfill is compressed and sealed under tonnes of soil. This minimises oxygen and moisture, which are essential requirements for microbial decomposition. For biodegradable plastics to effectively decompose they need to be treated like compost.

Composting the packaging with its contents

Compost may be the key to maximising the real environmental benefit of biodegradable plastics. One of the big impediments to composting our organic waste is that it is so mixed up with non-degradable plastic packaging that it is uneconomic to separate them. Consequently, the entire mixed waste-stream ends up in landfill. Organic waste makes up almost half the components of landfill in Australia.

By ensuring that biodegradable plastics are used to package all our organic produce, it may well be possible in the near future to set up large-scale composting lines in which packaging and the material it contains can be composted as one. The resulting compost could be channelled into plant production, which in turn might be redirected into growing the starch to produce more biodegradable plastics.

An Olympic effort - recycling 76 per cent of waste

For anyone who thinks such schemes aren’t feasible, you only have to look at the recycling success of the Sydney Olympics to see that where there’s a will, there’s a way. More than 660 tonnes of waste was generated each day at its many venues. Of this, an impressive 76 per cent was collected and recycled. Part of this success was due to the use of biodegradable plastics used in the packaging of fast food, making the composting of food scraps an economic proposition as it eliminated the need for expensive separation of packaging waste prior to processing.

With intelligent use, these new plastics have the potential to reduce plastic litter, decrease the quantities of plastic waste going into landfills and increase the recycling of other organic components that would normally end up in landfills.