Bad science hits the headlines again, with another pointless study. This week Daily Mail News publishes a completely taken out of context article based on a study carried out by The 5 Gyres Institute. Let's clear up a few things from the article: Article says: 'Bottles and cutlery made from 'bioplastics' are supposed to be #biodegradable'. Science says: This is not true. #Biobased materials are fully or partially made from biological resources, rather than fossil based raw materials. They are not necessarily #biodegradable or #compostable. Article says: Bioplastics are biodegradable but only under the correct circumstances. Science says: This is true. Biodegradable materials biodegrade in certain conditions at their end of life - usually via #industrial #composting. Article says: Left lying in the dirt or bobbing in the ocean, only some bioplastics broke down. Science says: True. Depending on the material, and the conditions required for their degradation, if these conditions are not met, then they will not degrade. Now on to the study, results, where researchers deposited 17 different bioplastics at 6 sites in California, Maine, and Florida - one on land and one at sea in each state. Mesh bags held the objects in place, while still exposing them to the elements. Land-based items were buried, and sea items were dangled into the water. Researchers retrieved the items at fixed periods to track how much they had broken down: 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 16 weeks, 32 weeks, and 64 weeks. The study found that about 78 out of 102 bioplastic items remained intact. The study is totally correct, but is also pointless. These #bioplastics will only fully degrade when subjected to the right conditions, which for these bioplastics is most likely to be via industrial composting - not being buried in soil or floating in water. For clarification, #compostable plastics used in consumer applications should not be labelled solely as biodegradable. Whilst they are indeed biodegradable, biodegradability per se is an abstract and meaningless concept, unless it has a time and place within which biodegradability takes place. To better define biodegradability we should talk about compostability, i.e. within a space, time and industrial process. For packaging, the UK & European standard BS EN13432 defines this time, space, output, and toxicity. The UK adopted this standard in 2000. https://lnkd.in/enmJHHKE David Robert Newman FCIWM
Peter Calliafas
9mo
Biodegradable, compostable, bioplastics is just greenwashing. Might work in controlled lab conditions but it does nothing in actual environmental conditions. All it does is promote a continued, unsustainable linear economy business model. And the plastic elephant in the room still trumpeting around. 430,000,000 metric tonnes of virgin plastic produced each year and growing. All the rest of this bioplastic etc ‘nonsense’ is a distraction.
Glenn Dawson
9mo
So how do these biodegradable products actually get to an industrial composter ? Where is the industrial compost bin all over cities and in every household? How can you expect anyone to do the right thing without infrastructure in place? What about the people who litter this stuff ? If it ends up in landfill as possibly 90% of it will, does it breakdown, no you just answered that question. Plastic is plastic sorry
Sam Walker
9mo
I'm getting sick of these articles where researchers/media don't understand the point of compostables/biodegradables. As with everything, there is a specific EOL process/route for these materials. No responsible supplier of compostable packaging is telling their customers to chuck it in the sea or leave it in a field. Imagine a consumer left a plastic bottle in a drawer for a few months, opened it, and found it still intact. No-one on their right mind would take this as evidence that plastic bottles are unrecyclable, yet here we are....
From my experience the composting facilities we have available in Victoria Australia, these items do not breakdown in the composting process. Greenwashing comes to mind!
Indeed dear Dr Jen Vanderhoven you will see many such totally pointless studies in the years ahead. I liken it to someone complaining to Fiat because their new 500 is not allowed to compete in a Formula 1 race. " It's a car isn't it? It's Italian isn't it ? Therefore should compete with Ferrari." Duh.
Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed I still maintain that we need more simple education of the community at large because these studies pointless or not are being disengeniously used to promote the status quo and even worse to disparage the bioplastic industry and the enourmous potential that these materials have - I don’t have the answers but based on my travels there is a huge effort to subvert the truth - this we must stop - perhaps we should craft studies showing the benefits ?
Melissa Woods
9mo
Some of the statements in this study are strange. It is almost the equivalent of laying a plastic bottle on the floor next to a mechanical recycling facility and wondering why it was not transformed. Like mechanical recycling and all forms of recycling, organic recycling needs the right conditions. This article isn’t helpful.
Gabriel Liu
8mo
Well said
Growing the bioeconomy to drive prosperity and wellbeing. Supporting sustainable bio-based innovation.
9moThe 5 Gyres report correctly concludes that: "Bioplastics are part of the solution to the plastic crisis, but only if the right material and right design are applied correctly to the right problem." It contextualises the problem well within its conclusions, and the need to inform consumers and manage EOL. It is shame that the Mail misrepresents that. And then goes on to conflate biobased, biodegradable, and compostable, to draw unjustifiably negative conclusions about the role of bioplastics. It is very hard to seriously any accusation that others are dangerously misrepresenting the environmental performance of materials, in a media article that presents such obvious errors and obfuscations. The problem is that media noise makes informed messaging very difficult.