It should be no secret by now that plastic is horrible for the environment. Since the invention of plastics, there is an estimated 8.3 billion tons of plastic in existence. The majority of this plastic is used for short term use or for packaging. Only about 9% of this plastic was or will be recycled. The rest of that plastic ended up in a mixture of places such as water (from the largest oceans to the smallest streams), land (Every major land mass), and disposal sites. Many of these containing wildlife and vegetation where the plastics cause harm to the natural habitats. Every year it is estimated that plastic will kill 1.1 million animals of all types. Humanity themselves consume 70,000 pieces of microplastics each year. With an ever-growing attention to the draw backs of plastics and an accelerating production that has nearly doubled it should surprise no one that there are developments in modern technologies to seek solutions.

One of the big break throughs has been the discovery of modern biodegradable polymers. These have the potential to overtake current plastics due to their properties to be able to breakdown naturally in the environment. There has been a lot of research and tests done to ensure both the safety and reliability of these new products. New research into these plastics has yielded a problem with these new plastics. As mentioned above plastics end up in a wide range of areas from water to land. This poses a tremendous problem that will need solutions. Polylactic acid which is a biodegradable plastic works wonderfully on land and will biodegrade rapidly on said land. But it is a different story once in the water as it does not biodegrade in water. Other biodegradable plastics suffer similar drawbacks. There are so many different variables of the environment that it poses challenges that are hard to predict. This includes everything from the temperature to the humidity to the number of microorganisms as seen below for PLA.





It is important to remember that new research is being done every day and many biodegrable plastics already exist. But with current technology it would be impossible to have a biodegradable plastic that works in all environments. Instead there needs to be a focus on using new biodegradable plastics in environments where they are most likely to end up. For example, plastics used near water ways such as on boats should biodegrade in water. Whereas a plastic in the middle of the country should be able to biodegrade on land. This means there must be a very strong focus on risk assessment to determine the levels of risk for new biodegradable plastics. What this also means is that while these biodegradable plastics are great they do form a bit of a niche where their use must be limited. At this time, the data suggests this is not a valuable solution to stop the current rate of pollution and could very well add to it. At most this is a temporarily solution as it has been shown the technology is not fully developed. Humanity waste is still too great and at current consumption a switch to these plastics would not be successful in stopping pollution. The best solution would be to look at consumer behavior and to remember that while these bioplastics are promising they are limited and sometimes not fully transparent.

Source:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/anie.201805766

Eric Siegel

B.S. Environmental Science