Plastic fills every nook and cranny of our lives, taking on many shapes and forms. We produce over 300 million pounds of it annually! Take a moment to look around the room in which you’re situated and notice the plastic that surrounds you. Do not simply peer at the plastic objects themselves, take note of the receptacles in which many of those objects are contained. Now, imagine all that plastic disappearing before your very eyes. What’s left — not much!

Where do all the plastic fragments go — the little corner you ripped off the package of your morning breakfast bar on your way to work — that unnoticeable piece that accidentally flew into the street? More often than not, the runaway remnants of plastic waste get broken down, journeying to our natural waterways, and subsequently to our ocean (about 10–20 million tons of plastic each year). The debris is ground down into microscopic bits and corralled by the currents in what has become an ocean of plastic. The ocean can be thought of as a giant toilet with regards to how it “flushes” our plastic waste. In this case, the toilet water has nowhere to go, swirling forever in an endless standstill void known as The North Pacific Gyre. You might have heard of the Giant Garbage Patch, or have seen photographic evidence supporting the fact that birds are mistaking plastic for food. Those photos make us sad for sure, but they are not doing anything to change behavior. Why? Well, we have no other choice but to consume plastic. It wraps pretty much every commodity imagined in its malleable sheath. When you go to the store to buy milk, you are purchasing plastic. I don’t care if it’s organic, sustainably sourced, or even if it’s sold in a glass carafe, I guarantee that all options at your local grocery store contain some form of plastic lid. The hippest of hippies cannot avoid this bendable binge.

We overindulge in plastic everyday and that can have severe consequences on our bodies.

Intractable amounts of plastic are consuming us. We bathe in plastic. Beyond the confines of their containers, plastic particles make their way into our consumables in unnoticeable forms such as microbeads; exfoliating soap scrubs, cosmetics, sunscreens, and even synthetic clothing to name a few. Should this worry us? Although these products are “FDA approved,” do companies know (or care) about the long term effects these materials have on our bodies, our psyche, and our wellbeing? Phthalates contained in these products can leach into our bodies, taking on the form of endocrine disruptors. By mimicking hormones in the body, these chemicals interfere with the endocrine system. They can bind to receptors within in a cell and block naturally occurring hormones from binding. Furthermore, they have the ability to prevent the natural production of hormones from occurring. And the result of these hormonal impostors can be severe; adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune defects.

My bitter experience with everything plastic

Before moving to Silicon Valley, I worked on a small organic farming project in upstate New York. I was part of a team designing permaculture gardens for clients throughout the Hudson Valley and selling crops from our own gardens to local farmers markets. I soon learned that the ag industry is one of the most wasteful with regards to its plastic use and old-fangled disposal procedures. Pretty much every input utilized in the growing process comes from some manifestation of a plastic container; seed trays, buckets, plastic wraps, plant tags, hoop house covers, weed barriers, soil bags, mulch bags, and many more. As responsible cultivators, we tried to reuse large plant containers and trays, but the plastic was oftentimes too flimsy to be used from year to year. Worse, I began to notice that many of these containers, large and small, were made from non-renewable and non-recyclable materials. I would often peer all about the containers looking for some type of recycling symbol, often to find nothing. On long road trips around New England, in the pursuit of purchasing organic plant inventory from large nurseries and farms, I discovered mountains of the plastic containers in trash heaps waiting to be hauled away to a nearby landfill. The notion of waste gave me chills because I knew in most states, especially Connecticut, the recycling laws (or lack thereof) were incredibly lax. Citizens there had to pay to have their recycling taken away, and so many individuals and businesses opted out of the “service.”

Haunted by those experiences on the farm, that same year I embarked on the development of a compostable plant container that had the ability to biodegrade into the soil. On the farm you have the option of using either peat pots (made from plant fibers that have a tendency to decompose rather quickly) or plastic — that’s it. Therefore, I was blown away by the possibility of using biodegradable plastic pots. Biodegradable pots would have the stability required for farmers to seed, grow, ship, and transplant directly in the ground in one single container. For the next few months, I worked out a patent for a plant container for hydroponic and soil applications. I believed these plastic “plant pots” could be manufactured using a compostable polymer, but I was sure the material versatility for compostable plastic was not yet available. During my endless search for bioplastic sources, a manufacturer approached me soon enough (we’ll call them “The Bioplastic Plant” for now). It turned out that I was wrong — the technology to create bioplastic in any compostable form was already here.

You can manufacture any type of plastic “grade” from compostable resin; soft plastic bags, durable cups, and even mesh materials. Compostable plastic can even be 3D printed! The most commonly used compostable plastics derive from corn starch which is then converted into a polymer. Bioplastic, mainly in the form of PLA (Polylactic acid), is manufactured from other materials as well; potato starch, soybean protein, sugarcane, petroleum byproducts, and even fruit!