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When you compost your PLA plastic products, you are working to create a closed "cradle to cradle" loop for the material:
This is a pretty long loop (and also inefficient, from an energy perspective).
One way to shorten this loop would be to recycle, as we do with regular plastics:
This is "mechanical recycling". The problem with this is, PLA doesn't recycle as nicely or easily as regular plastic. There are difficulties with getting a nice-looking, pure product.
So what can we do? LOOPLA (by Galactic) has a possible answer: chemical recycling.
The LOOPLA process can provide a major short-cut that increases the efficiency of the cradle-to-cradle PLA loop:
Although this process is still cutting-edge and in its experimental and testing phase, it promises to provide a real answer: it promises to be cost efficient, and provides a mechanism that will allow us to keep re-cycling the same feedstock around and around... each time producing PLA products that are exactly the same quality as products made from virgin PLA.
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MDBC) wants to change how we think about industry. Time Magazine has called their vision "a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world." And two years ago, have made this vision into a concrete program to certify manufacturing processes that are environmenally intelligent and conserve materials throughout the lifecycle of the product.
The concept is called Cradle to Cradle Design: "Instead of designing cradle-to-grave products, dumped in landfills at the end of their 'life,' MBDC transforms industry by creating products for cradle-to-cradle cycles, whose materials are perpetually circulated in closed loops." This means using environmentally safe and healthy materials; design for material reutilization, such as recycling or composting; the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency; efficient use of water, and maximum water quality associated with production; and instituting strategies for social responsibility. In the end, the idea is not to simply make the manufacturing process destroy the environment more slowly; it is to re-tool the process so that it can grow in an environment while also preserving it.
From their website:
Minimizing toxic pollution and the waste of natural resources are not strategies for real change. Designing industrial processes so they do not generate toxic pollution and "waste" in the first place is true change. Long-term prosperity depends not on the efficiency of a fundamentally destructive system, but on the effectiveness of processes designed to be healthy and renewable in the first place. Cradle to Cradle Design's strategy of eco-effectiveness is rooted in the systems of the natural world, which are not efficient at all, but effective. Consider the cherry tree. Each spring it makes thousands of blossoms, which then fall in piles to the ground-not very efficient. But the fallen blossoms become food for other living things. The tree's abundance of blossoms is both safe and useful, contributing to the health of a thriving, interdependent system. And the tree spreads multiple positive effects-making oxygen, transpiring water, creating habitat, and more. And it is beautiful! Eco-effectiveness seeks to design industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature. The central design principle of eco-effectiveness is waste equals food. When waste equals food, the "be less bad" imperatives of efficiency fade. When a product returns to industry at the end of its useful life and its materials are used to make equally valuable new products, the minerals or plastics of which it is made do not need to be minimized-because they will not become waste in a landfill. Industry saves billions of dollars annually by recovering valuable materials from used products. Similarly, products designed to be made of natural, safely biodegradable materials can be returned to the soil to feed ecosystems instead of depleting them.
Minimizing toxic pollution and the waste of natural resources are not strategies for real change. Designing industrial processes so they do not generate toxic pollution and "waste" in the first place is true change. Long-term prosperity depends not on the efficiency of a fundamentally destructive system, but on the effectiveness of processes designed to be healthy and renewable in the first place.
Cradle to Cradle Design's strategy of eco-effectiveness is rooted in the systems of the natural world, which are not efficient at all, but effective. Consider the cherry tree. Each spring it makes thousands of blossoms, which then fall in piles to the ground-not very efficient. But the fallen blossoms become food for other living things. The tree's abundance of blossoms is both safe and useful, contributing to the health of a thriving, interdependent system. And the tree spreads multiple positive effects-making oxygen, transpiring water, creating habitat, and more. And it is beautiful!
Eco-effectiveness seeks to design industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature. The central design principle of eco-effectiveness is waste equals food.
When waste equals food, the "be less bad" imperatives of efficiency fade. When a product returns to industry at the end of its useful life and its materials are used to make equally valuable new products, the minerals or plastics of which it is made do not need to be minimized-because they will not become waste in a landfill. Industry saves billions of dollars annually by recovering valuable materials from used products. Similarly, products designed to be made of natural, safely biodegradable materials can be returned to the soil to feed ecosystems instead of depleting them.
Dr Michael Braungart, co-founder of MBDC, will be the keynote speaker at The Biopackaging from Feedstock to Waste Stream 2009 conference in London, September 8 - 10. Check out their website for more information.
The U.S. Army initiated the research with General Atomics, Renewable Energy Group Inc. and ISU to investigate which plastic materials (such as styrofoam) best dissolve into biodiesel, and how stationary engines perform when running on the polymer-rich fuel.
"If you take a Styrofoam cup and drop it into room-temperature biodiesel, it will dissolve in a couple minutes, but Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or soda bottles, will not dissolve," said Iowa State professor Balaji Narasimhan. "Some garbage bags and containers for meals ready to eat (MREs) also dissolve into biodiesel."
According to Biodiesel magazine, engine tests thus far have only successfully used biodiesel with polystyrene--in concentrations of 1 percent, 2 percent, 5 percent and 10 percent.
Unfortunately, no matter how good the machines are, they still cost money. As a news report on checkbiotech.org observed,
If you only have a couple of thousand PLA bottles among billions and billions of PET bottles, the average recycler has little interest in doing something with those PLA bottles.
For much of the U.S., November is a time for admiring the beautiful colors of autumn foliage... before it falls to the ground and needs to be raked, bagged and carted away.
But if there ever were time when it's important to use biodegradable bags, it's for the disposal of leaves. It makes absolutely no sense to put a mass of compost (leaves) into a non-degradable bag and cart it off to a landfill.
Luckily, this reasoning has already occured to officials in some counties, like Davidson County in Tennessee, where leaves MUST be disposed of in paper or biodegradable plastic bags.
Get active, and find out how leaf collection is handled in your county.
This blog article explains that there really is no such thing as "recycling" for plastic. When you see the recycling symbol on plastic (the chasing arrows) there is also a number (1-7) included, which indicates the type of material the plastic is.
The catch is, you cannot recycle a plastic product into another plastic product with the same number: instead, it gets converted into a product with a higher number, and type 7 plastics cannot be recycled at all.
The article points out that this isn't really "recycling" in the sense that most people think of it. It's "downcycling" ... and has a lot of dangers associated with it.
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