Plastics News has a great article about new efforts to create standards and specifications for "bio-based" food packaging.

The main point of this is to prevent "greenwashing" and all of the false claims out there by some manufacturers that claim to be "green" or "biodegradable" when they really are not. They talk about ideas for certification and standards for labeling packaging at different levels (gold, silver, etc).

A fun blog criticism of bioplastics that can be summed up in its one beautiful diagram:

Degradable, biodegradable, compostable, EN13432? Most "degradable" material is oxodegradable, and really just breaks up into smaller pieces - not particularly good for the environment. Compostable? mostly based on corn somehow, which is great unless you're in the 3rd world and starving. EN13432? defines a set of conditions for biodegradation, that's all. Material isn't supposed to degrade in a land-fill. It's all spin, except for simply "using less", which is down to design and (less so) to technology.

Given choice in degradable or compostable, then compostable every time. However, retailers only tend to use compostable packaging for organic foods and slowly we are seeing more compostable packaging on other products. The price of compostable packaging is far higher so the cost will inevitably be added into the cost of the end-product to the consumer. There is also the issue of using GM crops for compostable packaging, if not Materbi. The overriding advantage of compostable over degradable, is that in landfill the packaging will degrade in 60-80 days.

Being a "liberal" or "progressive", I generally have a lot of sympathy for environmental causes. However, I also get worried when we (environmentalists) paralyse ourselves by fretting over every single thing, until there are no options left. Like the old joke about why environmentalists hate energy: you can't use fossil fuels because of pollution; you can't use nuclear energy because of possible radiation; and you can't use wind power because it might disrupt the flocking patterns of birds.

Is the same thing happening in the field of plastics? This article drums up fear against bioplastics because, in an effort to make either plastics more biodegradable or to create new types of plastics made from renewable resources, we might increase the use of Genetically Modified Organisms.

Most of the GMO's discussed in the article are pretty neat. From microbes that digest plastic, and microbes that can convert plants into plastic raw materials, to crops that can yield better feedstocks for bioplastics... genetic engineering could really be a boone for the environment.

But this article proposes a lot of "scary what-ifs", without actually providing any solutions or alternatives. Is this just the fear of the unknown gone overboard?

It isn't enough to simply produce bioplastic products, throw them into the marketplace, and hope everything works out. In order for bioplastics to have positive effect on the environment--or on the economy--our entire culture has to adapt, from "end to end" in the use cycle.

Marc Masala points out just some of the steps that need to be taken in this article. First, manufacturers need to clearly identify products as biodegradable and/or compostable. If you can't tell the difference between bioplastic utensils and regular plastic utensils, you will just throw them out and they will get landfilled as if it were normal plastic. Second, vanues need to provide the option of disposing of bioplastic products in a different place then regular plastics. From the article:

"I recently attended a conference at the Long Beach Convention Center and was pleased to see that all of the disposable forks and cups were made from compostable material. However,... although there were three classes of material, each waste station had only two containers--one marked 'Trash' and one marked 'Recyclables.'

The article goes on to describe other cases where bioplastics were introduced... but where there was no adequate way provided to deal with them.