Metabolix, a bioscience company focused on developing sustainable solutions for plastics, chemicals and energy, announced today that it has received a Grant from the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES). The award will be used by Metabolix to further enhance biobased, biodegradable resins suitable for blow molding operations.

Meanwhile, Sprint recently got recognition from the U.S. Department of energy for being a leader among telecommunications companies in environmentally-responsible initiatives, in part because of their bioplastic cell phone, the Reclaim.

According to the Miss America Organization, it has partnered with Nature's Bottles to promote their bioplastic-based bottled water made from NatureWorks' Ingeo polylactic acid resin.

Nature's Bottles noted the use of 2.5 billion barrels/year of oil for making plastics. The company said more than 60 million petroleum-based water bottle plastics end up in landfills every day.

"We are excited to partner with an innovative and exciting new company, Nature's Bottles(TM), to promote one of the most important and socially relevant causes that face our future generations," said Art McMaster, President and CEO of the Miss America Organization.

In just over three weeks (September 8-10), the 2009 Biopackaging from Feedstock to Waste Stream conference will be revving up in London.

Green Plastics will be there, and we will report on highlights of the talks and presentations that we will be able to attend: the Principles and Concepts workshop on Tuesday, the Cradle to Cradle keynote talk on the second day, and the many, many presentations by vendors, researchers, and industry experts in the days that follow.

We've seen the topic brought up before: if bioplastic is made from the same stuff that food is made out of (e.g. corn), won't it make food more expensive?

This fear is repeated over and over again, especially on the internet, and has become a standard part of the litany that blog articles copy and paste from eachother arguing against (or, more often, simply "questioning") bioplastics: they won't compost in landfills, they can't be recycled, and they will make food more expensive.

This final bit of fear-mongering has finally been addressed in a rational way in the article Land Use for Bioplastics (by Michael Carus and Stephan Piotrowski) in the April 2009 issue of Bioplastics Magazine.

The article begins,

"There is an ongoing public, political, and industrial debate, with wide-reaching implications, on the competition between food, animal feeds and industrial markets for agricultural raw materials. This has created a lot of confusion and insecurity within the bioplastics industry. The German automotive industry in particular has decided not to use bioplastics based on potential foodstuffs such as sugar, starch or edible oil. This article offers some basic facts for this debate, which will be back on the agenda as soon as the world economy recovers and food prices rise again. The bioplastics industry should be prepared for this debate."

The article is detailed and well-written, and if you really want to understand this debate you should buy and read it yourself. However, this is my basic summary (disclaimer: I haven't spoken with the authors, so this is my, and only my, interpretation of what they said):

• Hunger and food scarcity aren't caused by there "not being enough crops"; they are caused by problems of distribution, logistics, and money. We have more than enough land and crops to both feed people AND make bioplastics from crops.
• There are huge amounts of naturally irrigated and arable land on the planet; the challenge is simply investing in making use of the land and making sure it is used efficiently.
• Raw materials used for bioplastics is much smaller than raw materials used for biofuels.
• The main thing causing increases in agricultural raw materials has been an increase in demand for meat and milk: most corn and soy is used for animal feed.
• The effort to make bioplastics "not compete" with food is misguided: instead, the effort should be to work on making all crops more efficient, make better use of arable land, and improve the logistics and distribution of food crops to improve availability.

Recently, Doris De Guzman posted blog entry on www.icis.com that was very even-handed.

In the "either-or" format that many news outlets also use, this article finds problems with both PLA and oxo-degradable plastics:

While the bioplastic industry ... are trying to distance themselves from oxo-biodegradables, the National Association for PET Container Resources, meanwhile, are refuting the PLA bioplastic claims that they can be recycled with PET plastics.

On other words: Both sides have problems; oxo-degradable plastics don't biodegrade, and you can't recycle PLA plastics. So it's a toss-up. Everyone's got issues; they're all the same.

That's the impression one might get from reading the article.

But I have an idea: it's nice to be fair and present all of the sides of a debate. But let's not pretend these are the same.

The argument against PLA is procedural; the argument against oxo is material. That is, the fact that PLA is not recyclable is only a problem as long as people habitually mix PLA bottles in with PET bottles in the recycling stream. This is can be changed, whether by changing people's behaviors (e.g. getting some "compost" containers out there, as an alternative to "trash" and "recycle") or by developing sorting technologies that can separate PLA automatically. But either way, this isn't a problem with the plastic, it's a problem with how it is handled.

The argument against oxo-degradable plastics, on the other hand, is an argument about their actual physical and chemical properties. Do they re-integrate with the biosphere after they break down? Are they gauranteed to be non-toxic after they disintegrate? Questions like these aren't questions about how to "handle" oxo-plastics, they are questions about the value of the materials themselves.

Ulimately, the argument against PLA described in this article is inherently temporary: the contamination of the plastic recycling stram by PLA is only a problem as long as we assume that sorting technology and people's behaviors NEVER CHANGE.

The problem with oxo- plastics, on the other hand, is a question of long-term consequences: what is the real value of the type of "degradation" the occurs with "oxo-degradable" plastics?

Here is a summary of their response, with my own personal commentary added (in italics, for clarity):

• oxo-plastics can be assessed for degradability, bio-degradability and non eco-toxicity by ASTM D6954-04.
  This is in response to the fact that oxo-plastics fail to meet the requirements for ASTM D6400, which is a more strict standard.
  
• Claims that oxo-biodegradable plastics could encourage people to drop litter can equally be applied to hydro-biodegradable plastics.
  I actually agree with them on this one. This is a lame criticism on the part of the bioplastic community.
  
• The claim that fragments remain in the environment has been proven untrue.
  With some experts saying one thing and other experts saying the opposite... who knows what to believe? If both sides have financial stakes in the game...
  
• European Bioplastics' reference to an attempt by the oxo-biodegradable industry to "water down the criteria of EN 13432" was not to enable oxo-biodegradable materials to meet the standard... instead it was to make sure there were "tests appropriate to oxo-bio."
  This sounds like a lot of linguistic acrobatics, to me. When they say "tests appropriate to oxo-bio", don't they mean "tests that our materials will pass"?
  
• "Composting is not the same as biodegradation in the environment - it is an artificial process operated according to a much shorter timescale than the processes of nature."
  Isn't that the point, though? We don't want this stuff sitting around for years to degrade "naturally"... we want to be able to make it degrade quickly in a controlled environment.
  

Trade body European Bioplastics has waded into the heated oxo-degradable debate by calling for claims of biodegradability and compostability to be backed by international standards.

European Bioplastics said products that did not meet the standard requirements risked confusing the public, and it was important that items carrying the seedling logo, for compostable products, were not associated in anyway with oxo-biodegradable products.