With poor countries now rejecting our mountains of plastic waste, and plastic particles already contaminating water and food systems worldwide, the need to reduce packaging while also producing environmentally friendly plastics is one of the most urgent issues of our time.
While there are many efforts underway, non-petroleum based plastics are still less than 2% of those in use, and many remain chemical, enery and resource intensive while not actually biodegradable. A lot of people are working on solutions and a team of brothers from California have developed a process they say ticks all of the boxes needed. See Turning food waste into bio-plastic:
“Full Cycle Bioplastics manufactures polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) bioplastic by using organic and cellulosic waste as the feedstock. We take the waste, put it into a modified digestion unit, let everything break down and accelerate it, so we get a very strong wastewater intermediate. We take that liquid form, feed the fatty acids to bacteria, which convert them into PHA, which is basically micro-fat that can be sculpted into various shapes such as packaging or forks. No petroleum, no chemicals involved. It’s an organic process.
…The brothers’ goal is not to eliminate conventional plastic altogether. For some items that are meant to last long, let’s say medical equipment, or the hard shell of a laptop, you probably don’t want to experiment with compost. But it’s especially absurd to use a material that does not disintegrate for hundreds of years for things we discard quickly, such as packaging, plastic bags, and single-use cutlery. Roughly half of our plastic production is for single-use items – and less than a quarter of them get recycled.
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