04/24/2021
Sorting Through the Plastic Rhetoric
For those of you who are Interested, here’s why we have chosen to use PET plastic produce containers. PET is the most readily recycled plastic. Recycling centers already have infrastructure in place to shred, pelletize this plastic, and manufactures in place to make products out of it, like polyester fleece. The topic of plastic waste is complex and not easily remedied. Personally, I’m opposed to plastic and wish it could be eliminated as a waste stream and replaced with a life-friendly alternative.
For now we use PET clamshells. We are however looking into a company called Bottlebox who makes all kinds of containers from 100% recycled water bottles.
We also want to encourage our wonderful customers to give us back their used containers so we can recycle them.
Here’s more on this complex topic…
After careful scrutiny it seems that solutions like ‘biodegradable’ and ‘compostable’ plastics that may appear obvious on the surface may not be sensible solutions at all.
The desire in people to feel good about themselves by ‘doing their part’ for the environment and their misguided zeal is compounding the problem and bungling up the system. Instead of being examined as a whole system, the life-cycle of plastic is treated in isolation and solutions are integrated piecemeal.
Take for instance PLA or bio-based plastic usually made from cornstarch. PLA plastics are touted as being ‘biodegradable’, meaning that they can be biologically broken down. However, these plastics require industrial composting conditions, i.e. controlled temperature and humidity in the presence of micro-organisms within a special composting plant. In the wild it would take 80 years for these plastics to decompose naturally!
Few of these facilities exist in comparison to the existing number of recycling centers that handle traditional petroleum-based plastic. A survey carried out by the German Environmental Aid (DUH), counting almost 1,000 German composting plants for bio-waste and green waste, showed that 95% of these composting plants cannot compost bio-plastics in accordance with the standards. Lastly, PLA plastic cannot be mixed in with regular plastic because it contaminates the existing waste stream. At this point in time we feel it is better to support existing plants and manufacturing facilities that are able to recycle 100% of PET plastic.
The truth is biodegradable or compostable packaging is not as easy as it is made out to be. You can’t just take compostable packaging and throw it out in the compost pile. It won’t break down without a special composting centers.
Currently, only a few hundred of the roughly 4,000 composting facilities in the U.S. have the ability to accept food scraps and a much smaller subset can accept bio-plastics.
In the case of compostables, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) reviewed 18 years of life-cycle assessments, including over 1,200 comparisons involving compostable packaging and over 360 comparisons for food serviceware. In most of these comparisons, the production and use of compostable materials (and composting them) was found to result in higher environmental impacts than that of either non-compostable materials, or compostable materials treated via recycling, landfilling, or incineration.
As you can see, the topic is complex. It’s possible that bio-based plastics with their required infrastructure can be developed and implemented slowly over time, replacing our existing plastic recycling system. But while that’s in process, the best we can do is to keep plastics like PET in circulation and out of the waste stream as long as possible!
