Biodegradable plastic like the bags in the supermarket produce aisle turns into plastic fragments within two years. Regular plastic can take up to 200 years to turn completely into fragments.
Please join me in contacting your representatives on the state and federal levels along with major newspapers and other outlets.
The best of intentions in using biodegradable plastic is a foul-up. We need those bags pulled from the grocery stores.
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village food services used paper straws for a few years. This year, they have gone back to plastic-appearing straws, which have wrappers proclaiming the straws “composable”.
Meanwhile, in the accelerating lunacy that is gripping Shiny-land, a luminary has introduced legislation to outlaw straws made of anything but plastic.
Compostable turn to the fragments of plastic we all worry about. Disaster.
We should return to Cellophane when clear film is needed. Termites can eat it.
Paper is a good choice.
Polylactic acid should be biodegradable and ok.
At least biodegradable does not last forever. It slowly goes away.
But all of these choices have opposition. So companies continue to use old reliables until good regs are enacted.
Pretty sure it does not completely biodegrade. Instead it becomes the fragments we are now worrying about.
Polylactic acid is a type of polyester. The monomer, lactic acid, is a natural material. Nature should be well accustomed to dealing with it.
Polyesters do hydrolyze. Ie they fall apart in time. They do go away. Its the other plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyvinyl chloride that last forever.
All of this is subject to debate. Do they go away fast enough? Under typical conditions, etc.
If the monomers biodegrade its not logical to say at some point they stop degrading. They have a rate. The microbes that feed on them are likely to multiply increasing capacity.
These tiny microbes are munching away at plastic waste in the ocean
https://www.science.org/content/article/these-tiny-microbes-are-munching-away-plastic-waste-ocean
Plastic makes up nearly 70% of all ocean litter…
To conduct the study, researchers collected weathered plastic from two different beaches in Chania, Greece. The litter had already been exposed to the sun and undergone chemical changes that caused it to become more brittle, all of which needs to happen before the microbes start to munch on the plastic. The pieces were either polyethylene, the most popular plastic and the one found in products such as grocery bags and shampoo bottles, or polystyrene, a hard plastic found in food packaging and electronics. The team immersed both in saltwater with either naturally occurring ocean microbes or engineered microbes that were enhanced with carbon-eating microbe strains and could survive solely off of the carbon in plastic. Scientists then analyzed changes in the materials over a period of 5 months.
Both types of plastic lost a significant amount of weight after being exposed to the natural and engineered microbes, scientists reported in April in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
DB2
…as the plastic-degrading polyethylene terephthalate enzyme (PETase) has been reported in marine microbial communities. An assessment of 416 metagenomes of planktonic communities across the global ocean identifies 68 oceanic PETase variants…
We found oPETases in 90.1% of samples across all oceans and depths, particularly abundant at 1,000 m depth…providing a carbon source for bathypelagic microbial communities.
DB2
That is outdated. It is not true.
Are PLA microplastics harmful?
Scientists conclude PLA-based microplastics are “severely toxic” to aquatic biota and might be a threat to people through the food chain. Multiple studies have reported that microplastics persist in most environments and corners of the world, even in the ice blocks of the Antarctic.Mar 26, 2024
The process that makes these plastics make plastic. It becomes fragments and stays there. It does not revert away from being plastic. There is greenwashing.
You can argue if they degrade fast enough but biodegradable fragments do continue to degrade.
This is a good example of the kind of work the oil industry funds to throw sand in the wheels of any alternative to use of their products.
What is the main problem with biodegradable plastics?
Biodegradable plastics are often claimed to be sustainable and better for the planet. These properties are inaccurate and misleading. Not only are biodegradable plastics made from fossil-fuels, they also end up creating microplastics and contaminating other plastics recycling streams.
Why are bioplastics bad?
Because bioplastic products are a synthetic, hybrid product containing organic material AND petroleum, chemical fillers, and additives, they cannot be composted like pure organic materials. Additionally, they cannot be recycled like pure plastic products given their partial-organic nature.
Bioplastics are Bad News for Compost Operations - Western Placer Waste Management Authority.
This is certainly not true of polylactic acid.
Per Wikipedia: “The monomer is typically made from fermented plant starch such as from corn, cassava, sugarcane or sugar beet pulp.”
It is a green product. Some may be made as petrochemicals but not PLA.
Of course someone will say but its made from food materials. Yes, one day the environmental movement will get its act together. For now, it is very good at shooting itself in the foot.
Interesting there are “blogs” or organizations making all sorts of claims.
The story I heard on NPR was that PLA becomes plastic fragments that last in the environment. It is not clear to me how long the fragments last. It is not one answer that much is clear.
200 years is nothing in the lifecycle of the planet. Heck, the forests dropped billions of tons of leaves all over the place for millions of years and were we complaining? No. Then they got squashed down into peat and coal and oil and were we complaining? No. Now we’re squashing them down into plastic bottles so I can buy a Coke for a few moments of pleasure. Am I complaining? No.
I’ll tell you what’s bad, tho. Those blister pack covers they put over scissors, that you can only open if you already have a pair of scissors! What kind of MC Escherian packaging manager thought that one up? And don’t get me started on fake logs, where we take a perfectly good tree, grind it up, then press the bits together so … it looks like a log. What’s that about?
And you know what’s funny? Saran Wrap. Yep. In order to sell this stuff they have to put it in a cardboard dispenser box. And to get it to the store they put 30 of them in a bigger cardboard box. And to get to the distribution center they put 20 boxes on a pallet. Which they then wrap … with Saran Wrap. Talk about a conspiracy!
Well, I could go on, and sometimes do, but it’s time for a pause that refreshes, if you know what I mean.
The problem if immediately we are surrounded by fragments that last 80 years as a few blogger/organizations claim, then we can not round up those fragments within the next three human generations. The fragments enter and stay in the food chain for a while.
Whereas solid plastic we might round up one day and dispose of. I know we do all sorts of favors for the future of humanity.
You are very trusting. You might not be talking about human beings.
I’ve been using an X-acto knife or just a box cutter to open those lately. Works pretty well. The other trick I learned (from a cheap chair I assembled) is to simply open it from the back, the cardboard side. But that only works if the plastic is affixed to the cardboard, if the plastic goes all around the item, you still need a knife of some sort.