Plastic microparticles are everywhere in the environment and in everyone’s body. Inevitably, the petrochemical industry will find people to tell us this is harmless, or perhaps even good for us, but the evidence points the other way.
So far, biodegradable alternatives have shortcomings, but this solution appears to have fixed them. A third of global plastics are made in China & 6.5 per cent of all global oil use currently goes to supply China with petrochemicals. Since 2021, 90% of the increase in Chinese oil imports has been used by chemical feedstocks, not fuels.
Quite apart from environmental concerns, oil imports are China’s top national security risk. They are the only way outside actors (the US) can leverage a chokehold over its economy.
Speedily electrifying with renewables has been one way they’ve been reducing that dependence; now they have another. Swap bamboo (something they have in vast abundance) for even more oil imports.
This is incredible! I just feel like I’ve seen this headline a trillion times and yet the biodegradable stuff is never used (at least in the US, I’ve seen biodegradable packaging being used in Mexico quite a bit).
Biodegradable alternatives tend to have two big problems over traditional plastics. The first being that we’ve spent 50 years engineering plastic manufacturing. So there’s a huge economic inertia to overcome (although not so huge that we haven’t routinely overcome them with paper and particleboard alternatives in many other instances). The second is that the alternatives are biodegradable, which tend to limit shelf life, raise sterilization risks, increases the shipping weight/volume, and undermines product durability. Again, this goes back to paper as a popular substitute for plastics. Glass - a very popular precursor and still popular alternative to plastic - has this problem in spades.
You see this problem in grocery stores all the time, with respect to paper/glass versus plastic bags or containers.
In a country that prioritized the value of waste management, reuse, and recycling, I suspect we’d see a lot more durable glass and paper products to replace plastics. And, where plastics do exist, we’d see more methods for reusing and recycling existing containers, rather than generating mountains of single-use disposables.
But so much of this isn’t an issue of technology. Its purely economics.
This alone is an obstacle. Long ago, I could buy “trash” bags based on potato starch. Anything wet would dissolve them, but ideally we would pit green waste in compost. I loved them, but even that market that catered to “hippies” had to quit selling them because they weren’t durable enough. They were better than paper! But whatever.