Materials News
Having your fill of “edible” plastics Bioplastics development is becoming more “appetising” with the innovation of food-based packaging materials, says Angelica Buan in this report. These are said to be safe when eaten by animals and marine life, and some are even safe for human consumption!
Plastics “food” in the sea The smorgasbord of plastics waste in the ocean may be an eyesore for humans but for marine animals the plastics stew is a gastronomic lure! A 2016 study published in Science Advances found that algae, which can thrive on waste plastics in the oceans, emit an odour of a gas known as dimethylsulphide (DMS). Marine animals (and even sea birds), with a keen olfactory sense, follow the scent that normally leads to a banquet of small crustaceans – their natural prey. However, with the oceans inundated with waste plastics, marine animals that follow the DMS trail are instead being led to a lethal buffet of plastics, instead of their natural prey! An estimated two-thirds of the world’s fish stocks ingest plastics, according to Australia-based Ocean Crusaders Foundation, feeding on largesse of some 46,000 pieces of plastics per square mile of ocean.
Curbing waste through bioplastics Waste management, particularly recycling, is a common and practical approach to curbing land-based plastic waste, a fair amount of which enters the waterways. However, technical, institutional, financial and social constraints, particularly in developing countries, hound waste management efforts. On the part of plastic producers and users, a doable solution is replacing conventional plastics that do not biodegrade on land or in water (unless additives are added to materials during production) with plant-based plastics/ bioplastics. The market for bioplastics is projected to grow at a CAGR of 28.8% or close to US$44 billion by 2020, a report from Future Market Insights (FMI) says. It will be mainly driven by a growing packaging industry. But even with the “promise” of being biodegradable, some experts are sceptical if bioplastics can solve the marine debris problem. An article published by US-based marine environment research organisation Algalita questions if bioplastics are able to degrade better in the environment than oil-based plastics, in reference to the two test standards that gauge biodegradation of plastics: ASTM and ISO. The latter tests distinguish key terms such as degradable, biodegradable and compostable.
The Ocean Cleanup is deploying its cleanup system, Pilot, later this year
Clean-up efforts have been started by some groups, notably the Netherlands-based The Ocean Cleanup, which is gearing for its large-scale clean-up of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 2020. Later this year, the team will be launching and deploying the world’s first operational ocean clean-up system called Pilot. It utilises the natural ocean currents to catch marine debris, hence doing away with any external energy source, the organisation states. Nevertheless, even with such model technology in place, it may take decades to clean the oceans of waste plastics, or at least to that level when plastics consumption was not as wide-scale as it is now.
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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2017
Algalita mentions of bioplastic being presumed to break down better in the environment than conventional plastics
Meanwhile, New York-headquartered Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) also released a white paper on