Belated Innovation

We’re sitting with tea, weekend chores pressing in. Slyly, I offer, “I’ll go to the compost after this, shall I?”

The question is rhetorical - the kitchen windowsill caddy is bursting and the lid hasn’t shut for 2 days.

“Mm, yeah. If you do that, I’ll do the dog-poo run”.

This, of course, was my sneaky goal� Even if in French they’re called ‘crottes’, I hate the job of collecting them around the garden� Especially in the morning�

Tea over, we pull 2 small rolls out from the drawer: green compost bags and brown (ick) dog-poo ones� Both are made of cornstarch� Fully compostable�

Every time I see these bags, I feel a blend of gratitude and anger� I’m glad that we now have bags that are made of fermented corn starch instead of petroleum by-products� But so angry that we had to wait so long� The technology could have been there years ago and saved our oceans and landfill tonnes of plastic pollution� Then, of course, there’s the plastics inside us� Since 2018, we’ve known that microplastics (less than 5mm long) are in our bodies�

Ingestion, inhalation and dermal contact with plastic is now understood to lead to what scientists name ‘particle toxicity’ in our bodieswith a resulting impact on health and mortality�

I remember Chemistry lessons at high school and the thrill of making nylon� 2 liquids mixedand at the line where they met, a thin chewinggum consistency thread of polymer� Our 1970s O-level courses sold us the industrial revolution as something marvellous, petrol as a driver of progress, and petroleum by-products as some kind of miraculous free gift� Was it economics (greed), pragmatics (what to do with those petrol by-products), or simply foolish shortsightedness that made the world turn to plastic without thought of the long-term effects?

Whatever, we’re now - very - belatedly turning to alternatives.

As I research cornstarch plastics (there’s journals in polymer research if you fancy digging in), I find lists of advantages and disadvantages� While talk about downsides seems to focus on slow rates of decomposition (but, yeah, we must remember that regular plastic does not decompose at all) some are saying that using a foodcrop - corn - is not a great idea, and are putting forward solutions that re-use an already-existing waste product, other materials� You may have seen plastic alternatives turn up in the form of coffee cups or cutlery made out of discarded woodchips, coffee husks and so on� Innovation and hightech industries are moving very fast to kick plastics out of our lives�

Meanwhile, the clean-up continues� A brilliant project at Chichester harbour down the road, led by University of Brighton’s Dr Carina Ciocan, trains ‘citizen scientists’ (volunteers - people like us) to take water samples for measuring water pollution and marine damage by plastics� (A lot of it comes from fibreglass boat hulls)�

The clean-up at home done, we pop our cornstarch bags into the bin and close the lids� Anger - and gratitude� 21st-century industry and innovation will take a much larger and longerterm view than did 20th-century�