A year ago, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that single-use plastic will be banned from the 2024 Olympic Games. While this initiative seems plausible, it has one significant flaw. The ban says nothing about other kinds of plastic, but, single-use or not, this material is still a pollutant. Nevertheless, people still fall for its trap, and supposedly eco-friendly kinds of plastic, namely, the biodegradable type, only make the situation worse.
Plastic is versatile and durable, and this qualities have revolutionized many aspects of our lives when it entered the mainstream back in 1950. However, its durability is also our curse: this material does not biodegrade, meaning it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to break down. Plastic waste is now found in every corner of the world, from the highest mountains to the deepest oceans, harming wildlife, polluting our water supplies, and clogging our landfills and even bodies.
The realization that plastic is not a salvation but a danger came to humankind only in the 90s. Since then, the anti-plastic movement has been growing, finding a new lease of life with the invention of biodegradable polymers. Then, the idea of a material that could break down naturally, without leaving harmful substances behind, seemed like a dream come true. However, as further research and real-world applications emerged, it became clear that biodegradable plastic was not the silver bullet we hoped for.
The tricky case of biodegradation
One of the primary misconceptions about biodegradable plastics is that they will simply disintegrate into harmless substances when exposed to the environment. While they do indeed break down into organic matter, this process often needs specific conditions that are not always present in the environment. For instance, some biodegradable plastics require industrial composting facilities to achieve complete degradation, which are not widely available in many parts of the world.
France’s earlier effort to reduce single-use plastics is a case in point. In 2022, the nation outlawed all PLU tags that weren’t compostable. A victory for French environmentalists, however, quickly turned into a difficult situation for product importers: in an international market where goods are imported from all over the world, the prohibition on plastic PLU tags only truly takes effect if all other countries choose to follow suit. When exported to other countries, the majority of those biodegradable stickers would still wind up in landfills, where they would be decomposing for as many years as regular plastic would.
And even if this “green” plastic lands in a country with a developed waste management system, utilization facilities aren’t always happy about that. Many of them can’t always tell the difference between conventional and compostable plastics, and they don’t want to risk contamination and production stops, says Nora Goldstein, an editor and publisher of BioCycle composting website: “If I can’t tell the difference, and I am a composting professional, your average consumer is just as likely to throw a plastic bag in the compost as a compostable bag in the recycling.” Basically, one mismatched piece can seriously disrupt the entire system: when conventional plastic ends up in compost, the latter turns to be useless and even harmful if released in the environment. And when biodegradable packaging finds its way into a recycling facility, it will clog the machinery and contaminate the subsequent batch of recovered plastic, putting a stop to the enterprise.
“Eco-friendly” promises only aggravate the situation
The problem of differentiation between several kinds of plastic leads us to the bigger issue. Many consumers across the world are concerned about the environment. Yet their governments, especially in developing countries, often fail to provide them with a chance to make their contribution to the fight, even by simply sorting their waste. And even when a country has everything for efficient waste management, users still fail to tell one plastic from another: for instance, participant in an experiment held in the UK between 2019 and 2021 were confused about what sort of bioplastics can be put in a home compost bin, with some trying to home-compost products made for industrial composting.
At that, the labels “Biodegradable”, “Recyclable” and others only aggravate the problem by making people readily buy products in the supposedly eco-friendly packaging: “People need to be aware that putting [plastic] in the recycling or trying to compost it, or putting in the general waste bin won’t necessarily get them the results that they’re being advertised,” says the experiment’s author, Imogen Napper of the University of Plymouth.
With this in mind and to avoid confusion and further exacerbations, some companies even opt not to inform users altogether. Novamont, the producer of a starch-based plastic, was investigating how its own products break down in a marine environment. The results showed that the product fully biodegraded in seawater on a timescale of up to one year, but the company opted not to advertise this feature. Francesco Delgi Inoccenti, who looks after the ecology of Novamont’s products, says the company doesn’t have any plans to publicly promote these characteristics because it doesn’t want to encourage littering. Rather, the tests were an insurance policy in case their products end up somewhere they shouldn’t: “It’s not going to be a commercial claim, because people could really misunderstand the meaning of that,” Inoccenti says.
Even a government may believe that plastic is good
It’s not just people but entire governments that fall into the trap of marketing promises, and sometimes this applies not only to biodegradable plastic but to conventional plastic as well. One of the evident examples here is polymer banknotes, touted as eco-friendlier and made of synthetic polymer film (BOPP) – which is not even biodegradable. Nevertheless, some states continue to introduce them, claiming that the plastic bills have a lifespan longer than their paper counterparts, so there are fewer notes to dispose of. And when they do need to be replaced, they can be recycled and turned into other products. What escapes attention, however, is that recycling is not the equivalent of total disintegration.
A product made of recycled banknotes will eventually end up in the nature, often in the form of microplastic that can travel into the wildlife, the atmosphere, soil and the human body. Compare this to the cotton/linen mix in conventional paper banknotes: both materials are truly compostable and biodegradable: “Natural fibres don’t contribute to the ongoing micro[plastic] pollution crisis in the hydrosphere, which threatens aquatic and human life,” says Good On You environmental organization.
Introduction of such banknotes looks particularly strange in countries most prone to climate threats: for instance, Maldives keep making desperate pleas to reverse the climate change and lower the level of CO2 emissions, but don’t hesitate to introduce plastic bills – even though they release almost three times more carbon dioxyde than paper notes. This same kind of contradiction can be found in many Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates. A few months before hosting COP28, the country announced the introduction of a new banknote made from polymer. A material derived from the petrochemical industry… The difference between political statements and decision-making is often very significant.
Any plastic counts
Polymer bills, small tags, thin carrier bags and many, many other minutiae may seem not very significant when compared to larger issues like fossil fuels – but they make their contribution, too. It’s not just that they pollute the environment: their false promises won’t let us kick the habit of using plastic altogether. Discussing the issue, some researchers even go as far as calling this mix of the environmental agenda and marketing the greenwashing: “Greenwashing first acts on people’s thoughts and consumption ideas, then on people’s production and consumption behaviors. The greenwashing of biodegradable plastics will seriously affect the consumption of biodegradable products by those who think in sustainability or environmental privilege and can lead to improper disposal of these materials,” reads a study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.
Essentially, actions like Paris’ ban on single-use plastic or introduction of plastic banknotes may seem well-intended. However, what they actually do is at odds with any holistic environmental strategy since they indirectly imply that some plastics are better than others. We see now that they’re not, and while we can’t get rid of this pervasive material as quickly as we would like, we can stop justifying the use and introduction of any kind of it right now – and only then can we say that we have truly taken the first step towards a plastic-free (and more eco-friendly) society.
