Circular BioPlastics - a glimmer of hope for a sustainable future.
I’ve had the privilege of having a very minor role in a very exciting and frustrating project recently. The BioSupPack consortium, a Horizon 2020 project supported and guided by CBE JU, set themselves the ambitious goal of validating an entirely new, circular bioplastics supply chain. (well, why not shoot for the stars?).
Starting from pure waste (spent grain from breweries), they developed and scaled processes to turn this into biodegradable plastic (PHB), which can be recovered, recycled and reused – either directly or after enzymatic degradation and then a fermentation process to create a “new generation” of PHB. They developed cutting edge techniques to automatically sort bioplastics from other waste, to track plastics from cradle to grave (except it’s no longer a grave, but a re-birth).
The scientific and consumer research work was outstanding – look out for some great technical papers and/or read the slightly less technical updates on their website or linked-in page.
This was a project with a smaller and a larger goal. The smaller goal, which was already huge, was to develop and validate this new supply chain. The larger goal was to show the world that this kind of idea – turning what we currently consider to be waste into sustainable high-quality products that replace our current unsustainable technologies – can work.
The world DESPERATELY needs solutions like this. In less than 2 centuries, we have polluted the atmosphere and the oceans with plastics, we have irreparably harmed the climate. We have done this by using fossil-fuels; in a couple of centuries we have used fuels that were created over millions of years – and treated them as the free resources of whomever discovered them, so that their prices were absurdly low. All this is not sustainable. It’s not just about climate change and pollution.
If we cannot survive without plastics, we need plastics that are non-fossil-based and truly recyclable. (which most plastics are NOT. Despite the reassuring way we’re told to sort them, only a small fraction can be recycled, and invariably it’s into something much less useful, like tyres or road-surfaces).
Projects like BioSupPack give a small glimmer of hope for future generations. But even as they do the hard bit, the rest of us fail totally to do the tiny parts that we can play to help them help us and our children, and this is what makes the project frustrating - because the scientists and engineers can only do so much - they need a small bit of help from the rest of us:
- When they test these bioplastics with end-users like us, we basically tell them “yeah, great – but if it’s not as good as my current package, or if it’s more expensive, I’m not willing to pay for it!” Plastic processes have been optimised for a century, are made at massive scale, with total disregard for the health of the planet, for degradability, for pollution, for recyclability, for the climate. They are made with fossil fuels which should be extremely expensive but are basically free. And yet we expect a totally new generation of bioplastics to meet the same standards before we’ll consider switching. [If you see a product in a truly sustainable packaging and it costs a few cents more, please buy it and recycle it.]
- If we consumers won’t help, then it’s up to our legislators to force our hand. For example, by putting a price of fossil-based plastics that truly represents their total cost, including damage to the planet. By setting standards for recyclability and degradability and reuse. But this is happening far too slowly, and it feels like there is far more lobbying money from the fossil-fuel plastics industry than from those who care about future generations having a liveable planet.
Bluntly: the current model in which every product has a perfectly optimised plastic container in a beautiful colour, containing a mix of hard and soft plastics chosen from a pallet of hundreds of different kinds of plastic, for optimal aesthetics and feel, is just not sustainable. It makes efficient recycling almost impossible. We need to move back to a world where there are fewer types of plastic, where containers are made out of one type, where plastics are not coloured, so that sorting and recycling become realistic again. And we need to price these plastics at a realistic price-point which reflects their true cost.
In such a world, circular bioplastics would be transparently a far better option than fossil-based plastics. There might be cases where the bioplastics are not yet ready, and where fossil-based plastics would still be necessary. That is OK – provided that the cost of the fossil-based plastics is high enough to encourage researchers to quickly find a sustainable solution.
What is amazing is that the BioSupPack have shown that circular bioplastics can work even in our deeply flawed existing world. But it will be a true challenge for them to take over the market unless both consumers and legislators start to take our responsibilities seriously.
There is a broader point here.
You will often hear defenders of “free markets” arguing against states imposing legislation which “limits consumer choices” or “increases prices.” They will argue that we need to “eliminate red tape” and “simplify.”
You will usually find that these people are actually defending a deeply unfree market which just happens to benefit them, by keeping their costs artificially low, by not forcing them to pay the full costs of their products (pollution, climate damage, using up the Earth’s very limited stock of fossil-fuels). They have identified emotive terms, qualified in focus groups, which make their position feel reasonable and normal.
A little though clearly shows that it is not, and the fossil-based plastics vs circular bioplastics is a perfect example. We need more red tape. We don’t need simplification. We need rules that clearly say “if your plastic is fossil-based and not sustainable, you will need to pay the full costs associated with it’s entire life cycle.” It’s not simple, because it shouldn’t be simple to put harmful products into circulation and just abandon them to their fate.
One of the really impressive things the BioSupPack team was to develop a scalable system which would enable each package to be tracked throughout its lifetime. Is that “simple”? Maybe not, although their method is very efficient and fully automated. But it is what we need.
Bioplastics is a route out of the current mess, but if we want them to succeed (and trust me, we do – even if you don’t, your children do) we need to create a level playing field. People like the BioSupPack team and other teams supported by CBE JU are solving very challenging problems that the plastics industry has ignored or failed to address for a century. If we want them to succeed, we need to at least take a small burden ourselves, and we need to insist that our legislators do what’s good for us and not what the highly-paid fossil-fuel lobbyists with their focus-group qualified language ask them to do.
