The Bio-Revolution:

30 June 2009

By Robert Sutton

The 1960s were an auspicious age of petrochemical innovation. Oil was cheap and limitless and scientists have kept on coming up with modern products made from petroleum that have helped to ensure, in the words of one corporate slogan, "better living through chemistry."

These products comprise fertilizers, pesticides, medicines and  plastics. 

However plastics have only in the last several years been discovered to be an unmitigated catastrophe. Overwhelming our oceans and landfills with a toxic mess of non biodegradable poison that cannot easily be cleaned up.

But, like petroleum, modern plastics come from petrochemicals, a finite resource and with peak oil around the corner the race is on to substitute petroleum based chemicals with renewable alternatives and to recycle petroleum based products into their less toxic form through  bioremediation. 

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Bioplastics:

 Bioplastics  are been touted as the alternatives to petroleum based plastics, made from renewable, raw materials, including corn, wheat, potatoes, beets and a variety of other plants, bioplastics have been on the drawing board since the mid 1980s.

They are often called PLAs, or polylactic acid, because this is what the plant matter is ultimately converted into when they degrade.

The benefits of Bioplastics:

•Producing bioplastics uses 65% less energy than it takes to produce petroleum based    plastics.
•Bioplastics generate 68% less greenhouse gases than petroleum based plastics.
•Manufacturing petroleum based plastics uses about 200,000 barrels of oil per day,    switching to bioplastics means being less dependent on foreign oil.
•As they degrade, bioplastics will remain non toxic and will not leach dangerous    chemicals into the soil.
•The process of making bioplastics has finally become cost effective.
•Bioplastics can easily be recycled.

The Disadvantages of Bioplastics:

Although bioplastics are a great improvement over petroleum based fuels, they are not yet the perfect solution.

•Most recycling centers are not set up to handle large amounts of PLAs. Presently, PLA    products cannot be recycled with petroleum based products.
•Bioplastics are compostable, but only under specific conditions. To biodegrade within 90    days, as described, the products have to reach 140° F for ten consecutive days. This    requires a special facility, which few consumers have access to. If your PLA products    end up at the landfill, they will not degrade any faster than a petroleum based product.
•Planting corn for non food uses are problematic for several reasons. Most corn planted    for industrial uses are genetically modified, raising the question of the potential    contamination of conventional crops. Soil erosion is another problem.
•Plant based bioplastics have a low melting point. This means that if you leave a corn    based take away container in your car on a warm day, when you return you might find    that it has melted into a small puddle.

Bioplastics appear to offer a more sustainable future. But can they live up to the hype, many different types of bioplastics are produced today, but they are still on a journey to full sustainability and as more companies explore bioplastic packaging and materials, some concerns have been raised about the end of life of bioplastic.

Some types of bioplastic can only be composted in industrial composting facilities, and in most places there is little composting infrastructure. Making materials that can also be digested in home compost settings raise the question on the ability for those materials to be composted and receive the end of life the manufacturer intended, instead of being throw in the trash.

Accurate sorting is at the heart of making bioplastics economically and socially viable, because the recycling or composting operation must be able to separate petrochemical and bioplastic materials into their pure streams to ensure correct end of life of both types of products.

Digesting the indigestible:

Bioremediation has been used to clean up petroleum waste since the 1950s. Because petroleum is a naturally occurring, organic substance, the environment is full of microorganisms and enzymes that can degrade it and often only require additional nutrients or an oxygen source to accelerate the process.

At first, bioremediation posed an option whose results were uncertain at best, and which was not easily tailored to individual problems. However great strides have been made in bioscience and the result for this  remediation  method has been the creation of tailored made solutions designed to ingest petroleum based pollutants.

These solutions can recycle complex petroleum based plastics into their parent compound to be used again or  up-cycled  into more desirable products like medicines, bioplastics and  biofuels. 

To date the vast majority of recycled products in the world today is in fact  down-cycled  products making recycling operations both economically and socially unsuitable.

Continued research and development into bioremediation will reduce the tonnes of petroleum based plastic waste that makes its way into oceans and landfills each year.

With worldwide government support and legislation petroleum based plastics and their toxic affects could reach their natural end of life.

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