Are BioPlastics A Good Thing?

My favorite milk is an unhomogenized whole milk from Sparkman’s Cream Valley. The milk is produced in Georgia, is rBGH free, and comes in a corn starch bioplastic bottle. On the surface bioplastics look like a good idea. They are made from renewable biomass sources, such as vegetable oil, corn starch, etc., instead of petroleum. But are bioplastics really any better than traditional plastics?

Here are seven reasons why bioplastics are worse than traditional plastics:

1. Why make stuff out of it when you can eat it? There are lots of hungry people in the world, and it seems a little odd to be making disposable cups out of the stuff when it could be eaten instead.
2. You can't always recycle it. Because bioplastics come in dozens of varieties, there's no way to make sure you're getting the right chemicals in the recycling vat. And, in general, the solution is compost instead of re-entering the supply stream.
3. It could make plastic recycling impossible. Even worse than not being recyclable itself, if it creeps into the recycling stream (which is likely, since it doesn't look any different) it can introduce new chemicals that make the final recycled product weaker or even unusable.
4. Compostable doesn't mean compostable. If you toss a bioplastic fork into your compost and assume it'll be dirt in a few months, you'll be sorely disappointed. While bioplastic is (sometimes) compostable, it requires high intensity, high heat commercial composting.
5. It's never made from organic corn, and generally made from genetically modified corn. We won’t get into the concerns with genetic modification but conventional corn production is a very petroleum intensive process.
6. It makes low quality plastic. Instead of solving the problem of the disposable society, bio-plastics generally can only be made into disposable items. They're having problems even making transparent bioplastic that's strong enough to hold water for a few months.
7. It's good marketing, but bad honesty. It's very easy to have bioplastic cups or bags or forks. But it's very difficult to figure out what that means. Because there are so many different types of bioplastic, you never really know what you're getting into. Maybe it's compostable, maybe it's not. Maybe it's recyclable, maybe it's not.
   

Bioplastics may one day be superior to traditional plastics, but today they fall short (think of them like first generation biofuels). Without the technology and infrastructure in place to handle these materials (and consumer awareness to use it) bioplastics are likely to end up being thrown away rather than recycled or composted.

What can Alpharetta do to help?
The best thing Alpharetta could do is to expand curbside recycling to include traditional #3-#7 plastics (like Roswell) as well as starch-based bioplastics. If recycling the bioplastics is too expensive, the bioplastics could be collected along with yard waste to be composted.

8 Reasons Why BioPlastic is Worse than Regular Plastic
Sustainable Bioplastic Guidelines (PDF)