Could Bioplastic be Viable?

What if we could make plastics from less harsh products? This means we get rid of them much easier and in a much safer way. Most bioplastics are made from natural materials like corn starch. Some bioplastics look identical to traditional petrochemical plastics. The main ingredient in bioplastics is Polylactide acid (PLA), which looks and behaves like polypropylene and polyethylene, widely used for the production of food containers.

Turning shrimp into plastic: Harvard's Wyss Institute comes up with fully degradable bioplastic

Producing PLA, according to NatureWorks, saves two thirds the energy you need to produce traditional plastics. However, a problem remains, even with the advent of bioplastics. Those currently in use do not fully degrade in the environment. Also, their use is limited to packaging material or producing containers for food and drink.

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have now introduced a new bioplastic, isolated from shrimp cells. It is made from chitosan, a variety of chitin – the second most abundant organic material on Earth. The main ingredient in the hard crustacean shells is the tough polysaccharide, chitin. The Wyss Institute makes its ‘shrilk’ from chitin from shrimp shells most which would otherwise be discarded or used in fertilizer or makeup, and a fibroin protein from silk (Gazette, 2014).

Wyss Director, Donald E. Ingber in March 2014 said, ‘There is an urgent need in many industries for sustainable materials that can be mass produced. Our scalable manufacturing method shows that chitosan, which is readily available and inexpensive, can serve as a viable bioplastic that could potentially be used instead of conventional plastics for numerous industrial applications.’ This environmentally friendly plastic could also serve in the manufacture of diapers, trash bags, and for packaging.

Even more exciting news, shrilk breaks down in just a few weeks, when discarded, it even releases rich nutrients that assist plant growth. According to researchers at Columbia University, the United States alone generates about 34 million tons of plastic every year, with less than 7% being recovered for recycling. According to these researchers, plastics buried in landfills will take 1,000 years to degrade.

Drawbacks to Bioplastic

·        Some bioplastics like PLA, are made from genetically modified corn, a variety of crops considered by most environmentalists to be implicitly denigratory to the environment.

·        Bioplastics are made from plants like corn, land for agriculture is readily forgone for the ‘cultivation of plastic’, and possibly causing a significant increase in food prices – the poorest are hit hardest!

·        Bioplastics cannot be easily recycled. PLA looks similar to PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) but when mixed in a recycler, the mixture becomes impossible to recycle. The increasing use of PLA may be a threat to the recycling of plastic.

 References

Gazette, H. (2014, May 5). Promising Solution to plastic pollution. Retrieved May 24, 2015, from Havard Gazette: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/05/promising-solution-to-plastic-pollution/