CLEVELAND (AP) – In a world increasingly concerned about the persistent damage that plastic – made in petrochemical plants – has had on the environment, companies are investing billions of dollars to increase the production of plastics made from natural materials and renewables that can be done safely. compost or can biodegrade under the right conditions.
Bioplastics have long been used in medical applications. The stitches you got after slicing your onions were probably made from bioplastic thread that dissolved harmlessly into your body.
But the nascent bioplastics industry envisions a much bigger role for materials made from corn, sugar, vegetable oils and other renewable materials in hopes of capturing a larger share of a global plastics market of nearly 600,000 millions of dollars.
Since large-scale production began in the 1950s, fossil-fuel plastics have made food safer to eat and vehicles safer to drive, for example. However, plastics are considered one of the world’s major environmental threats with their production responsible for the emission of millions of tons of greenhouse gases each year.
Of the 9 billion tons of fossil fuel plastic produced since the 1950s, only 9% percent has been recycled, studies have shown. The rest has been buried in landfills, burned or contaminated land and waterways. The chemical structure of fossil fuel plastic means that it can never fully disintegrate and instead breaks down into smaller and smaller particles.
At the moment, bioplastic represents only 1% of the world’s plastic production. If plastic made from fossil fuels is the massive Mall of America in Minnesota, bioplastics would be a 7-Eleven.
Companies and investors see opportunities. Data from i3 Connect shows that investment in bioplastics manufacturing reached $500 million in the first three months of 2022, surpassing the previous high of $350 million in the final quarter of 2021. The money is coming from both corporations and venture capitalists.
Zion Market Research estimates that the bioplastics market will grow from $10.5 billion in 2021 to about $29 billion in 2028.
Danimer Scientific is a bioplastic company with a recent expansion of its plant in Winchester, Kentucky, the Georgia-based company makes a bioplastic called PHA using microorganisms that ferment canola oil. The result is plastic pellets that manufacturers can use to mold products in the same way they use petrochemical plastic, Danimer CEO Stephen Croskrey said in an interview.
The expansion has made Danimer one of the largest PHA producers in the world.
Danimer’s plastic drink straws and stirrers made with PHA are being used at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and in large arenas such as Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., Croskrey said.
“We have active development projects for almost anything you can imagine,” he said.
Tests have shown that products made with Danimer’s PHA can biodegrade in six months in marine environments and two years in soil, Croskrey said.
The other primary bioplastic sold today is PLA, polylactic acid, usually produced by fermenting sugar from corn and sugar cane. One of the producers is Minneapolis-based NatureWorks, a joint venture between Cargill, one of the world’s largest private corporations, and Thailand-based PTT Global Chemical. It is the largest PLA company in the world, capable of producing 150,000 metric tons of bioplastic pellets annually at a plant in Blair, Nebraska.
NatureWorks is building a $600 million plant in Thailand that will increase its production capacity by 50 percent, Leah Ford, the company’s global marketing communications manager, said in an interview.
The company’s “biggest visibility market,” Ford said, is compostable food service items such as plastic cutlery, clear cups, wraps and containers that, along with restaurant food waste, are they can turn into a dark organic material to enrich the soil in gardens and the earth. farms. This is important because food waste clogs recycling machinery and contaminates recyclable petroleum plastics.
Some Starbucks stores use NatureWorks’ PLA-lined single-use cups, Ford said.
NatureWorks has become a game changer in the UK, where PG Tips, a big name in tea, has switched from polyester tea bags to bags made from cellulose and a thin layer of NatureWorks PLA which are fully compostable, Ford said.
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal published a study in 2019 that said petroleum-based polyester tea bags leached billions of microplastic particles when immersed in hot water. Around 60 billion cups of tea are consumed annually in the UK.
One of the criticisms of bioplastic made from corn and sugar is that it uses arable land on a starving planet. Ford called that concern unfounded. NatureWorks uses sugar extracted from corn while the rest of the grains are used to produce sweeteners, ethanol, cooking oils and livestock feed.
PLA, unlike PHA, does not readily biodegrade in nature. It must be mixed with food waste in industrial composters to biodegrade. When buried in landfills, PLA will disintegrate, but that would likely take decades.
NatureWorks has formed a partnership with PHA manufacturer CJ Bio to produce a bioplastic that can biodegrade more easily. The South Korea-based company is expanding its plant in Indonesia and plans to build a large plant in the Americas, said Raj Kirsch, vice president of research and development at CJ Bio.
Mixing the two types of bioplastics “brings a lot of value propositions to the final product,” Kirsch said in an interview.
Ramani Narayan, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University, has worked with Cargill in the past to help with PLA production.
Narayan said companies are using biodegradability claims to make their products more attractive to consumers. But the term is “misused, abused, and misused because everything in the world is biodegradable given the right time and environment.”
California, Narayan noted, has banned the use of the term “biodegradable” in marketing. The world needs to replace petroleum-based plastic with plastic materials that have been verified and certified as fully biodegradable, he said.
Narayan acknowledged that bioplastics are easier to biodegrade than petrochemical plastic, which can take centuries to disintegrate, leaving troubling microplastics along the way. However, the fact that PHA takes longer to break down in cold oceans and lakes than in temperate climates should not be glossed over.
“It will take time and you have to say it,” Narayan said.