Most commercially available bioplastics are now produced from food crops or first-generation feedstock, plants high in carbohydrates like corn, sugar cane, and sugar beet.
Due to its low land requirements and high yields, the first-generation feedstock is now the most advantageous for the manufacture of bioplastics.
Non-food crops (second and third-generation feedstock) like cellulose are the subject of study by the bioplastics industry to expand their use in the manufacturing of bioplastics.
Straw, corn stover, and bagasse are all examples of cellulosic by-products that can be utilized to make biopolymers, and new technologies are focusing on these materials.
What is bioplastic?
Put bioplastic is plastic produced from plants or other biological materials instead of petroleum. Bioplastic is another name for it.
The sugar from plants like corn and sugarcane is extracted and converted into polylactic acids (PLAs), or it can be manufactured from polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) using genetically modified bacteria.
Plastics made of PLA are frequently used for food packaging, while those made of PHA are commonly utilized in medical devices like sutures and cardiovascular patches.
Also Read: What Is Ecosystem Services?
Bioplastics can be expensive, but polylactic acid (PLA) is the most cost-effective option because it is produced in the same vast industrial facilities as other biofuels like ethanol. It is the most popular variety and may be found in various everyday items like water bottles, cutlery, and clothing.
How are bioplastics made?
Dozens of bioplastics and bio-based plastics are currently being manufactured from a wide variety of biological components around the world. Here, we zero in on polylactic acid (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), the two bioplastics that now dominate the market.
Polylactic acid, or PLA, is a thermoplastic polymer derived from sugar in several renewable plants. Similar to polypropylene and polyethylene in many ways, PLAs may be mass-produced with little additional investment in time or resources, thanks to the widespread availability of the necessary processing equipment.
It is the second most common bioplastic after polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs).
About 5 percent of the plastics manufactured and consumed globally today are PHAs.
Bioplastics like polyhydroxyalkanoates are a type of polyester made by microorganisms from starch.
Because they can react with more than 150 distinct monomers, PHAs can be used to make polymers with a wide range of properties.
Because of their low production costs, PLAs are widely used in packaging food and other consumer goods.
Plastics made from polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are frequently employed in the injection molding process for medical devices.
Do bioplastics fare better than traditional plastics?
The more challenging question is whether bioplastics benefit the environment more than traditional plastics. The solution is murky, as it usually is with sustainability issues.
This bioplastic, made from PLAs, is recyclable, biodegradable, and compostable. This means that over time, plastic bags, bottles, and other packaging created from PLAs will degrade into biomass that may be recycled.
Some single-use plastics derived from petroleum can take hundreds of years to degrade, while a PLA plastic bottle, for example, will decompose in the water after 6-24 months.
It should be noted that there is an essential qualification. Businesses can offer PLA straws and bottles, claiming that they are compostable, and some do so.
However, PLAs need the controlled circumstances of industrial composting to break down correctly; these conditions cannot be duplicated in the ocean or at home.
PHAs require even more stringent requirements. This plastic can biodegrade in as little as one to two months in tropical regions and warm waters, but this time frame extends to decades in the cold and arctic.
The requirements for the biodegradability of PLAs and PHAs are not always met. New, super-biodegradable plastics less sensitive to environmental conditions like temperature require more investigation and development.
Bioplastics’ close relative, bio-based plastics, are not always biodegradable. The time it takes for many bio-based polymers to biodegrade is comparable to that of petroleum-based plastics.
Recycling and better waste management practices offer another potential answer. We lack the infrastructure in the UK to process bioplastics in considerable quantities at this time. In the home, people would have to sort plastics into various containers based on their properties.
Should we keep producing bioplastics?
We should keep working with and developing bioplastics and bio-based plastics even though the technology may not be at its most efficient. Although material disintegration is just one of the many obstacles facing the sustainable solutions sector, bioplastics, and bio-based plastics help us use less oil and other nonrenewable resources.
PLAs and PHAs use less energy in their production than traditional plastics and have fewer potentially harmful chemicals. The use of bioplastics and other forms of bio-based plastics is not without their benefits.
However, the reduction is still our first line of defense in the fight against plastic pollution. We should all do everything we can to decrease our usage of disposable plastics, most of which wind up in landfills or the world’s oceans.
