Three words explain why the 100 percent bioplastic bottle isn't ubiquitous yet: Supply, supply, supply.
Coca-Cola, Pepsi and several other Fortune 500 companies are working to address that. The beverage makers earlier this month announced they're teaming up with Nike, Ford, Procter & Gamble and Heinz to accelerate the development of 100-percent plant-based PET via a new initiative called the PET Plant Technology Collaborative.
“There’s limited supply and we’re all competing for it,” said Michael Washburn, director of sustainability for Nestle Waters North America. “Not just in the beverage industry, but also the carpet industry, technology companies like HP, food companies, and so on, and because of that we have to pay a premium for rPET. That dynamic needs to change for us to increase our use of it.”
It’s not just plant-based PET that’s in short supply, but recycled PET as well, said Washburn, who noted the limited supply of recycled PET (rPET) is keeping recycled content low in U.S. beverage bottles.
And with the beverage companies' ambitious goals -- Coke and Pepsi are each aiming to convert as many of their bottles to plant-based plastics in the next five years as possible -- collaboration, rather than cutthroat competition, made sense.
“We’re all end-users of PET and we’ve all been looking at bioplastics, so we’ve been working together informally for about a year, and thought it would be a good idea to work together in a more formal way,” said Angela Harris, biomaterials research engineer in the plastics research group at Ford Motor Company's Research and Innovation Center. “We’re all in different industries so we’re not competing with each other, and we have the same goals—we want to use this material, so we want to develop more of a supply base.”
Instead of bioplastic companies coming to each company individually, Harris explained, they can come to all five together. “Then we can talk about the different technologies amongst ourselves and figure out what would work best.”
Next page: Enviros say the new plastic is just like the old plastic
How Ironic that cocacola
How Ironic that cocacola wants to start pursuing a new plastic format whilst threatening to sue the Northern Territory Government in Australia over its recently introduced plastic bottle recycling levy. That smacks of utter hypocrisy to me
See http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2011/09/16/260651_ntnews.html and
and http://timsilverwood.com/2012/01/24/if-you-believe-in-recycling/and http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/recycling/coke/not-in-my-name
How Ironic that cocacola
How Ironic that cocacola wants to start pursuing a new plastic format whilst threatening to sue the Northern Territory Government in Australia over its recently introduced plastic bottle recycling levy. That smacks of utter hypocrisy to me
See http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2011/09/16/260651_ntnews.html and
and http://timsilverwood.com/2012/01/24/if-you-believe-in-recycling/and http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/recycling/coke/not-in-my-name
Is this not really about
Is this not really about "sustainabilty" of the demand for throw away bottles? The goal of the bottle companies is to make people feel like something productive is being accomplished, and it's ok to keep buying more single use bottles. "Somebody" is taking care of it, and yes boys and girls, it's ok to keep buying and throwing...
...it's not just that....
...it's not just that.... it's the greenwash that goes along with it.
These "plant-based" bottles are primarily corn (GMO corn)... a petroleum, chemical, and water intensive crop that destroys soil microbes, creates horrific problems for bird, bat, bee and frog populations, and creates economic problems for millions of US farm and agricultural workers in a variety of ways. ...when you add to that, the problems these "bio-plastics" create in the waste stream (recycling) plants; there is just nothing good or eco-friendly about them.
I'm not as concerned with the
I'm not as concerned with the "environmentalist concern" cited in the article--that we end up with the same plastic in the end--as I am with the full lifecycle impact.
Plastic pollution needs to (and can) be combated with innovative recycling and bottle take back programs.
But, what I am more concerned about is whether "plant-based plastic" requires any less petroleum inputs. Nearly everything in our economy hums on petroleum, and big agriculture is no exception. So, we've got big gas-guzzling tilling and cultivation operations. Then, apply petroleum-based fertilizers. Then, gas-guzzling harvesting operations. Then, transport of the plant materials. Then conversion to plastic. I'd like to see much more news on the early stages of the value chain here, and how this stacks up to conventional plastic production. The feedstock discussion, which this article at least mentions, needs to be enlarged. There are some studies out there, but this concern needs to be mainstreamed in any and every discussion surrounding plant-based plastics. If someone has a good study to point me to, I'd love to read it!
In addition to all this, we've got opportunity costs--agricultural operations could otherwise be used to produce food for a growing population--and externalities--soil erosion, monoculture crop proliferation reducing genetic diversity, eutrophication, etc..
What has me most interested are programs that would take organic waste and turn it into plastics. Waste-based plastics. If we're going to begin closing the loop here, these companies need to begin working out how to use the organic wastes in their value chain (or in partner value chains) to create plastic, not how to grow new crops to create plastic. Pepsi was working on it, Coke was not. I'm not sure of the progress.
Obviously, I understand the technological and financial barriers to rapid implementation for this and many other closed-loop processes. I suppose I am reacting more to the absence of this discussion in news on the "plant-based plastic" hype.