April 12, 2023
It would be nice to believe that all products labeled as “bioplastics” had no negative impacts on the environment and could be used without consequence. However, a recent literature review warns that we shouldn’t be so quick to make this assumption. A January 2023 article by science journalist Michael Allen notes that while plastics that are certified as biodegradable are designed to break down under “specific composting, industrial, and laboratory conditions,” they can be just as harmful to marine life as typical petroleum plastics if they end up in our oceans. Some bioplastics can take years to break down in a marine environment. They can also be chemically identical to traditional plastics or have similar toxic additives, although they can be labeled as “bioplastics” because the carbon used to make them is not sourced from fossil fuels. Some studies included in the literature review demonstrate that bioplastics can have the same negative effects on mussels as typical plastics do, impacting the creatures’ digestive systems and ability to attach to rocks. Neither Michael Allen nor the authors of the literature review intend to suggest that bioplastics are a useless invention or that scientists should not spend time developing them; they simply mean to say that we need equally tight regulations to ensure that the new materials are used and disposed of safely. I am personally very interested in the development of bioplastics and hope that they can be a useful tool for the future, but reading these publications opened my eyes to the fact that, in their current state, they cannot provide a complete solution to ocean plastic pollution.
