Trash Talk: Biodegradable packaging losing its green sheen
March 26, 2010
Ellen Moorhouse
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
The other day I picked up a four-litre bag of Natrel milk, took one look at the outer bag with its big oxo-biodegradable label and vowed never to buy that brand again.
Until, that is, I went online and discovered the company, after only a year, is discontinuing the biodegradable pouch.
Obviously, the dairy products outfit has been listening to municipal trash managers who don’t want biodegradable packaging complicating the waste stream. Mountain Equipment Co-op is also eliminating its compostable BioBags, once the supply is used up.
“We paid a premium for that (compostable) product – the technology is European – but over time it proved to be less than an ideal solution,” says Tim Southam, spokesman for the co-op, which prides itself on its eco-principles. Complaints came in, notably from Halifax and its composting program, Southam said. Soon, the only bag you’ll be able to get at the outdoor lifestyle store is a 95-cent reusable one, with high recycled content.
Over at Natrel, it was criticism from Toronto that sparked the phase-out of the biodegradable pouch, according to vice-president of marketing Caroline Losson. The company is returning to a plastic that municipalities can potentially recycle.
Biodegradable plastics, or bio-plastics, cover a range of materials, from familiar polyethylenes and polypropylenes, with small amounts of time-bomb additives that cause them to break down much faster, to more exotic plant-based compostable polymers that micro-organisms can eat.
These plastics bathe in a green glow. After all, it’s disturbing to think those grocery bags will endure for decades, not to mention the fact they’re lethal to animals such as sea turtles. And companies like the marketing allure of an eco-friendly label.
There’s a role for biodegradable plastics. Take medical applications, such as sutures that dissolve. Or even compostable liner bags which some municipalities (not Toronto) want residents to use for collecting their green-bin kitchen scraps.
What about biodegradable plastic packaging? Consider the following:
• If you’re trying to recycle plastic, the last thing you want is biodegradable material entering the mix and potentially destabilizing the resin that’s going into new products.
• Introducing biodegradable plastics makes sorting more complex and prone to error, whether by residents or by plant workers grabbing blue-bin items off high-speed conveyors.
• Industrial composting operations either screen out plastics at the start of the process, like Toronto’s anaerobic system, or can be too efficient for the biodegradable packaging to decompose completely, so it ends up as trash, anyway.
• If oil prices rise, Toronto will try to sell the polyethylene film from all the plastic bags and diapers that went into our green bins, but it will be unsalable if the material has biodegradable contaminants.
• Biodegradable products, often touted for breaking down in landfill, won’t degrade in a modern dump for years. And you don’t want them to. (Decomposition will produce methane emissions, worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and potentially affect soil and water conditions.) According to the Biodegradable Products Institute, landfill researchers have uncovered “legible 30-year old newspapers, five-year-old lettuce and 10-year-old hot dogs.”
Municipal doors are starting to close on bio-plastic packaging. Toronto retailers are on notice that the city, which collects and recycles plastic retail bags, is banning biodegradable ones (like Mountain Equipment Co-op’s compostable sack) as of June 1.
“Clearly it’s our markets that have the ultimate say, and they’re saying to us, ‘We will reject your material if it’s found to contain bio-plastics,’ ” says Geoff Rathbone, who heads the city’s solid waste management division.
Toronto also wants to expand its polyethylene film recycling but that’s a challenge. With biodegradable plastic milk pouches and dry cleaner bags out there, not to mention a vast array of other types of unrecyclable film products, from laminated snack-food bags to meat wrappers, how can they risk it?
Trash Talk appears Saturdays in New in Homes & Condos. Send questions or comments to e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca.
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