*DrawDown #8: BioPlastic v. PetroPlastic
(*Nov 4 2018, we appended an update, below.)
A San Francisco Board of Supervisors debate in 2007 dragged for weeks, weighing whether to ban plastic bags at retail checkouts. Dozens testified in support, but momentum stalled with an industry lobbyist urging instead, a ban on plastic bag bans. A conservative, usually combative, drop-by visitor, jolted the idea back into motion: 40-ish Irish-American man, president of the Residential Builders Association, stood to report a similar ban passed in Ireland and "we keep paper bags in the trunk of the car" there now, it couldn't be easier to comply!
People are talking about plastic this week. We're talking "BioPlastic" page 168 for the eighth meeting of DrawDown bookclub. Part I is Review, part II covers "Bioplastics" page 168 and Part III decides what to read next. Do know plastic news is breaking as we begin this meeting.
Monday June 5 was "World Environment Day" the search results for "plastic bans" under Google News this Thursday evening show bans passing around the world, some just minutes ago:
I. Review
II. BioPlastic, page 168
III. Next Readings
I. Review
A chapter from two weeks ago "Compost" page 62 continues to draw feedback. Forty six percent of respondents to an informal poll on dailykos.com say compost is not yet collected by their garbage company in their town.
Selling point: composted garbage smells better! Garbage companies are missing out on a revenue stream: composted soil is high-quality. Cities are missing out on better-smelling refuse. New Yorkers started composting last year.
With three-way separated trash, this house is less cluttered - we take out the compost and the recycling two times per week and take out the garbage once per. Our recycling can is unobtrusive as it fills with clean paper, clean cardboard, clean plastic and clean glass. No flies congregate. No odor wafts.
As we discovered two weeks ago reading the chapter, organic food waste that's not composted starves for oxygen and decomposes to methane, which emits a "signature pungence." And is a bigger contributor to global warming than is CO2.
Compost is a principle farming technique that North African farmer Yacouba Sawadogo uses, as described in last week's nonfiction story chapter on "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" page 118. Adapted from the book "Hot" the chapter is a gripping tale of a North African man who watched his country descend into famine and his neighbors flee a decades-long drought. And Sawadogo stayed with his 50 acres as vegetation loss was captured on 1970s satellite images. Sawadogo planted, plodded, continuously innovated his farming techniques, and by the late 1980s before rainfall had returned, the water tables in his country showed water stopped dropping by a meter per year. He still lives in Africa and teaches the world his techniques, through his translator "when you have trees, you get more trees." And "trees are like lungs."
Also last week we reviewed "Walkable Cities" page 86. Pedestrians are attracted to neighborhoods that are useful, safe and interesting, which they are in New York's stretches that host public pianos featured last Sunday on CBS This Morning.
II. Bioplastic, page 168
For all the evil that plastic spreads, all the birds and fish it kills and the whales it starves, this chapter says in the 19th century, plastic saved elephants.
National billiards champion Michael Phelan in his 1858 book documented the characteristics, diameter, weight of the ideal billiard ball. But Phelan lamented the ivory source material was "dreadfully dear." And in 1863 he advertised $10,000 gold-coin reward to the person who could invent a billiard ball made from an ivory substitute.
After a few iterations, a printer and "tinkerer John Westly Hyatt" patented in 1868 the first cotton-based bioplastic calling it "celluloid." The new billiard ball successfully served players with the proper weight and roll. Not without flaws, the celluloid ball, sensitive to heat, when near cigar embers was known to explode.
Bioplastic preceded petroplastic. Leo Baekland revived a scientific discovery from 1833 "polymeric" materials or what we now call "polymers" - the basis of all bioplastic and petroplastic. Baekland used fossil fuel-based polymers to produce his own petroplastic, "Bakelite" patented in 1909.
Petroplastic & bioplastic developments raced forward, and Henry Ford introduced his first car made from soybeans in 1941. You read that right. DrawDown says:
Of course, bioplastic is not the pat answer to today's plastic problems for two reasons: 1) it requires a lot of land to grow these bioplastic feedstocks like soybeans, corn and sugarcane, and 2) bioplastics do not naturally biodegrade.
Bioplastics do not biodegrade in your compost heap at home. Bioplastics don't biodegrade on their own. So what do we do?
[INHALE]
Some bioplastics, *if* they're properly separated from petroplastics in the wastestream, can biodegrade if heated to the proper temperature. Some bioplastics cannot biodegrade, but many of those unbiodegradable bioplastics can be recycled if properly separated from the biodegradable bioplastics and the petroplastics.
[EXHALE did you get that?]
What many readers may be asking: do bioplastics recycle more easily than petroplastics? And this is the bookclub host's answer: the book chapter doesn't say whether bioplastic is recycled more easily or more completely than petroplastic. (Recall: the purpose of the DrawDown bookclub is for science-background citizens without environmental science expertise to read the book as novices, so we can ask the stupid questions that expert environmentalists forgot were not stupid questions at all.) Relying on bioplastic *does* allow us to leave some fossil fuel in the ground for future generations to utilize. How much? About 6% of oil is used to create plastic.
Only six percent??? Plastic is less black-and-white than we thought. It saves elephants, starves whales and is a byzantine flowchart to throw out. Maybe we should just use less of it.
Let us now break from the chapter and look at what people are doing around the world to rely less on plastic. A Scottish milk company installed a milk-fountain vending machine in grocery stores (B.Y.O.m.B. bring your own milk bottle.) Plastic bag bans inspire attractive reusable shopping bags to be used (unmet market need: masculine reusable bags for men. Sports team logos?)
The #stopsucking campaign is creating a wave to substitute either paper straws, metal straws, or sans straw sipping to eliminate more plastic from the waste stream. (Headscratcher: Starbucks contributed to the #stopsucking campaign with a plastic strawless lid.)
A company in Norway offers money back for each plastic water bottle people recycle via vending machine. This is backed by government subsidy.
As this host has proposed at earlier meetings: (consider) starting a tree farm, and swap some of this plastic back for paper, what we had originally (this bookclub hasn't yet read "Recycled Paper" page 166, so do your research first.) Milk always came in paper cartons - why did that change? What was "paper or plastic" inspired by anyway, the petroplastic industry?
This might be a good time to check back in with the #plastic week on social media and "Plastic Ban" search on Google News.
IV. Next Readings
Let's examine this untested assumption we've been operating on that we can swap plastic for paper, even though we swapped paper for plastic at some point. Let's read "Recycled Paper" page 166.
For a future meeting, in case "Infrastructure Week" the president keeps promising us actually happens, let's get in front and read what infrastructure we need for "Electric Vehicles" page 142.
Friendly "Mr. Trash Wheel" scoops plastics out of Baltimore Harbor.
Carton-plucking robot "Clarke" picks 60 recyclable cartons per minute from a waste stream conveyer belt.
Apple unveiled it's newest phone-recycling robot "Daisy" just ahead of Earth Day.
See you next week!
<- DrawDown #7: Walkable Cities and Man Who Stopped the Desert | DrawDown #9: Clean Recycled Paper vs. 'Garbage Juice' ->
* -------- UPDATE ------>
Bliki Update Nov 4 2018: We received a question about this post.
We received an email yesterday from a reader researching a school assignment on bioplastic:
Reader did not sign their name. Thank you for writing. The answer is: "petroplastic" is plastic derived from oil, or derived from "fossil fuels." Whereas "bioplastic" is derived from plants. Plants are a renewable resource, fossil fuels are not.
-----------------
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
A San Francisco Board of Supervisors debate in 2007 dragged for weeks, weighing whether to ban plastic bags at retail checkouts. Dozens testified in support, but momentum stalled with an industry lobbyist urging instead, a ban on plastic bag bans. A conservative, usually combative, drop-by visitor, jolted the idea back into motion: 40-ish Irish-American man, president of the Residential Builders Association, stood to report a similar ban passed in Ireland and "we keep paper bags in the trunk of the car" there now, it couldn't be easier to comply!
People are talking about plastic this week. We're talking "BioPlastic" page 168 for the eighth meeting of DrawDown bookclub. Part I is Review, part II covers "Bioplastics" page 168 and Part III decides what to read next. Do know plastic news is breaking as we begin this meeting.
Monday June 5 was "World Environment Day" the search results for "plastic bans" under Google News this Thursday evening show bans passing around the world, some just minutes ago:
- CNNMoney - 7 Hours Ago "Ikea bans all single use plastic from its stores and restaurants"
- New York Times - June 1 "Chile Bans Plastic Bags at Retail Businesses"
- NJ.com - 2 Hours Ago "Plastic bag bans coming to Hoboken, Jersey City"
- Oneonta Daily Star - 21 Minutes Ago "Plan to ban plastic bags hits snag in courthouse"
- RICentral.com - 4 Hours Ago "Plastic bag ban gains support in SK"
- CBSNews - June 5 "Over 60 countries have introduced bans, fees to cut single use plastic waste"
- Jamaican Observer - June 3 "Latin America and the Carribean bidding goodbye to plastic bags"
- ...
- ...Let's check back in with the news in Part III.
I. Review
II. BioPlastic, page 168
III. Next Readings
I. Review
A chapter from two weeks ago "Compost" page 62 continues to draw feedback. Forty six percent of respondents to an informal poll on dailykos.com say compost is not yet collected by their garbage company in their town.
Selling point: composted garbage smells better! Garbage companies are missing out on a revenue stream: composted soil is high-quality. Cities are missing out on better-smelling refuse. New Yorkers started composting last year.
With three-way separated trash, this house is less cluttered - we take out the compost and the recycling two times per week and take out the garbage once per. Our recycling can is unobtrusive as it fills with clean paper, clean cardboard, clean plastic and clean glass. No flies congregate. No odor wafts.
As we discovered two weeks ago reading the chapter, organic food waste that's not composted starves for oxygen and decomposes to methane, which emits a "signature pungence." And is a bigger contributor to global warming than is CO2.
Compost is a principle farming technique that North African farmer Yacouba Sawadogo uses, as described in last week's nonfiction story chapter on "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" page 118. Adapted from the book "Hot" the chapter is a gripping tale of a North African man who watched his country descend into famine and his neighbors flee a decades-long drought. And Sawadogo stayed with his 50 acres as vegetation loss was captured on 1970s satellite images. Sawadogo planted, plodded, continuously innovated his farming techniques, and by the late 1980s before rainfall had returned, the water tables in his country showed water stopped dropping by a meter per year. He still lives in Africa and teaches the world his techniques, through his translator "when you have trees, you get more trees." And "trees are like lungs." Also last week we reviewed "Walkable Cities" page 86. Pedestrians are attracted to neighborhoods that are useful, safe and interesting, which they are in New York's stretches that host public pianos featured last Sunday on CBS This Morning.
II. Bioplastic, page 168
For all the evil that plastic spreads, all the birds and fish it kills and the whales it starves, this chapter says in the 19th century, plastic saved elephants.
National billiards champion Michael Phelan in his 1858 book documented the characteristics, diameter, weight of the ideal billiard ball. But Phelan lamented the ivory source material was "dreadfully dear." And in 1863 he advertised $10,000 gold-coin reward to the person who could invent a billiard ball made from an ivory substitute. After a few iterations, a printer and "tinkerer John Westly Hyatt" patented in 1868 the first cotton-based bioplastic calling it "celluloid." The new billiard ball successfully served players with the proper weight and roll. Not without flaws, the celluloid ball, sensitive to heat, when near cigar embers was known to explode.
Bioplastic preceded petroplastic. Leo Baekland revived a scientific discovery from 1833 "polymeric" materials or what we now call "polymers" - the basis of all bioplastic and petroplastic. Baekland used fossil fuel-based polymers to produce his own petroplastic, "Bakelite" patented in 1909.
Petroplastic & bioplastic developments raced forward, and Henry Ford introduced his first car made from soybeans in 1941. You read that right. DrawDown says:
Today we have bioplastic bags, and popular cornstarch bioplastic utensils, and ping pong balls are today, as they always have been, made of cellulose polymers (bioplastic.)The car was inspired by the growing shortage of metal due to the war, as well as by the idea of combining industry with agriculture. He already had established the Soybean Laboratory in Greenfield Village at the time, and had made the fuel for the car from hemp oil. The frame was tubular steel, the body was plastic, the windows were acrylic, and it was powered by a conventional 60-horsepower engine. The finished car weighed 1,000 pounds less than its conventional, all-steel counterpart. Though it was created in part to aid the war effort, most car manufacturing ceased for the duration of the war and the bioplastic car was never revived.
Of course, bioplastic is not the pat answer to today's plastic problems for two reasons: 1) it requires a lot of land to grow these bioplastic feedstocks like soybeans, corn and sugarcane, and 2) bioplastics do not naturally biodegrade.
Bioplastics do not biodegrade in your compost heap at home. Bioplastics don't biodegrade on their own. So what do we do?
[INHALE]
Some bioplastics, *if* they're properly separated from petroplastics in the wastestream, can biodegrade if heated to the proper temperature. Some bioplastics cannot biodegrade, but many of those unbiodegradable bioplastics can be recycled if properly separated from the biodegradable bioplastics and the petroplastics.
[EXHALE did you get that?]
What many readers may be asking: do bioplastics recycle more easily than petroplastics? And this is the bookclub host's answer: the book chapter doesn't say whether bioplastic is recycled more easily or more completely than petroplastic. (Recall: the purpose of the DrawDown bookclub is for science-background citizens without environmental science expertise to read the book as novices, so we can ask the stupid questions that expert environmentalists forgot were not stupid questions at all.) Relying on bioplastic *does* allow us to leave some fossil fuel in the ground for future generations to utilize. How much? About 6% of oil is used to create plastic.
Only six percent??? Plastic is less black-and-white than we thought. It saves elephants, starves whales and is a byzantine flowchart to throw out. Maybe we should just use less of it.
Let us now break from the chapter and look at what people are doing around the world to rely less on plastic. A Scottish milk company installed a milk-fountain vending machine in grocery stores (B.Y.O.m.B. bring your own milk bottle.) Plastic bag bans inspire attractive reusable shopping bags to be used (unmet market need: masculine reusable bags for men. Sports team logos?)
The #stopsucking campaign is creating a wave to substitute either paper straws, metal straws, or sans straw sipping to eliminate more plastic from the waste stream. (Headscratcher: Starbucks contributed to the #stopsucking campaign with a plastic strawless lid.)
A company in Norway offers money back for each plastic water bottle people recycle via vending machine. This is backed by government subsidy.
As this host has proposed at earlier meetings: (consider) starting a tree farm, and swap some of this plastic back for paper, what we had originally (this bookclub hasn't yet read "Recycled Paper" page 166, so do your research first.) Milk always came in paper cartons - why did that change? What was "paper or plastic" inspired by anyway, the petroplastic industry?
This might be a good time to check back in with the #plastic week on social media and "Plastic Ban" search on Google News.
IV. Next Readings
Let's examine this untested assumption we've been operating on that we can swap plastic for paper, even though we swapped paper for plastic at some point. Let's read "Recycled Paper" page 166.
For a future meeting, in case "Infrastructure Week" the president keeps promising us actually happens, let's get in front and read what infrastructure we need for "Electric Vehicles" page 142.
Friendly "Mr. Trash Wheel" scoops plastics out of Baltimore Harbor.
Carton-plucking robot "Clarke" picks 60 recyclable cartons per minute from a waste stream conveyer belt.
Apple unveiled it's newest phone-recycling robot "Daisy" just ahead of Earth Day.
See you next week!
* -------- UPDATE ------>
Bliki Update Nov 4 2018: We received a question about this post.
We received an email yesterday from a reader researching a school assignment on bioplastic:
Dear offlinereport.net, Why do environmentalists assume everyone knows the jargon? There's no definition of "petroplastic" at dictionary.com, merriam-webster.com or wikipedia. Or siri or alexa. What is "petroplastic"?
Reader did not sign their name. Thank you for writing. The answer is: "petroplastic" is plastic derived from oil, or derived from "fossil fuels." Whereas "bioplastic" is derived from plants. Plants are a renewable resource, fossil fuels are not.
-----------------
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
