You may have heard about biodegradable plastics for many years, you may even have tried it (usually in the form of a corn based plastic bag) but they have yet to take off in volumes. I know conventional plastic has a lot of qualities that are hard to replace – you can mold it, it is flexible, strong, it holds moisture and odor away… but! It also sucks as a material. It takes forever to biodegrade so it ends up everywhere. All over beaches in the form of plastic bottles, all over the countryside in the shape of plastic bags, and finally even in the stomachs of birds, as photographer Chris Jordan shows us in the video-clip. Usually I focus on the solutions but this time I think the problem deserves a look...
And I guess I don’t need to mention it is made of oil, a resource known for its carbon emissions as well as its scarcity.
There are some options going to market, US based Cereplast is moving in on some large consumer markets with their biodegradable plastic (usable for things such as Starbucks coffee mugs and similar). In the Nordics we have companies such as re8 Bioplastics doing plastic replacements for moldable applications (they can make bandy-sticks of superior quality to plastics to mention one product). Another company in this field is Organoclick, with a chemical solution that can give oher materials such as paper, the same qualities as plastic, making it water resistant www.organoclick.com. This can enable substitution of a lot plastic products. Xylophane is another exciting one. They have a barrier material for packaging based on renewable raw material. They have attracted investments from leading international cleantech VC Capricorn of Belgium and Swedish VC SEB Ventures (both these investors are members of Cleantech Scandinavia btw:)).
The market is clearly huge, have a look at http://www.d2w.net. They count the approximate number of plastic bags consumed each year (don’t know how they come up with the number but it is stunning if ti is correct) and this is not counting all the hard molded plastics or packaging-related plastics that go in the dumpster each year.
SO that's my first wish for the new year, alongside with wanting to learn to do a proper tomoe-nage judo throw, something I have yet to manage...
And if you have the stomach for it take a look at http://www.chrisjordan.com/ for more pictures of environmental concern.