The time has come to face one of the most urgent environmental emergencies of our times: pollution linked to plastic. A material that persists for centuries in the environment, difficult if not often impossible to recycle, and with which unfortunately we continue to produce hundreds of millions of tons of objects, packaging and US devices and throws. The biodegradable alternatives are now there, and it is only a matter of finding the will and political force of imposing the transition. This is what emerges from a large review published in the magazine Trends in Food Science & Technologyin which some of the major experts in the sector analyze the current extent of the problem, the innovations expected in the field of biodegradable plastic, and the strategies necessary to encourage their use.
Usa plastic boom throbbing
Let’s start with the numbers. As the authors of the study recall, the production of global plastic is constantly growing, and also thanks to the pandemic (which has dramatically increased the amount of US medical devices without the world around the world), it has gone from 367 million tons of 2016 to exceed 430 in 2024, and it is expected that it could triple by 2060. A third of this plastic mountain is used for the packaging and production of US products. And of these, only 25 percent is recycled. The rest ends up in landfill, or is directly dispersed in the environment by less attentive consumers.
Where very stringent policies have been implemented for the reduction of the use of disposable products, the effects have been seen: some regions in countries such as Brazil, the United States, Australia and Rwanda, have seen a reduction in the use of plastic bags that also reached 65 percent. However, a good result that cannot be considered enough: plastic by its nature is incompatible with use for the production of disposable goods – if we want to avoid that it continues to accumulate in the environment and produce microplastics that are proving to be increasingly insidious also for human health – and it is therefore indispensable, according to the authors of the study, encourage the diffusion of more sustainable alternatives.
Only 0.5% of plastic is biodegradable
Currently, just 0.5 percent of the plastic produced annually is biodegradable. And it is on this aspect that it should be intervened, in particular in particular the use in the field of packaging, from which about half of the plastic waste produced annually comes.
“Food packaging has a vital role to ensure the safety and quality of food”, comments Ana Elizabeth Cavalcante Fai, researcher of the State University of Rio de Janeiro who coordinated the review. “However, the production of packaging with a very short life cycle is increasingly unjustifiable using synthetic plastics that survive in the environment even for 400 years. And even more worrying is the growing awareness that plastics do not degrade completely, they fragment into micro and nanoplastics that we recognize today as pollutants now omnipresent in the environment, and as an emerging danger for public health”.
The good news is that the biodegradable alternatives to traditional plastics exist, are increasingly, and increasingly cheaper. The number of patents recorded in the world for the production of biodegradable plastics is constantly growing, with a country like China (currently among the main manufacturers of polluting plastics) to lead the ranking. The number of companies that produce biodegradable plastics on an industrial scale are also growing, and important innovations such as zeal -based materials should soon arrive on the market, a protein contained in corn that allows you to produce biodegradable materials with excellent performance, starting from an extremely widespread crop.
According to the experts, international regulatory initiatives are served as soon as possible that help to promote the use of biodegradable plastics in the production of US products and packaging. But that’s not all: to overcome the current emergency, “holistic” interventions will be needed, which even at the same time also point out to inform the public and guide the preferences of consumers, and to increase the construction of infrastructures for the recycling of plastic materials. Only acts simultaneously on several fronts – they explain – you can hope to reduce and perhaps one day reset the accumulation of plastics and microplastics in the environment.
“Most of the plastic that has been produced still exist in some form nowadays,” concludes Fai. “When we say ‘throw it away’ we must remember that there is no ‘way’ for plastic: everything remains in the environment we share. And the planet simply cannot absorb this volume of waste to infinity. If the current trends will continue, some projections estimate that by 2050 there may be more plastic than fish in the ocean. It is not only worrying, it is a very urgent call to action”.
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