In this week’s issue of our environment newsletter, we look at well-meaning but complicated efforts to create and certify plastic-free plastic and where things stand with the federal government’s two-billion-trees pledge.
In this week’s issue of our environment newsletter, we look at well-meaning but complicated efforts to create and certify plastic-free plastic and where things stand with the federal government’s two-billion-trees pledge.
The rare case of a question headline to which the answer is yes
The answer, based on the content article, is no. Betteridge can continue to hold his head high.
The article suggests that anything that might be perceived as being “plastic-free” is plastic using a less traditional polymer (not plastic-free), or something else, like paper (not plastic).
All the article gives for a fact is that one specific certification company no longer certificates bioplastics as plastic-free plastic. More specifically, that company no longer issue plastic-free certifications at all. And that same company still pushes for the same plastic-free materials (their website: plasticfree.com), they’re just halting the certification.
Other certification companies still issue that certification anyway, and there are multiple types of bioplastics and other plastic-free plastic-looking materials. So the answer is still most definitely yes.
I get it. If you see this, what bin does it go in? It looks and feels like plastic-plastic, but it’s actually closer (is?) cellophane. I can see how this could cause confusion. Still, I think the solution is to move away from plastic-plastic to bio-plastics, such a sulfite pulp. If all plastic was bio-plastic, it wouldn’t be so confusing.
An aside. Celluloid (as in film), cellophane (as in the original cling wrap), and rayon are all made from the “Red Liquor” or sulphite pulping process. The Port Alice pulp mill on Vancouver Island used this process, but it closed permanently back in 2015. The sulfite process used to be common, but it’s been mostly phased out, although it apparently had a brief revival when oil prices were around $100/bbl from 2010 to 2014. Rayon and other dissolving pulp products were more cost effective than many oil based plastics. I don’t know how the economics have changed, but I expect that displacing petro-plastics with bio-plastics shouldn’t be that expensive, extrapolating from that $100/bbl price.
Here’s the thing, our tissues are made of plastic. You can’t really escape plastics as people understand them generally. Collagen is a polymer, fundamentally no different chemically than any other common plastic. Plastics are incredible materials, that’s why we use them, it’s why they were selected for evolutionarily; the problem is more complex than whether something is a plastic or not, and so “plastic free plastic” is an admittedly absurd term for biodegradable plastic not derived from coal or oil which has less environmental impact.
@villasv@lemmy.ca
Just to get everyone on the same page here.