#biodegradeable

Find the other lists in this series here

HoldOn Bags - compostable trash, pet, and ziplock bags

Kangaroo Hangers - made of entirely recycled materials and designed to bend instead of snap when carrying too much weight

Living Pantry - family-owned eco-friendly shop

Moziwash - laundry detergent based on perfume and cologne

Oak & Willow - from their home page: "Welcome to eco-friendly living made affordable", has a program in America that you can buy a package for someone who can't afford one

Trashie - has a take-back bag to donate clothes and electronics

Decor

Curious Hawaii - home decor made in Hawai'i

Darby's Crochet Corner - crochet plushies (store currently unavailable)

Understory labyrinth - self watering ceramic pots for carnivorous plants and seedlings

Warm People Co - mostly blankets, some plushies and clothes

Paint

Rustoleum Colors (english brand)

Hera Ray (has paint, door knockers, doorknobs, and more)

Plastic bags are handy for carrying light items. But many are trashed after a single use. Some of these bags end up as litter that may harm animals (including those in the ocean). That’s one reason some companies have switched to biodegradable plastic. These are supposed to break down faster than regular plastics. But a new study in England shows that may not happen.

“Single-use plastic bags are a huge source of litter worldwide. We wanted to test whether biodegradable plastic bags could help reduce plastic pollution,” says Richard Thompson. He’s a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth in England. Thompson and a graduate student, Imogen Napper, decided to test that.

Materials break down through rot or decay. That’s usually a process whereby microbes feed on them, breaking big molecules into smaller, simpler ones (such as carbon dioxide and water). Other living things can now feed on these breakdown products to grow.

The problem: Ordinary plastic bags are made from oil, which few microbes can digest. So these plastics don’t decay easily.

Biodegradable plastics are sometimes made from materials that microbes do readily digest. Others may be held together with chemical bonds that break apart when exposed to water or sunlight. There’s also no one rule for how quickly biodegradable plastic bags should break down. Some plastics may even need special conditions — such as heat — to fully break down.

How long will my litter take to biodegrade?

If it's a banana peel, 2-5 weeks.

If it's a six pack holder, 400 years!

If it's a glass bottle, 1,000 years!!

White fun  💕

This bar of fun is part of the butterball scent family, and has a lovely gentle scent and is quite strong. I used the fun as a bubble bar and it created a lot of thick bubbles, however they did not stay for the length of the bath. The bath water was a pale milky white and I found the bath to be very very moisturising but not oily. The white bath makes it suitable to use as a cocktail with other items too. I did feel however that it was too squishy and easily breakable to use as playdough. 

Lobster bisque and shrimp cocktail make for scrumptious meals, but at a price. The food industry generates 6 million to 8 million metric tons of crab, shrimp and lobster shell waste every year. Depending on the country, those claws and legs largely get dumped back into the ocean or into landfills.

In many of those same landfills, plastic trash relentlessly accumulates. Humans have produced over 8 billion tons of plastic since mass production began in the 1950s. Only 10 percent of plastic packaging gets recycled successfully. Most of the rest sits in landfills for a very long time (a plastic bottle takes about 450 years to break down), or escapes into the environment, perhaps sickening seabirds that swallow tiny pieces or gathering in the Pacific Ocean’s floating garbage patch (SN Online: 3/22/18).

Some scientists think it’s possible to tackle the two problems at once. Crustaceans’ hardy shells contain chitin, a material that, along with its derivative chitosan, offers many of plastic’s desirable properties and takes only weeks or months to biodegrade, rather than centuries.

The challenge is getting enough pure chitin and chitosan from the shells to make bio-based “plastic” in cost-effective ways. “There’s no blueprint or operating manual for what we’re doing,” says John Keyes, CEO of Mari Signum, a start-up company based just outside of Richmond, Va., that is devising ways to make environmentally friendly chitin. But a flurry of advances in green chemistry is providing some guideposts.

Nature’s scaffold

Chitin is one of the most abundant organic materials in the world, after cellulose, which gives woody plants their structure. In addition to crustaceans, chitin is found in insects, fish scales, mollusks and fungi. Like plastic, chitin is a polymer, a molecular chain made from repeating units. The building block in chitin, N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, is a sugar related to glucose. Chitin and chitosan are antibacterial, nontoxic and used in cosmetics, wound dressings and pool-water treatments, among other applications.

This 2-inch square of compostable chitin foam could be used to make surfboards or biodegradable food packaging. CREDIT: CRUZ FOAM

Entrepreneurs are trying to launch new chitin products. Cruz Foam, a company in Santa Cruz, Calif., set out to produce surfboards from chitin, though the company has since pivoted to focus on the much larger market of packaging foam. Polystyrene foam, a common component in both surfboards and food packaging, takes a minimum of 500 years to biodegrade. Company cofounder Marco Rolandi is convinced that his Cruz Foam will biodegrade readily, based on his at-home test. “I put Cruz Foam in my backyard compost and a month later there were worms growing on it,” he says. Eco-friendly surfboards and wound dressings are valuable, but they are niche products — small potatoes that won’t make a dent in the massive amounts of fossil fuel–based plastics. Scientists have proposed large-scale production of chitin or chitosan in the past. But the chemistry for isolating the materials from shell waste has some big drawbacks, so the work didn’t get far.

Making use of seafood shell waste starts with drying the shells. CREDIT: MARI SIGNUM

For one thing, pulling out the chitin traditionally requires corrosive chemicals. A crustacean shell contains 15 to 40 percent chitin. To get to the chitin requires removing the protein along with the minerals, largely calcium carbonate, that make the shells stiff. Hydrochloric acid, a strong acid, removes calcium carbonate while generating carbon dioxide emissions; sodium hydroxide, or lye, is a strong base that removes the protein. Producing a single kilogram of chitin requires 10 kilograms of shells, six kilograms of coal for heating purposes, nine kilograms of hydrochloric acid, eight kilograms of sodium hydroxide and 330 kilograms of freshwater. Washing the chitin to remove residual contaminants can use up to an additional 200 kilograms of water.

Getting the chitosan requires an extra step: adding hot, concentrated sodium hydroxide solution to the chitin. To do this work in a sustainable way, companies must invest in pricey corrosion-resistant reactors, wastewater treatment and carbon dioxide capture technology.

The harsh reactions used today also sever the long polymer chains that make the materials sturdy, limiting chitin’s and chitosan’s versatility. Mari Signum’s chief technology officer, Julia Shamshina, offers a clothing analogy: It’s impossible to make a sweater with a ball of yarn made only of short threads.

Dried seafood waste is put through several chemical steps to extract the chitin. One extra step gets to the derivative, chitosan (shown), which is also being tested as a plastic replacement. CREDIT: COURTESY OF MICHAEL HOFER/FRAUNHOFER INST.

Approaches that reduce or eliminate corrosive reagents, recycle water and keep the polymers strong are in demand, says Pierre-Olivier Morisset of Merinov, a research center in Gaspé, Canada, that helps marine-product companies manage waste and commercialize innovations. “We’re looking for technologies that can produce hundreds of kilograms” of chitin or chitosan with long polymer chains, Morisset says. But developing greener methods is not easy.

Seafood suppliers face economic drawbacks as well. Today, U.S. producers pay landfills to take their shells. But those who want to keep the waste out of the landfill and support chitin production must still pay to dry the shells and transport them to often faraway extraction facilities, like Mari Signum. For its part, Mari Signum is changing the equation by paying the transportation bills for its Gulf Coast suppliers. Once Mari Signum is profitable, the company says it will also pay those suppliers for their shells.

Plastic bags are handy for carrying light items. But many are trashed after a single use. Some of these bags end up as litter that may harm animals (including those in the ocean). That’s one reason some companies have switched to biodegradable plastic. These are supposed to break down faster than regular plastics. But a new study in England shows that may not happen.

“Single-use plastic bags are a huge source of litter worldwide. We wanted to test whether biodegradable plastic bags could help reduce plastic pollution,” says Richard Thompson. He’s a marine biologist at the University of Plymouth in England. Thompson and a graduate student, Imogen Napper, decided to test that.

Materials break down through rot or decay. That’s usually a process whereby microbes feed on them, breaking big molecules into smaller, simpler ones (such as carbon dioxide and water). Other living things can now feed on these breakdown products to grow.

The problem: Ordinary plastic bags are made from oil, which few microbes can digest. So these plastics don’t decay easily.

Biodegradable plastics are sometimes made from materials that microbes do readily digest. Others may be held together with chemical bonds that break apart when exposed to water or sunlight. There’s also no one rule for how quickly biodegradable plastic bags should break down. Some plastics may even need special conditions — such as heat — to fully break down.

To study how well these bags live up to such claims, Thompson and Napper collected 80 single-use plastic bags from stores for testing.