The millions of plastic products in the world are almost entirely derived from oils, which offer a complex arrangement of atoms that can be manipulated and rearranged to make plastics of varying strength, rigidity and opacity. They are cheap to produce, too, meaning it is often much more expensive t...
Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:
While some are trying to clean up the plastic pollution in the oceans, and others are removing it from beaches, one company is looking to end the need for plastic bottles that last hundreds of years and are rarely recycled. A Dutch company is looking to fight the plastic crisis with a plant-based alternative that degrades in one year, as The Guardian reported.
Avantium, a biochemical company in the Netherlands, is fundraising for a new project that will turn sustainably grown crops into a plant-based plastic. The technology has gained the attention of beer maker Carlsberg, beverage giant Coca-Cola and Danone. All three companies have signaled that they plant to use Avantium's technology in the future, according to Ubergizmo.
Carlsberg, for example, hopes to sell its pilsner in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of plant plastic, according to The Guardian. Avantium posted a picture of Carlsberg's paper bottle on Instagram.
"It is a milestone in the development of high-value applications such as specialty bottles," said Marcel Lubben, Avantium's Managing Director, as LADbible reported. "The Paper Bottle shows how we, together with partners, can use innovation to help shape packaging for a circular and sustainable future."
The move towards a plant-based plastic from a sustainable source would mark a major step forward for Coca-Cola, which has consistently ranked as the world's worst plastic polluter, according to the advocacy-group Break Free From Plastic, as EcoWatch reported.
The millions of plastic products in the world are almost entirely derived from oils, which offer a complex arrangement of atoms that can be manipulated and rearranged to make plastics of varying strength, rigidity and opacity. They are cheap to produce, too, meaning it is often much more expensive to recycle them than it is to produce new ones. Of course, all that plastic made from oils takes hundreds of years to decompose, as CleanTechnica reported.
Around 300 million tons of plastic is made from fossil fuels every year, which is a major contributor to the climate crisis.
