Blue Planet News

I’ve argued for a long time that there has to be a way to make a biodegradable plastic substitute. My chemist friend said it was possible but cost prohibitive, but I just didn’t believe that on a large scale production it would be. Now, for the first time it’s here, it’s really here!.

Three days ago we finished throwing away the mountain of plastic bottles we’d collected with our ecology group kids. We had to throw them away because they were “too dirty” to be recycled. We hand washed about 60 pounds of them before we realized how long it would have taken us and so we gave up. It was sad throwing them in the dump knowing they’d be there forever and all the time we’d put into trying to stop that from happening.

People in El Salvador and surely many places that are modernizing are so accustomed to just throwing down whatever banana or mango peel or pit and not have to worry about it being there FOREVER. In fact organic stuff is fantastic fertilizer, but plastic just traps rainwater and makes perfect little nests for mosquito larvae and thus dengue fever. Not to mention they’re just plain ugly. It’s extremely hard to change people’s habits, so the best thing to do would be to build a product adapted to those habits and this is it!

The bottles break down when the temperature gets high and the humidity goes up, perfect for El Salvador. It takes something like 10 weeks inside a compost to break down so it should last plenty long for any use here, especially considering most people here can’t afford to keep more than a couple weeks of inventory anyway. Even if a little breaks down before its not harmful, its really just a glorified corn starch anyway.

The way I had imagined it before was that the bottle would biodegrade by oxygen but only from the inside so it would only slowly start to happen after the bottle had been opened and drunk. The other possibility was a chemical released into the plastic to break it down once the top was twisted off. Those both involved chemicals that would almost undoubtedly have nasty biproducts. Just making something out of corn and having it degrade in the right conditions is simpler and really more idea. It’s a good example of occam’s razor in action.

source: here