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.
Yeah, it’s called cellulose bioplastics. It’s like plastic, but it’s made from a vegetal cellulose.
Yeah, this is one organisation that decided to stop certifying any of them and to basically ask questions later.
What organization?
You should read the article 🙂
Ha! LoL you got me. Yeah I’ll give it a read.
In case you don’t (CBC had better articles honestly) A Plastic Planet.
the City of Toronto … told me that the window, which it calls plastic, should be removed and put in the garbage, while the box should be put in the green bin if soiled and in the recycling bin if clean.
That’s the thing most paper packaging should actually go in the compost since it’s almost guaranteed to be soiled. Only some composting systems will accept these bioplastics as well. I know Calgary’s does, but not sure which others
Mixed materials are a huge issue in the waste stream and are something that should be reduced on the production side. In a perfect world we all peel off plastic windows from boxes and envelopes, we all rinse our cans and we all seperate the plastic caps from the bottles, but this isn’t a perfect world and the vast majoriry of mixed materials waste stays mixed when disposed of and cause serious concerns in the recycability and quality of recycled materials.
There should be regulations to reduce the amount of mixed materials. If they can’t be reduced they should be designed in a way that is easier to remove and come with disposal instructions for the consumer.
OMG govs are useless.
-Ban white grainy Styrofoam (use fines to enforce)
-Regulate to force some plastic products to be degradable within months/weeks (e.g. garbage bags, dog poo bags, etc.)
-If the packaging is for food and needs to be plastic, regulate to be Type-1 plastic (the most recyclable type)
The hard part of governing is not handwaving solutions, it’s amassing the political power and social capital to implement them.
That is in part the jobs of our elected officials and politicians. Unfortunately it seems unless you are a developer, they don’t really care about what you have to say.
I mean, devils advocate that gets complicated when someone finds a needed exception (like bendy straws for disabled people), or you leave off a product by mistake.
I suspect something like that is what the Liberals will propose, though.
Everything is possible if the will exists
We could be sending our first human mission to the nearest star system at this point but we are all instead more interested in maintaining an imaginary financial system that keeps a handful of people enormously wealthy for no reason.
We could be creating and building systems that are completely self sustaining without much waste or detriment to the environment or to human life or the climate but none of those options are being pursued because it would upset the megacorporations and investments organizations that make enormous profits by just maintaining the status quo of destroying our planet with us in it just so investors can keep making profit.
We would rather destroy ourselves than negatively affect the investment portfolios of a few thousand people on this planet. Millions will be sacrificed over the next century just to keep the wealth of a small percentage of the population.
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).
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.
Just to get everyone on the same page here.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
What I eventually found out is that the term “plastic-free” isn’t nearly as simple or self-explanatory as it sounds, and that making single-use packaging greener is a complex challenge for everyone involved.
A note attached to the email from Laura Parlagreco, Astro Box’s vice-president of operations, said the window was made of cellulose acetate from wood pulp “sustainably sourced from fast-growing eucalyptus trees.”
“It’s great to read about cities and provinces that are establishing these eco corridors as a refuge for wildlife and for city-dwellers to share and escape the heat … We all need to recognize how necessary they are and fight to protect them.”
To put that in context — as the map above attempts to do — an area about the size of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island combined has burned this summer.
In a statement, NRCAN said it revised its 2021 figure by adding millions of trees planted through partner programs like Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Low Carbon Economy Fund (LCEF).
But the environmental advocacy organization Nature Canada said that if the government is counting existing trees that were already planted, it cannot claim its two-billion-trees program is offering any additional value.
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