Green Plastics:

An Introduction to the New Science of Biodegradable Plastics

E.S. Stevens

Chapter 1

THE AGE OF PLASTICS

No material on earth has been so highly valued for its usefulness, yet so maligned, as plastic.
We have ambivalent, contrary, and vacillating feelings about plastics, and have never finally
decided whether plastics are the good, the bad, or the ugly. One reason for the ambivalence is
probably their newness. The rapid growth of plastics production was a twentieth-century
phenomenon, and anything less than a hundred years old, on a historical scale, is novel.
Among materials, plastics are newcomers, and we simply have not had time to make up our
minds about them.

Plastics are so clearly useful that it is foolish not to afford them major respect. They are often
not only less expensive than alternative materials, but their properties often make them better.
Their low cost has undoubtedly had life-saving consequences, as in drought-prone areas of
Africa where lightweight plastic water pails, at times the most important family possession,
have replaced clay and stone containers, making it possible to bring in water from even
distant wells in times of severe water shortage. Plastics are also perfectly matched with the
modern information-age uses of cell phones, bank cards, and laptops. And even when mere
comfort is at stake, no one can deny plastics are outstanding performers. Synthetic fibers,
cousins to plastics, have become so highly developed that even the most die-hard naturalists
turn to them to keep warm and dry working out-of-doors on a damp winter's day, or simply
working up a sweat on a crisp cool ski slope.

But plastics, being so inexpensive, run counter to the usual association of good with rare and
costly--the snob-appeal factor. Gold is good; silk and satin are good; but what are we to make
of plastics, which anyone can own?

Their low cost and versatility have also allowed an unprecedented range of applications. In a
free market all market niches tend to get filled, so that plastics have taken on every
imaginable form. People's tastes being as varied as they are, there are differences of opinion
on the aesthetic value of some of them. What one person finds fetching, another finds garish-
and the material is condemned along with the form given it. The fact that many beautifully
designed plastic objects are manufactured has never seemed to provide enough weight to
balance the view that associates plastics with aesthetic poverty. Plastics may never shed the
guilt-by-association burden, because their low manufacturing cost will always allow the mass
production of objects of disputable beauty.

Moreover, the synthetic nature of plastics has come to stand for artificial and not-genuine,
with connotations of phony or false. (He is so plastic!) The combined effect of tawdry
applications and conflation of synthetic and false has been to color the popular attitude toward
plastics.

Some singular voices have even been raised connecting plastics with all that is bad in society-
-a "malignant force" set loose to wreak havoc. But, in the remarkable breadth of human
opinion, countervoices have unstintingly and exuberantly sung their praise. Nylon is not only
practical, it's sexy. Vinyl phonograph records produce the only truly authentic sound. Andy
Warhol wanted "to be plastic."

This book is not about the sociology of plastics, and it is not about the role that plastics play,
or do not play, as the cause of, or the reflection of, deep-rooted social, political, cultural, or
economic truths. It tells the story of the recent, as yet tentative, emergence of new plastics
with characteristics not usually associated with plastic-plastics made from natural, renewable
starting materials, plastics that are able to biodegrade totally and completely in an
environmentally benign manner.

Not being a plastics industry insider, I am not privy to the longterm plans being worked out in
the board rooms of the plastics industry. It is possible that even the movers and shakers of the
plastics industry do not know exactly what paths the industry will be taking five or ten years
from now. But as a chemist with a thirty-year professional relation with molecules,
particularly the large polymer molecules found in nature, I see these natural polymers coming
into their own as starting materials for a new breed of plastics.

If these new plastics make their mark, it will be a comeback, a revival, rather than a totally
new appearance, for they have not been completely unknown in the past. Perhaps the closest
we have ever come to having a major prescence of plastics made from natural polymers was
when Henry Ford began a substantial research project aimed at making plastic automobile
partsout of soybeans! But his plan was cut short by World War II. Had the soybean venture
worked out, we might have had by now a new slang expression, "--or I'll eat my car."

The starting point in the story of these new bioplastics is the simple fact that plastics are now
so commonplace that they have become an integral part of everyday life. There are personal
use items, like the toothbrush, comb, ballpoint pen, and credit card. There are containers, like
the jug of milk and the bag that holds the loaf of bread. And there are the wrappings on all
those articles we purchase, like drugstore items, clothing, and videocassettes.

Plastic comes in all sizes and shapes. It can be molded, like the comb and toothbrush, or
formed into sheeting or films. Some items are only partly made of plastic; others are made
entirely of plastic, but of more than one type of plastic, fabricated to make a useful item.

Production of plastics on a very large scale is relatively new. The Dustin Hoffman character
in the 1967 movie The Graduate was advised to go into "Plastics!" if he wanted a promising
career and a prosperous future. That future is now. In the United States plastics industry over
20,000 facilities produce or distribute raw materials, molds, processing machinery, or
products. They employ over one and a half million workers and ship more than $300 billion in
products annually.

Past ages of human society have been called the Stone, Bronze, Copper, Iron, and Steel Ages,
according to the material most used to fabricate objects. Today the total volume of plastics
produced worldwide has surpassed that of steel and continues to increase. Approximately 200
billion pounds (100 million tons) of plastics are produced each year, with over 80 billion
pounds a year being produced in the United States alone (fig. 1.1). We have entered the Age
of Plastics.

How Do We Use All That Plastic?

The phenomenal rise in the use of plastics is the result of their extraordinary versatility and
low cost. They make a good match with the needs of our rapidly growing world population.
But if 200 billion pounds of plastics are produced each year, that's about 40 pounds a year for
every person on the planet. What do we do with it all?

Much of the plastic that is produced is used for packaging. In the United States, about 30
percent of the plastic produced each year, over 20 billion pounds, is used for packaging,
representing its largest use by far (fig. 1.2). In Western Europe 42 percent of all plastics use is
for packaging.

Many people remember items that were previously sold unpackaged in bins but are now
packaged individually or in groups of some small, or large, number. The purpose may be to
provide added protection, longer freshness, or some other benefit to the consumer; it may be
for inventory or some other purpose of the seller.

Plastic packaging is popular on account of its low cost and performance properties. There are
now many forms of it, from plastic shopping bags to different types of plastic loose-fill
packaging material, including the peanut-shaped variety.

Approximately one-half of the plastic used in packaging is for containers, such as soft-drink
bottles and jugs of milk, water, laundry detergent, and bleach. One-third is in the form of
plastic sheeting or film for items like bread wrap and grocery sacks. The remainder is for
closures (caps and bottle tops), coatings, and other purposes.

Both flexible plastic packaging and semirigid plastics have been growing in use in food
packaging so that now, although paper and paperboard packaging still dominates, plastic food
packaging has become second in importance, followed by metal, glass, and other materials.
Food and beverage packaging accounts for approximately 70 percent of the more than $100-
billion packaging market in the United States and more than half the $400-billion worldwide
market.

The popularity of microwave ovens has contributed to the rapid growth of plastic food
packaging because they require the use nonmetal containers. Many plastic packages are now
designed to go conveniently from the freezer to the microwave oven, to the dinner table, and
then directly to the trash bin.

As plastic packaging has increased, the use of synthetic packaging adhesives has also grown,
in order to maintain compatibility. Plastic surfaces are often difficult to bond, the packaging is
frequently very flexible, and the processing of packaging materials is typically rapid. Natural
adhesive materials made from starch, dextrin, and sodium silicates, although cheaper, have
not been able to compete in some packaging markets, and there has been a large increase in
the production of synthetic packaging adhesives. Over a billion pounds of synthetic adhesives
are used in the United States each year for packaging. We have become a plastics-oriented
society partly because we have become a packaging-oriented society.

But plastics are versatile and are used for much more than packaging. Building materials of
heavy-duty plastic, often replacing metal and wood, are manufactured in the United States to
the extent of nearly 20 billion pounds a year. Consumer products include eating utensils, toys,
diaper backings, cameras, watches, sporting goods, personal-hygiene articles like combs and
razor handles, and much more. Institutional use of some of these items, like plastic eating
utensils in schools and hospitals, makes plastics use for consumer products very large. In the
United States over 10 billion pounds of plastic are turned into consumer products each year.

Transportation uses for automobile, watercraft, and aircraft parts total more than 4 billion
pounds a year. Furniture accounts for almost 4 billion pounds a year. Electrical components,
including wiring insulation, are commonly plastic.

There are many other miscellaneous end uses of plastics, each accounting for a billion pounds
or so a year or less. Plastics are used on a large scale for trash bags, which might be called
packaging for trash. Around a billion pounds of plastics are manufactured each year for that
purpose alone. Industrial plastic sheeting is also used widely. In manufacturing industries
there are many plastic machinery components. Plastic materials are used as coatings for paper
and cardboard. Hospital equipment, scientific-research equipment, and military equipment all
have plastic components.

Agricultural uses of plastics are more important than the scale of production indicates. Plastic
ground covers, for example, are used to increase crop yield by as much as 200 or 300 percent.
Just as home gardeners use mulch to conserve moisture, raise the soil temperature, prevent
nutrient loss, and inhibit proliferation of weeds and insects, farmers use plastic agricultural
covers for the same purposes but on a much larger scale. The use of agricultural covers is
driven by economics. If the increase in crop yield outweighs the costs of producing and using
the cover, the cover has an advantage. The use of plastic agricultural covers on a scale of
millions of acres is important for increasing food production for a growing world population,
and it is significant in terms of the vast amount of plastics required.

Other large-scale agricultural uses of plastics are for plant containers, binders and twines,
irrigation products, netting to protect crops from birds, and temporary covers for storing grain.

There is a constantly growing number of uses for plastics in biomedical applications. They
vary from the ordinary, like gloves, masks, gowns, plastic wraps, and coverings, to the more
complicated, such as sutures, other wound-closure products, and drug-delivery systems, to the
extraordinary, including orthopedic-repair products and other implants. Plastics used for the
more complex biomedical applications are expensive and are not produced on the same large
scale as the high-volume, low-cost commodity plastics that account for most of the use of
plastics.

The use of plastics has grown so remarkably because of the large number of applications that
have been developed for them. Plastics have become an important part of modern life and are
here to stay. They have, however, raised the question of reconciling convenient living with
concern for ecology.