The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year
Carlsberg and Coca-Cola back pioneering project to make ‘all-plant’ drinks bottles
A mound of plastic bottles at a recycling plant near Bangkok in Thailand. Around 300 million tonnes of plastic is made every year and most of it is not recycled. Photograph: Diego Azubel/EPA
Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from “all-plant” bottles under
new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership
with major beverage makers.
A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment
in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars
rather than fossil fuels.
The plans, devised by renewable chemicals company Avantium, have already won the support of beer-maker Carlsberg, which hopes to sell its pilsner in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of plant plastic.
Avantium’s chief executive, Tom van Aken, says he hopes to greenlight a
major investment in the world-leading bioplastics plant in the
Netherlands by the end of the year. The project, which remains on track
despite the coronavirus lockdown, is set to reveal partnerships with
other food and drink companies later in the summer.
The project has the backing of Coca-Cola and Danone, which hope to
secure the future of their bottled products by tackling the
environmental damage caused by plastic pollution and a reliance on fossil fuels.
Globally around 300 million tonnes of plastic is made from fossil fuels
every year, which is a major contributor to the climate crisis. Most of
this is not recycled and contributes to the scourge of microplastics in the world’s oceans. Microplastics can take hundreds of years to decompose completely.
“This plastic has very attractive sustainability credentials because it
uses no fossil fuels, and can be recycled – but would also degrade in
nature much faster than normal plastics do,” says Van Aken.
Avantium’s plant plastic is designed to be resilient enough to contain
carbonate drinks. Trials have shown that the plant plastic would
decompose in one year using a composter, and a few years longer if left
in normal outdoor conditions. But ideally, it should be recycled, said
Van Aken.
The bio-refinery plans to break down sustainable plant sugars into
simple chemical structures that can then be rearranged to form a new
plant-based plastic – which could appear on supermarket shelves by 2023.
The path-finder project will initially make a modest 5,000 tonnes of
plastic every year using sugars from corn, wheat or beets. However,
Avantium expects its production to grow as demand for renewable plastics
climbs.
In time, Avantium plans to use plant sugars from sustainable sourced
biowaste so that the rise of plant plastic does not affect the global
food supply chain.
