China and Its Biodegradable Plastic Problems

“In the absence of controlled composting facilities, most biodegradable plastics end up in landfills, or worse, in rivers and the ocean,” said Greenpeace’s East Asia plastics researcher Dr Molly Zhongnan Jia.

“Switching from one type of plastic to another cannot solve the plastics pollution crisis that we’re facing,” she said.

Need for a special approach

Biodegradable plastics can be broken down by living organisms, but most require specific industrial treatment at high temperatures to be degraded within six months.

Left in landfills under normal circumstances, the materials can take much longer to begin to break down and will still release carbon into the atmosphere.

What really biodegradable means?

One of the main challenges with biodegradable plastics is confusion about what biodegradable means.

Most compostable plastics cannot be put into ordinary household recycling or degraded in home composting bins – meaning consumers often don’t have any route to get biodegradable packaging to the kinds of industrial facilities capable of processing it.

“Just because a plastic is biodegradable, that doesn’t mean it is not single use,” she said. “The worry is that if people think a material is biodegradable it gives them a licence to litter, and that litter can still have a negative impact on the environment before it fully degrades.”

Shipping off waste

A study published in October in the journal Sciences Advances, which examined data from 2016, estimated that the US was the world’s leading plastic waste producer that year, followed by India and then China.

Taken collectively, the EU nations would be in second place, despite having only about 40% of the population of India and China.

What is the report warns about?

The Greenpeace report published on Thursday warns that replacing single-use plastics with high-volume production of various biodegradable alternatives is not the solution to the plastics waste problem.