• Question: what is the most biodegradable plastic?

    Asked by anon-335906 on 6 Oct 2022.
    • Photo: Dan Day

      Dan Day answered on 6 Oct 2022:

      Love this question! Most biodegradable is difficult to say exactly. Lots of plastics are made from natural polymers though (e.g. starch and cellulose) which all have excellent biodegradability. However, their properties make them unsuitable for many applications

    • Photo: Justin Perry

      Justin Perry answered on 20 Oct 2022:

      I agree with @dan’s answer entirely.

      There is another way of looking at this though- I went to a meeting of scientists and companies to talk about the sort of materials that we could be using in food packaging in the future. What was most interesting was that the companies were not keen to produce food wrappers that were labelled as ” very biodegradable” because they were certain this would lead to an increase in littering as people would think “ah… I don’t have to put this in a bin because it’ll rot away”. That’s obviously a problem!

      So… I think the answer is we need to manage how we use plastics like PET (the plastic in plastic Coke bottles) so that we use plastic items as many times as possible, we reuse the plastic in as many ways as possible AND we have a way to biodegrade the plastic when it is finished with (and that’s one of the exciting bits of UK science going on at the moment… microbes which can effectively “compost” PET bottles).

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