Packaging items — acrylic painting

Bioplastics: a green innovation or just another plastic problem?

A conference pen suddenly claims to be “80% nature”. A spotted cutlery set is labelled as biodegradable. Cups encourage you not to feel guilty, because after momentary use they can be composted. What is this?

Around five years ago I started noticing the presence of bioplastics — feel-good alternatives to disposable plastic that clogs our seas and wild animals’ stomachs. Young geniuses were being rewarded for coming up with this or that plastic alternative, and science reporters sounded ecstatic over this up-and-coming revolution. The promise sounded great — no more extraction of oil and gas, from which plastics are made, coupled with the same convenience of regular plastic. Slightly more expensive, yes, but a few incentives can take care of this. But should they?

In early 2020, I took part in a collaborative cross-border journalism programme by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. By then I already knew that bioplastics are widely supported. Innovation funds finance research and development. Start-up funds help inventors de-risk. Agricultural subsidies help make the feedstock. Perhaps there could be green procurement measures in some countries. At the same time, criticism was gathering steam too — bioplastics, we were told, are land-hungry and not that fast to degrade. So, during the programme’s pitching clinic, I proposed an investigation into how and why the public sector supports bioplastics. A few participants were interested in this issue, we created a team and were coached on how to apply for IJ4EU funding. We didn’t get the grant. The pandemic began. The project was shelved and my colleagues moved on to work on other priorities.

In 2023, I had a chance to build a new team — with Simone Fant in Italy and Jelena Malkowski in Germany. We came up with a series of new hypotheses and were awarded a Journalism Europe grant to look into subsidies for bioplastics, as well as their role in Europe’s green transition.

As the European Parliament sat down to vote on the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (around half of bioplastics are used for packaging), our team was well-placed to quickly react to the unfolding news with analytical insights from experts and stakeholders. The catch is, most bioplastics only biodegrade in industrial composting conditions, and few countries have those in the EU. We received survey results from 8 countries, and most of them were not accepting bioplastics in their composting facilities. I additionally asked how this is done in Lithuania and Malta — in Malta, which has a separate organic waste collection schedule, compostable waste is burnt (source), but bioplastic packaging is not treated with the compost, which implies it is landfilled. In Lithuania, the responsible ministry told me that such packaging would be processed according to the waste hierarchy, which means that unless they are designed for recycling (very few are), they would be burnt. Plastics expert Prof. Ričardas Makuška from Vilnius University says it’s not such a bad idea, but he, like many other experts we talked to, thinks that growing agricultural crops (the main feedstock for bioplastics) to create polymers just to discard and burn them after a single use is wasteful.

The European Commission considers that bioplastics are suitable for collecting organic waste and preventing plastic contamination of this waste stream. So tea bags, for example, should see fossil plastic replaced with bioplastic. But unrecyclable single-use takeaway packaging, for example, should be phased out altogether. This is the idea with the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation.

Our news story on this appeared in EUobserver (paywalled)

In December 2023, the Council adopted its position, with a view of adopting the law before the current European Parliament goes into campaign mode.

I explored the controversies surrounding bioplastics more in-depth in my radio show for Vienkartinė planeta (in Lithuanian)

In January 2024, the EUobserver published our investigation into the use of Horizon research funds for single-use packaging innovations.

This page will be updated with further publications.

Meanwhile, I am sharing the library of secondary/ analytical sources our team read and consulted. I generated the list from our internal spreadsheet of sources using Python.

Library of sources