The main interest and advantage of using bioplastics is their ability to potentially improve a product’s environmental impact in a number of ways:
- Recovery of waste or by-products.
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions;
- Save fossil fuels;
- Possibility of using a local resource;
Generally speaking, bioplastics help to improve the environmental impact of products in two ways:
- The use of renewable resources to manufacture monomers reduces the use of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions;
- Their biodegradable biodegradable which offers an additional option for the end-of-life of products and reduces waste volumes.
The environmental performance of bioplastics still needs to be validated by studies such as life cycle assessments (LCA).
The benefits of renewable resources and biodegradation
The economic development of industrialized countries has largely been based on the intensive exploitation of non-renewable resources. Today, faced with dwindling fossil resources and the rising cost of extracting them, renewable plant resources offer a sustainable alternative.
Biobased plastics incorporating plant-based materials in their manufacture create new bridges between the agricultural, chemical and plastics industries, as part of a sustainable management of our resources.
Biodegradable plastics can not only help reduce the volume of waste (through composting, for example), but also limit environmental pollution by facilitating the disappearance of waste in the environment in which it is used, without creating persistent microplastics.
environmental impacts
The environmental impact of polymers can be measured and analyzed usingLife Cycle Assessments(LCA). This decision-making tool identifies, quantifies andevaluates the environmental impact of all stages in a product’s life cycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life.
The ISO 14040 series of standards (external link ISO 14040) lists the best practices for carrying out an LCA, thus guaranteeing the robustness of the results.
The use of plant-based bioplastics as a substitute for fossil-based polymers can often significantly reduce the carbon footprint of products, depending on the application. Generally speaking, these analyses demonstrate the good performance of biobased polymers in terms ofgreenhouse gas emissions andfossil fuel savings.
There is still room for improvement in these areas compared to the current situation. Indeed, the biomass used up to now has been mainly “noble” and often from dedicated crops.
In some cases, by-products such as molasses from sugar cane are already used to produce biobased polymers (in this case, biobased PET).
The use of by-products and waste from different sectors is currently being investigated in numerous projects, both on a local scale ( COPROPLAST) and European (URBIOFIN).
These developments are set for industrialization in the coming years, with the constant aim of promoting biomass recovery as part of an eco-design and circular economy approach.