Turning sawdust into plastic bottles
From sugar, to corn, to wood — innovators try new materials to make packaging without petrochemicals
ACanadian technology startup says it has the answer to the world’s plastic pollution problem: sawdust. Origin Materials is getting ready to pay sawmills in its part of Ontario US$20 ($29.70) a tonne for the scraps left over in the process of turning logs into timber, which it will use to make recyclable plastic bottles that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because they’re made from sustainably sourced wood waste. Nestle, Danone and PepsiCo plan to sell water in Origin’s recyclable plantbased bottles in early 2022.
It’s one of the many unconventional ways conceived by scientists to reduce the world’s reliance on plastics made from petroleum. Other so-called bio-based plastics are being developed from sugar, corn, algae, seaweed, sewage and even dead beetles.
“Consumers are caring about plastic in a way that they haven’t in a long time, maybe ever,” says John Bissell, 34, who founded Origin Materials in 2008 and has spent 10 years working as an engineer developing alternative plastics that don’t contribute to climate change.
“Everyday things like bottles and clothing can now become carbon negative, but remain otherwise functionally identical.”
That may be true in theory, but phasing out petroleum-based plastics will be an uphill battle. Use of the material has become so ingrained that about half of all new oil demand between now and 2040 will come from petrochemicals, an industry that relies on plastics for most of its business, according to analysis by BloombergNEF.
The US$500 billion global plastics market is responsible for 5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to data from Friends of the Earth. Some projections see that ratio tripling in the next 30 years.
Plant-based plastics, especially
varieties made from sugar cane, are starting to seep into the mainstream as companies try to respond to consumers who are increasingly angry about the ecologically devastating impact of plastics. But big food and beverage companies will need to get on board to really alter the equation. Nestle alone produces 1.7 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, enough to make over 51 billion bottles.
Beverage makers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi use a lot more than that. Coca-Cola rolled out its so-called plantbottle in 2009, but it’s still 70 per cent petroleum based.
As part of a strategy to find more sustainable packaging, Pepsi last year joined Nestle and Danone’s NaturALL Bottle Alliance to find ways to reduce the carbon footprint of beverage bottles. All three plan to buy 100 per cent plant-derived bottles from Origin Materials when its Ontario plant gets up and run- ning at the end of next year, with a starting capacity of 300 million bottles a year.
Origin Materials developed a way to extract cellulose from wood waste to make para-xylene, a hydrocarbon usually derived from oil used to manufacture PET, one of the most common plastics today. Since trees and plants naturally capture CO2 through photosynthesis, using sustainably sourced sawdust and wood chips more than offsets any pollutants released in the manufacturing process, according to Bissell.
However ingenious the techniques to make plant-based bottles may get, though, they’re still plastic. Not all varieties are recyclable or biodegradable. And ultimately, unless they are recycled — and worldwide, only one out of every five bottles is — plastic bottles inevitably end up in landfills or find their way into the oceans where most could take hundreds of years to degrade, killing birds, fish and whales in the process.
When incinerated, bio-based plastics may be little better than oil-based ones because the carbon stored in them is released.
Since Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet 2 documentary in 2017 showed albatrosses feeding their chicks plastic by accident, plastic’s environmental impact has “gone from a niche topic of conversation and engagement to something that features in all our conversations,” says Mark Lancelott, a sustainability expert at PA Consulting Group.
The London-based consultancy has seen a “significant increase” in requests from food and beverage companies asking how to manage plastic waste.
Sceptics of the bioplastic push say such materials are not resolving the underlying problem.
It would be better to focus on improving rates of reuse of plastic or glass packaging, with waste collected by the producer, argues Juliet Phillips, an ocean campaigner at the Environmental
Investigation Agency, a nongovernmental organisation.
If production of plant-based plastics were scaled up, “land-use demands could bring about competition with agriculture, accelerating deforestation concerns and biodiversity loss,” she says.
For Bissell at Origin Materials, the plastics industry has become too important for global commerce to work
on only one front to improve sustainability, especially considering soaring demand in emerging markets where reuse programmes tend to be underdeveloped.
“The end of life of plastics is really important. I’m not too sure that I’d argue that it’s more important than climate change. That feels like maybe not the right tradeoff to make,” he says.
Consumers are caring about plastic in a way that they haven’t in a long time, maybe ever. John Bissell, Origin Materials