Oh yes, it’s plastic, so fantastic
CSIR comes up with biodegradable plastic, to lessen SA pollution
● SA is in 11th place in one of the world’s leagues of shame, which in this case ranks countries that are worst at managing plastic waste.
But its position, sandwiched between Bangladesh and India, could improve thanks to an invention at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
A team at the CSIR has developed and patented fully biodegradable “bioplastic” from sugarcane and maize by-products, and is in talks to put it into mass production.
Senior CSIR researcher Sudhakar Muniyasamy said the invention was a potential game-changer in a country where 90% of flexible plastic products, such as shopping bags and food wrapping, are not biodegradable and cause environmental havoc.
Muniyasamy said the material was as tough as traditional plastics while being made from 100% renewable, plant-based sources. “It also meets the required properties — physical, mechanical and thermal — of the conventional non-biodegradable products. Bags can biodegrade in soil, compost and water within three to six months after end of life.”
The country’s reliance on non-biodegradable flexible plastic prompted the team to come up with an alternative to a “menace that creates serious pollution that persists in the environment for decades”.
Muniyasamy said bioplastic technology would create new jobs in agriculture and in the plastics industry, and the CSIR was “engaging with various interested plastic manufacturers and major retailers for licensing the technology for industrial production and commercialisation”.
Innovations are growing in the private sector, too, and a local nonprofit was inundated when it called on the public to make “ecobricks” out of used plastic bottles stuffed with shopping bags.
An ecobrick is a plastic bottle densely packed with plastic to create a building block. These are then used to make modular furniture, garden spaces and full-scale buildings like houses and schools.
EcoBrick Exchange director Ian Dommisse said more than 30,000 ecobricks, containing more than 10 tons of plastic, arrived from around the country after the organisation launched its appeal in 2013.
Its main project is Penguins Preschool in Port Elizabeth, where ecobricks have been stockpiled until money is available for construction.
The organisation no longer collects ecobricks and instead encourages people to create the bricks and build something for their home, school or community.
“Now that so many more projects have been requested we have started a line of smaller and quicker-to-implement projects such as raised vegetable gardens and mosaic benches,” said Dommisse.
EcoBrick Exchange has teamed up with other environmentalists to form a group of artisans who offer a building and project management service. Each project ordered “enables a reciprocal beneficiary community a rewards pack for their ecobricks”.
One of the key threats from plastics is in the microscopic particles that end up in marine ecosystems. “As with larger pieces of plastic, there is evidence of damage to marine animals from microplastics, particularly by filter feeders such as zooplankton that ingest them,” said WWF SA.
“This is of major concern because plankton is critical for marine food chains and helps to remove CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Microplastics had also “infiltrated freshwater ecosystems, and they are in our soil and atmospheric process too”.
A recent study on bottled water from nine countries found that 93% of samples contained microplastics. As a result, the World Health Organisation announced a review into the potential risks of plastics in drinking water.
“There is already some evidence of plastic contamination in drinking water in SA,” according to the WWF SA.
According to Plastics SA, South Africans are increasing their plastics recycling year on year. In the last survey, in 2017, more than 334,727 tons were recycled back into raw material.
But director Anton Hanekom said one of the biggest challenges to building the recycling industry had been access to good quality, relatively clean materials before they reach landfills.
“Despite our calls for separation-atsource, whereby recyclable materials are separated from non-recyclables, a staggering 74% of the plastics that were recycled during 2017 was still obtained from landfill and other post-consumer sources,” he said.