An Alternative to Single Use Plastic?

 

 

Humans buy about 1,000,000 plastic bottles per minute in total. Americans purchase about 50 billion water bottles per year, averaging about 13 bottles per month for every person in the U.S. It is estimated that 4 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide annually. Only 1% of plastic bags are returned for recycling. Single-use plastics frequently do not make it to a landfill or recycling. A full 32% of the 78 million tons of plastic packaging produced annually is left to flow into our oceans; the equivalent of pouring one garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute. Even when single-use plastics make it to landfills they aren’t harmless. Landfill liners can leak harmful pollutants into the watershed and plastics on the tops of landfills can be carried away by the wind.

What if there was a practical alternative to plastic packaging that was from a sustainable source and was fully compostable? 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have created a plant-based, sustainable, scalable material that could replace single-use plastics in many consumer products. The researchers created a polymer film by mimicking the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature. The new material is as strong as many common plastics in use today and could replace plastic in many common household products. Even better, the new material is home compostable and can safely degrade in most natural environments.

The results were published in 2020 in the journal Nature Communications. While not ready for large scale commercial use just yet it will be commercialized by Xampla, a University of Cambridge spin-out company developing replacements for single-use plastic and microplastics. The company will introduce a range of single-use sachets and capsules later this year, which can replace the plastic used in everyday products like dishwasher tablets and laundry detergent capsules. You can read more of the details here.

With any luck, we may have a practical alternative to single use plastics for the first time.