“A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.
“The plans, devised by renewable chemicals company Avantium, have already won the support of beer-maker Carlsberg, which hopes to sell its pilsner in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of plant plastic.”

Ok. From the outside this seems like a good thing. Less microplastics, less pollution, right?

Yay?

“Avantium’s plant plastic is designed to be resilient enough to contain carbonate drinks. Trials have shown that the plant plastic would decompose in one year using a composter, and a few years longer if left in normal outdoor conditions. But ideally, it should be recycled, said Van Aken.
“The bio-refinery plans to break down sustainable plant sugars into simple chemical structures that can then be rearranged to form a new plant-based plastic – which could appear on supermarket shelves by 2023.”

What will this stuff be made from?

“The path-finder project will initially make a modest 5,000 tonnes of plastic every year using sugars from corn, wheat or beets. However, Avantium expects its production to grow as demand for renewable plastics climbs.”

Ok, so let’s get this straight. First you have to grow the raw materials. Where? In newly cleared parts of the Amazon?

In your back yard?

Then you have to make these bottles. Currently that means using a mixture of renewable energy and fossil fuels.

Then you can chuck the used bottle out the window, but “ideally” it should be recycled.

More energy needed to do that.

Let’s not pretend these companies don’t understand the environmental impact of all this. They have to make it seem like they have the finger on the pulse:

“In time, Avantium plans to use plant sugars from sustainable sourced biowaste so that the rise of plant plastic does not affect the global food supply chain.”

Why not do it from day one if you think it’s possible?

What a cop-out!

And all the time strenuously avoiding any mention of the underlying problem: buying too much shit in plastic containers (and containers in general, really).

If a bottle of Coke cost fifty bucks, there’d be a lot of people drinking water out of taps again.

This is just one more example of those price/convenience/environmental destruction tradeoffs we know so well.

The environment rarely wins.

I remain skeptical.

[Cover photo: Diego Azubel/EPA]