In this cornfield, dark green stalks come up almost to my chest and wind around the hill in perfect rows. This field will produce thousands of bushels of corn to be turned into cattle feed, corn syrup, ethanol, and …plastic.
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This might sound like corn, too, but it’s actually millions of small plastic pellets being blasted through long tubes into gleaming steel silos at a processing facility near Blair, Nebraska. 10
The pellets are plastic resin – the raw material for everything from food containers to carpet. For the last 10 years a company here called Nature Works? has used corn, instead of oil or natural gas, to make bio-plastic. Nature Works? is partially owned by the ag giant, Cargill, and it makes more bioplastic right now than any company in the world. Steve Bray is Director of Manufacturing.
BRAY
The capacity of the plant is 300 million pounds of polymer per year. (GRANT) Is it maxed out yet? (BRAY) It’s not but we’re getting very close. You know in the first few years of operation we saw triple digit growth.
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Bray says things slowed down a bit during the recession.
BRAY
But even then we had growth. And now that the economy appears to be coming back we’re seeing very strong growth again.
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Between 20 and 30 percent in the last year. That kind of growth is happening across the bioplastics industry. Even traditional plastic makers are investing in bioplastic.
Kent Furst is an analyst with the market research firm, the Freedonia Group, based in Cleveland.
FURST
In pounds or in dollars, it’s really growing very fast. Sort of at the rate where we expect the industry to double in size in the next 3 or 4 years.
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It’s impressive, but bioplastics are actually less than 1 percent of the plastic market. Still, Furst says bioplastics are beating even the most optimistic forecasts. So why are companies using more bioplastic now? Furst says consumer interest is part of it. More people are shopping for sustainability. But it’s the price of oil that is making it affordable for manufacturers.
FURST
With the price of oil and natural gas in the early part of the last decade being so low, you didn’t see as much actual market interest in bioplastics. But as the price of oil and natural gas rose in the later part of the decade I think that’s when you saw how fast bioplastics could be competitive with conventional plastics on price.
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When you walk through a typical grocery store you can see how some major corporations are beginning to buy in.
It’s still difficult to find bioplastic on the shelf here in Lincoln, Nebraska. But I picked up a couple things. First, Pepsi Co. which owns Frito-Lay, makes this Sun Chips bag from Nature Works?’ bioplastic. So the bag and the food inside are made of corn. Pepsi also announced it’s developing a 100 percent plant-based soda bottle. Their rival, Coca-Cola, makes this Odwalla juice bottle with bioplastic from a Brazilian company that makes plastic from sugar cane. Coke also says it will be coming out with a soda bottle that’s 30 percent bioplastic. But bioplastics are not made equal, and that could start to cause some problems as they become more common.
FOWLER
Bioplastic could mean that the material is biodegradable or it could mean that it’s biobased. Or it could mean that it’s both.
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Paul Fowler is Executive Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Technology. He says that there’s a growing bioplastics divide. Some plant-based containers are biodegradable but hard to recycle. Others are easy to recycle but do not biodegrade. For example, the Sun Chips bag…
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is made from Nature Works? bioplastic called PLA. What sets PLA apart is that it’s completely biodegradable. It can be recycled, but not many recyclers handle PLA because it can contaminate the traditional recycling stream. The Odwalla bottle…
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on the other hand is made from sugar, but after you’re done with it, it’s no different from a bottle made from oil. It can be recycled almost anywhere in the country, but it does not biodegrade. So, to compost or recycle? Fowler says there’s room for both.
FOWLER
If you consider the landscape for all the various products that are made from plastics then there’s a space for everyone within that landscape.
But he says it does leave consumers with a lot to learn. So as more bioplastic shows up on grocery store shelves, sustainable minded consumers will need to be prepared to choose from new shades of green.
