On March 22, 2023, President Biden issued an executive order with the goal of replacing 90 percent of current plastics manufacturing with plastic produced using biofuel ingredients like corn or wood, otherwise known as bioplastics, or chemically recycled plastic.

Executive order 1408: “Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing” would require a dramatic change, because most plastic products are made today using fossil fuels. Relatively cheap shale gas discoveries in the late 2000s led to a boom in petrochemical production, including for ethane, the primary chemical building block of plastics. The U.S. is now home to around 40 percent of ethane-based petrochemical production world-wide. Demand for plastic products has nearly doubled since 2000 and shows no signs of slowing. Meanwhile, our landfills and oceans grow more swollen with plastic trash every year.

Proponents of bioplastics highlight the environmental harms caused by fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel-based manufacturing processes. While concern over plastic waste like straws and plastic bags have captured popular national attention, resulting in policies like California’s single-use carryout bag ban, the environmental impacts of plastic production begin early in the lifecycle of products. Drilling for natural gas and oil and then transporting it to processing facilities carries risks of toxic leaks that can impact waterways for years, and the production of ethylene, a gas used to make plastic pellets that form a huge variety of plastic products, requires a carbon-intensive process called “cracking” that releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants.
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Bioplastics do not cause the same environmental harm as fossil fuel plastics. The main ingredients of bioplastic can be made from wood products, corn starch, vegetable oil, or other plant-based products using either natural polymers like starch or the chemical synthesis of plant-derived sugar or fats. By eliminating fossil fuels from the production chain, bioplastics eliminate many of the environmental risks associated with traditional plastic manufacturing.

Among other bioplastics projects being proposed, Citroniq Chemicals and Lummus Technology are planning to build a plant in Kansas that would produce polypropylene, a plastic resin, from corn.

Bioplastic production does not eliminate the use of fossil fuels, however. Increased demand for corn and wood biomass to produce bioplastics may require increased use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which can pollute waterways and harm local biodiversity. Nitrogen fertilizers are also produced using hydrogen, which is usually synthesized using natural gas or coal. While the use of carbon capture has been proposed at many fertilizer plants in recent years, the technology yields questionable benefits. A study from Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobson found that the greenhouse gas footprint of hydrogen production with carbon capture was 20 percent higher than simply burning natural gas or coal. In addition, emissions of dangerous air pollutants like benzene are not reduced when using carbon capture.

There are also better and worse – more and less climate friendly – ways of producing bioplastics. The most common method uses corn kernels and other food crops, like sugar beets. But this is more wasteful than using agricultural waste products – like corn stalks and husks – that would otherwise be thrown away.

Mike Belliveau, the founder of Defend Our Health, advocates for incentivizing production of bioplastics using agricultural waste and forestry residue, such as fallen branches that can’t be used for lumber. Conversion of these waste materials into plastic yields a much greater relative greenhouse gas emissions reduction than conversion of materials like corn kernels. But using these waste products also requires more energy and therefore more money. “No one wants to pay a premium in the marketplace for greener, more sustainable performance,” Belliveau said. For this reason, he argues that policies focusing on incentivizing bioplastics should distinguish between types of raw material and offer variable incentives, with fuel produced from crop or forestry waste receiving higher subsidies. While President Biden’s executive order mentions both types of base material, it does not outline specific incentives or potential differences in policy that would incentive the use of waste.

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of bioplastics is the potential to reduce emissions of toxic and carcinogenic compounds that harm the health of workers, communities surrounding production plants, and consumers. Polylactic acid (PLA) is one of the most common types of bioplastics currently in production, and it can replace polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a plastic used in beverage containers, plastic packaging, and other products. As its name suggests, PLA is produced using lactic acid. Lactic acid is corrosive at high concentrations but poses few risks to human health. PET plastic, on the other hand, is produced using terephthalic acid and ethylene oxide, both known carcinogens.

Replacing fossil-fuel-based plastic products with bioplastics is important in reducing the negative health impacts of the fossil fuel industry, but is not sufficient, Belliveau said. “We need to eliminate unnecessary and problematic uses, which includes most of single use and packaging [plastic],” he said. This would be the first step, followed by detoxifying hard-to-replace products by replacing chemicals of concern with safer substitutes. According to Belliveau, the federal government and the plastic industry have been “singularly focused on renewable carbon for greenhouse gas reductions and commercial opportunity to make profit. With such single focus we are going to perpetuate problems like widespread unnecessary use” of plastic products and the use of highly toxic chemical additives.

Bioplastics offer fewer benefits when considering the continuing problem of how to dispose of plastics, because even bioplastics do not quickly biodegrade and can persist in the environment for a long time.  For this reason, some advocates argue that the first and most important step in reducing the environmental impact of plastic pollution is reducing our use of all kinds of plastics, including bioplastics. Kate Melges, Greenpeace USA’s Plastics Project lead, described President Biden’s executive order as missing the mark. “We need to… switch to refill and reuse systems, not pursue false solutions like recycling and materials substitution,” she said.

Both PLA and another common bioplastic, polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), are compostable under the right conditions, unlike fossil fuel-based plastics. However, they require high temperature and high oxygen environments that exist only at industrial composting facilities, of which there are few. When bioplastics are tossed in standard trash or recycling, they at best sit in landfills, refusing to decompose just as fossil fuel plastics do. At worst, they contaminate recyclable traditional plastic, already a tenuous industry.

Until recently, the U.S. sold most of its recycling to China, but in 2018 China banned the import of plastic waste, largely because of how much of the supposedly “recyclable” waste being sent from the U.S. was contaminated. Since China’s ban, the U.S. has exported supposedly recyclable plastic waste to Turkey, Vietnam, Cambodia, Senegal, and other countries, mostly without strict environmental or labor laws. Only 5-6 percent of U.S. plastic waste is recycled at all, and even this figure is deceptive, because all plastics shipped overseas for “recycling” is counted as recycled, whether it ends up in landfills or not).

President Biden’s recent executive order aims to vastly reduce the environmental harms of plastics through bioplastics production, as discussed above. However, it also includes chemical recycling as an alternative plastics production process. The policy does not specify how it is going to reach its 90 percent target: whether with bioplastics or plastics that have been chemically recycled. That’s concerning, because it could prove nothing more than another lifeline for the plastics industry, which is enthusiastically promoting chemical recycling as the next plastics panacea.

Chemical recycling uses heat or solvents to break down the molecular bonds in used plastic products to make fuels, other chemicals, or new plastics. Some technologies associated with chemical recycling, like pyrolysis and gasification, use high temperatures to thermally degrade plastics. Other technologies, such as depolymerization, use harsh chemicals to dissolve plastics. These processes are energy-intensive, generate huge quantities of toxic waste, and emit hundreds of tons of hazardous air pollutants.

According to public records available on Oil & Gas Watch, there are nine chemical recycling plants currently operating or partially operating in the U.S. and another 22 planned. The chemical recycling industry is more developed than the bioplastics industry, particularly compared to bioplastics made using waste. If incentive policies do not define specific benchmarks for the bioplastics industry, it is possible Biden’s big goal to replace 90 percent of traditional plastic with bioplastics or chemically recycled plastic would simply result in a shift from one toxic product (fossil-fuel plastics) to another (chemically-recycled plastics).

With adequate regulation, appropriate incentives, and supportive policies, it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and harmful chemicals in the plastic industry while still producing hard-to-replace products like those used in medicine. However, President Biden’s executive order does not mention reducing single use plastics or specify regulation of the chemicals used to make plastic. “Our chemical safety system remains badly broken,” said Mike Belliveau of Defend Our Health.

Without an overhaul of this system and a focus on reducing our dependence on plastic overall, the executive order may only provide more opportunity for greenwashing from an industry far more attached to profits than healthy communities and environments.

Lead photo: Barry Griffett operates a machine at the Danimer Scientific plant in Winchester, Kentucky, on Aug. 3, 2022. The plant makes bioplastics from food waste (AP Photo/Jeff Dean).