Environmental Question #22 [Personal Buying Habits]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/Blahblah987369

Q: What would be your top 5 best biodegrable materials to seek out to replace plastics, esp single use, like trash bin liners? I read your blog where you talked about returning to reuse where possible, which is deffo the aim, but in the cases we can’t, what would be your preferences or recs?

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A: I'm not a big fan of rankings, because in my opinion the best choice in any decision comes down to a lot of an individual person's unique preferences and circumstances. For example, if a celebrity talks about their Top 5 fashion rules, in my opinion they're always either too vague to be useful to anyone or so specific to the celebrity's body or sense of style that they are useless to me as someone who doesn't have that body. Your circumstances and mine are probably different in terms of our finances, locations, preferences, and responsibilities, so I'm hesitant to treat my favorite things like they will have any special value to anyone else, because what works for me very well may not work for you.

To get to the heart of your question though, there are absolutely alternatives to common products like bin liners and plastic wrap, but they generally aren't very good today. Most of the options on the market are bioplastic-based, and many of those are even totally authentic in their claims and fully biodegradable, but I have yet to come across a product that performs adequately. The most common problem is with water-tightness, so most biodegradable bin bags leak, and some of the worse brands can even grow mold while sitting in your cabinet. This is a huge problem in the industry, and I feel particularly qualified to say that because I have personally developed biodegradable materials for bin liners and plastic wrap. My competitors' products sucked, and I feel comfortable saying that without a conflict of interest, because my products sucked too! This is a tough problem to solve, which is why I and many other scientists at many organizations are still working on it. Fortunately research is progressing rapidly across the industry, and products keep getting better every year, so I'm still confident we will collectively come up with a good solution in time. In the meantime, I recommend you poke around for biodegradable products that suit your lifestyle, buy small packages, and try them out. If it's a good product, then support it by continuing to buy it and telling your friends, and if it's a bad product help push the industry forward by loudly complaining.

In terms of my personal buying habits, I'm more conventional than you might think. I still buy plastic bin bags, although I try to minimize waste by always stuffing them as full as is reasonable before taking them out. All of the food containers I've purchased are glass, but if I get a plastic container from takeout food, then I continue to reuse it until it wears out. I know that this increases my exposure to microplastics, but for my personal priorities and risk tolerances, I care more about minimizing plastic waste than I do about exposing myself to small amounts of microplastics. I also buy clothes almost exclusively at thrift stores and only buy natural fiber clothes, but if I get a polyester sweater or blanket as a gift I still use it until it wears out. I spend a lot of time thinking about garbage and the damage it does to the environment for my job, so I don't like waste and I'd rather put myself at mild risk than let a perfectly good product go to waste.

My personal opinion is that for the world we currently live in, plastic reduction is good enough, because it is not possible for the average person to totally eliminate plastic from their life. The single biggest thing a person can do for the environment is to buy less stuff in general and buy used stuff whenever possible. You're right that there are some products that simply lack a viable non-plastic or biodegradable alternative today and I have dedicated my career to designing new materials to fill those gaps, but while I work on that you don't need to feel guilty about using plastic bin bags as long as you aren't using them frivolously.

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