Biodegradable fresh produce packaging requires considerable planning, before and after use, marketers say.
“It also depends on where you want it to degrade,” said Jeff Brandenburg, president and primary consultant for the Greenfield, Mass.-based JSB Group LLC and its QFresh Lab in Salinas, Calif.
He likened a landfill to “a tomb” — no air, no light, no water and very little degrading of materials inside.
“If you had a regular plastic container and you had a starch-added plastic container, you had to add that much more plastic, and you’re actually putting more in the landfill than you had before,” he said.
Polylactic acid answers some needs in packaging produce, since it is made from corn starch, sugar cane or other renewable resources, Brandenburg said, adding that PLA is a common go-to substitute for polyethene terephthalate, or PET plastics.
“Certainly, PLA is out there, and it has advantages and disadvantages — you can’t get the starch to trigger dissolve when you want to,” he said.
Polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA, a biopolymer, “looks very encouraging,” but availability can be a problem, Brandenburg said.
He also pointed to rice or sugar cane fiber-based materials that can easily degrade.
When it comes to packaging, there’s no silver bullet,” Brandenburg said.
“It’s matching the properties of some of these new polymers to what you need, for your consumers and the distribution channel,” he said.
“It’s what works best for you. It could be a fiberboard. It could be post-consumer recycled materials. That’s gaining a lot of popularity in Europe, and there’s been some technological breakthroughs that allows the FDA to say it’s OK to use this for food contact.”
In the early 2000s, some grower-shippers turned to corn-based materials for biodegradability, but problems cropped up with packages that degraded too soon, such as in the fields.
“I think what’s changed is corn-based wasn’t a breakthrough; it didn’t make a lot of scientific sense,” Brandenburg said. “What the market is demanding now, whether it’s understanding recycling and what it means or understanding a polymer and composting, the consumers are demanding scientific answers. What does it really mean? And that’s what’s changed. That’s very good because now we’re looking at answers from a scientific and engineering perspective.”
A common challenge with biodegradable packaging is that it is not recyclable, said Cindy Blish, brand and communications manager with Shelton, Conn.-based Inline Plastics Corp.
“And it often requires current biodegradable products can only decompose if they are sent to a special facility for processing, where the temperature and humidity is specially controlled, and lumped together with other compostable plastics,” she said.
In addition, if those plastics are either thrown into the landfill or mixed with other waste, then the benefits of biodegradability often dissipate, Blish said.
“With material recovery and recycling technologies today, PET is the most commonly recycled plastic, with over 60% consumer access — making it the best packaging material ready for recycling,” she said.
There are other challenges in biodegradable materials, said Victoria Lopez, marketing representative with McAllen, Texas-based Fox Packaging.
While Fox Packaging continues research in product development, “we stand by recycling, we advocate for the improvement of materials for recovery to combat landfill, litter and incineration, which all have negative impacts on our environment,” she said.
There are key tradeoffs, Lopez said.
“While a biobased plastic serves in the reduction of virgin resin, it increases in the need for resources such as land, water, and aquatic toxicity,” she said, noting that studies have shown that growing 1 ton of PLA biobased feedstock would require 1,100% more water.
“Are we going to use our land resources to grow plastics or grow food?” she said.
Food packaging is being targeted by the sustainability movement, but food waste is a bigger problem, Lopez said.
“At the end of the day, our industry is supporting communities through increased produce consumption,” she said.
“We’re supporting farmers and the labor and energy that was put into growing these commodities. Not only that, but our packaging is helping extend product life cycles. And with food waste rising, we cannot afford to ignore this issue.”
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