And a really important and fascinating area that is often misunderstood is bioplastics. And a lot of people don’t really know what bioplastics are and that they can mean a couple of different things.
It can mean that the plastics are sourced from recently living organisms as opposed to fossil fuels.
So something that I think more and more people are aware of is that conventional plastics come from petroleum and bioplastics can come from other places.
They can come from, for example, polyethylene. Which is like that stuff from which plastic bags are made. It’s made from ethylene, which can again come from petroleum.
It can also come from rotting or bananas or corn sugar – there’s various different agricultural wastes that can be used to produce plastics. And it can be used to produce plastics that are chemically identical to the ones that come from petroleum.
And so those might be called bioplastics. But that does not mean that they are biodegradable.
They are identical chemically to the conventional ones. They are just made differently.
