What are biodegradable plastics?
Technically all organic (carbon-containing) materials can be biodegraded (broken down by microbes), it’s a matter of time. And the typical answer to ‘how much time?’ is ‘it depends.’ Without light, moisture and oxygen (i.e. similar to conditions in a landfill), very little degrades. Even newspapers have been known to be readable after decades in a dry landfill. Traditional plastics made from petroleum products have not been around long enough to prove how many years they will take to degrade. When scientists apply the same tests to plastic bags as they do to other organic items to see how long it takes them to degrade (for the techies in the crowd, these are called respirometry tests), the bags don’t break down at all. Educated guesses based on this type of research put time to biodegrade for traditional plastics at 100 to 1,000 years. Enter bioplastics — plastics made from plant-based sources, like corn or sugar cane. These plastics break down much easier and faster than traditional p
