Do Biodegradable Plastics Really Work?
Just how long does it take for conventional plastics to completely break down? 500 years? 1,000? It’s a mystery. “No one has really measured how long it takes,” says Ramani Narayan, a professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at Michigan State University. What is known is that conventional petroleum-based plastics never really go away, even when they break down into pieces too small to be seen with the naked eye. Some new plastics are designed to degrade (not to be confused with biodegrade—more on that in a sec) in a matter of weeks when exposed to the elements, but that doesn’t mean they’re truly gone. But broken down plastics are better than litter, right? Wrong. In fact, plastics often create more environmental harm when broken down than when intact. This is most evident in the oceans, home to billions of pieces of disintegrating plastic and preproduction pellets called nurdles, which can work their way back up the food chain to humans.
