How friendly is biodegradable plastic?
08 July 2009, Inter Press Service URL: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47559 Cape Town: Awareness of pollution and the amount of waste going into limited landfill space is encouraging the growing adoption of products with biodegradable plastic packaging. But environmentalists are challenging the claims made for these green products. “Policymakers have tended to concentrate on waste which can be collected, and have encouraged people to reduce, re-use, and recycle, but in no country in the world will all the waste be collected, and some will always remain to disfigure the landscape,” says Michael Stephens, deputy chair of Symphony Environmental Technologies, manufacturers of oxo-biodegradable plastic. “This is particularly true of plastic, which can accumulate in the environment, polluting the land and the oceans for decades, and perhaps for hundreds of years. However, Symphony’s d2w oxo-biodegradable plastic will self-destruct if it gets into the open environment. Oxo-bio plastic
