Consumers Are Ready for Change as Industry Hammers Out the Details
We are living in the exciting third generation of plastics and polymers. The first generation was the dawn of the commodity polymers that were highly affordable, exceptionally durable, and able to displace many packaging, single-use, or commodity applications. Examples being polyethylene films and bags, polypropylene and polyester containers and fibers, PVC pipes, and polystyrene packaging. The second generation included the development of polymers for more intense and strenuous applications including use in high heat and/or chemically hazardous environments and high strength and toughness requiring applications.
Examples of these include many from the transportation sectors – both automotive and aircraft, composites, and protective technologies. All of these were produced from petrochemical sources and endured long after their use application’s end-of-life. The third generation of plastics and polymers is one that builds materials from a variety of sources, not only petroleum and/or are designed to NOT endure past the applications end of useful life.
Public Mindset Drives Change
The topic around the sourcing of the building blocks to make these third-generation plastics and polymers has already been discussed. Here, the focus will be upon what happens after the product has exceeded its useful life. Certainly, the most desirable end-of-life (EOL) goal is reuse and recycling, whether mechanical or advanced, to maintain the greatest raw material value. However, when reuse and recycling is not possible or otherwise fails to occur, consideration towards biodegradability and compostability come into play.
Recent polls by IPSOS, the World Wildlife Federation, Data for Progress, and others are consistent in showing that a large majority of Americans are concerned about plastic pollution in the environment. Regardless of political affiliation, 75% of Americans are concerned or very concerned about the impact of plastic in the environment. A significant percentage of respondents in various surveys believe that government and manufacturers of both plastics and plastics products are best positioned to address the issue of plastics in the environment.
In considering governmental actions, depending upon respondent country, 63-80% of surveyed Europeans were in favor of the European Union Single-Use Plastics Directive. Similarly, a WWF global survey indicated nearly 90% of respondents believed that a global plastics pollution treaty was important or essential. A smaller portion, around one-in-three, have made changes to their buying and use behavior to reduce the amount of single-use plastics that they are directly responsible for.
Studies by McKinsey and NielsenIQ have demonstrated that not only do consumers say they are willing to change purchase habits but have actually increased purchases of products with sustainability stories. This is occurring even when those purchases are at a higher cost.
Clearing Up Definitions
Looking at those buying choices, it is seen that consumers are intentionally purchasing products that indicate that the packaging and/or product is made using recycled content, is recyclable, can be composted or is biodegradable. While consumers are reasonably clear and certain as to what the claims relating to recycled content or recyclable mean, there is less certainty around compostability and biodegradability. The Composting Consortium have noted that 49% of respondents have difficulty distinguishing between the terms compostable and biodegradable. Furthermore, about half of consumers interpret the packaging claim “plant-based” to be equivalent with compostable and dispose of plant-based packaging materials with compostable waste. This education gap will become increasingly critical to address as more products (not only packaging materials) are produced with non-plastic materials, whether due to regulatory drivers or consumer pull, that are potentially biodegradable and/or compostable.
Thankfully, there have been improvements in the claim language that is permitted on products and claims of biodegradability and compostability must be validated against rigorously defined standards. Past claims of biodegradability were made based on the premise that under at least some conditions of water, heat, and light exposure, the product would break down in some manner. The time required to biodegrade, and the extent of biodegradation were generally not specified, which meant that a claim of biodegradability was often disingenuous at best.
However, ISO, OECD, EN and ASTM standards have been implemented that have addressed these gaps and now require a minimum degree of product degradation at controlled conditions, including both aerobic and anaerobic environments, defined temperature, humidity, and duration. Similarly, there are standards against which compostability claims may be evaluated.
While this is a significant improvement, it is also fair to say that consumers are generally ill-equipped to understand the differences between products labelled as biodegradable per ASTM D5511 and ASTM 5526 or ISO 14855 or …! Ultimately, consumers need to understand in accessible terms what “biodegradable per method XYZ” means with respect to the proper disposal of the product. The test method used is merely the proof that when disposed of appropriately, that the product has the potential to biodegrade. Similar comments apply to compostability claims which may be a step ahead of general biodegradability claims. This is due to often legislated requirements to label products as municipal/industrially compostable versus home or backyard compostable.
Before moving to some of the materials and technology, here are a few final words on product claims and labeling requirements. Product claims should abide by the requirements of the European Directive to Combat Greenwashing and Promote Sustainability and the United States Federal Trade Commission Green Guides. Each of these strives to provide clarity around claim language and in the case of the European directive demands that claims be validated with data. The efforts around both standards development and claim language regulation are significantly reducing consumer frustration and confusion over potential “green-washing.”
Materially-Speaking
For much of the nonwovens industry’s history, the biodegradability and compostability story centered around cotton, wood pulp, and viscose materials. Over the last few decades, significant strides have been made to expand the source of materials that can be used to generate viscose perhaps most notably the rapidly replenishing bamboo. These cellulosic materials were the predominant biodegradable raw materials and were limited by their inability to be thermally extruded in spunmelt processes. Additionally, they could not be thermally bonded or welded without the addition of some synthetic polymer fibers such as polypropylene, polyethylene, or polyester.
There were, of course, some other sources of biodegradable fibers such as wool, hemp, seaweed, silk, other animal fur, poultry feathers, and even chitosan from waste shellfish shells. These were generally niche products and not of appreciable commercial significance. However, in localized regions where alternate fibers are more readily available, such as wool in New Zealand and banana fibers in India, there has been increased commercialization in recent years.
There has also been an increased interest in hemp as a source of biodegradable fibers, particularly in the United States as both stigma and regulatory restrictions have diminished. Each of these fiber sources presents opportunities and challenges to the manufacturers of the nonwovens and products made from them. It should also be noted, that processing of the source raw materials to create fibers can also impact the materials ability to biodegrade, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Noted above was the general inability of these materials to be extruded or otherwise thermally processed, which meant that for high output processes like spunbond and meltblown, that only non-biodegradable thermoplastic polymers such as polypropylene, polyethylene, nylon, and polyester could be used.
Since the 1990s, that reality has been changing as polymers such as polylactic acid (PLA), polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), and polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) amongst others have moved from the lab into commercial production and are being thermally extruded into fibers and nonwovens. These new bioplastics represent a prime example of the third generation of polymers that are either bio-sourced, biodegradable or both.
Significant advances are being made to improve these materials extrudability, physical properties, and biodegradability. Products made with such materials are potentially compostable either industrially or at home and more importantly may biodegrade should they be released into the environment.
Reversing Irreversible Damage
Coming back to some of the first-generation polymers, such as polypropylene, there have been available for a couple decades, oxidative additives that could facilitate biodegradation of articles made with such polymers. Unfortunately, this type of biodegradation often resulted in a large plastic article being broken into smaller, potentially micro-plastic, sized pieces of plastic. While this approach had the potential to avoid seabirds strangling in six-pack holders and animals and fish choking on plastic fabrics, it created a
different, micro-plastic, problem.
Recently, a next generation of additives has been developed that, rather than simply breaking a large plastic into many smaller plastics, converts the plastic into smaller waxy or grease-like molecules that may be bio-available to microbes for complete digestion. The various developers of these technologies are clear in stating that this is not meant to be the primary disposal pathway for these plastics, but rather as a safety net for those instances when plastic articles are inadvertently introduced into the environment rather than properly recycled or disposed of.
The advent of biodegradable polymers and/or additives that can allow biodegradation of polymers historically not considered to be biodegradable will assuredly challenge the existing legislative, regulatory, and standards approaches. It will similarly put greater burden on manufacturers and retailers to educate consumers regarding appropriate end-of-life considerations for the products they purchase. As composting infrastructure and product designs advance to facilitate the viability of nonwovens and other products to be made compostable, labeling regulation and consumer education will be critical to ensure that each material is appropriately introduced to the next phase of its existence, whether reuse, recycle, composting, or landfill.
The array of tools in the product designers’ toolbox to address these end-of-life considerations continues to increase year-after-year. Many of these new tools have been recent finalists and/or winners of innovation awards from INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry and EDANA, the Voice of Nonwovens.
These topics and others will be covered in more depth in the INDA Sustainability Report being released in the fall 2024 and INDA’s inaugural Sustainability in Nonwovens Conference, April 29-30, 2025, held at the IDEA® 2025 Expo (April 29-May 1). These also run in conjunction with FiltXPO™. We hope to see you there.
Register now for www.ideashow.org
References:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/three-four-americans-support-national-policies-reduce-single-use-plastic. Accessed 2024 July 8.
https://www.protein-evolution.com/perspective/americans-views-on-plastics-recycling-and-sustainability. Accessed 2024 July 8.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/blogs/sustainability-works/posts/what-do-americans-think-about-plastic-waste-in-2024. Accessed 2024 July 8.
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/3/27/voters-express-concern-about-plastic-pollution-strongly-support-mitigation-proposals. Accessed 2024 July 8.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/1-in-3-americans-say-theyve-reduced-how-much-plastic-
theyre-using. Accessed 2024 July 9.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341670/europe-single-use-plastic-ban-support-by-country.
Accessed 2024 July 9.
https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/rising_tides__ii___1_.pdf. Acccessed 2024 July 9.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/consumers-are-in-fact-buying-sustainable-goods-highlights-from-new-research. Accessed 2024 July 9.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/consumers-care-about-sustainability-and-back-it-up-with-their-wallets. Accessed 2024 July 9.
https://www.closedlooppartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Composting-Consortium-Report_Updated.pdf. Accessed 2024 July 9.
