Instant Genius - Sustainability Special – Why ‘biodegradable’ doesn’t mean what you think

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

We humans depend on the Earth’s natural resources for our very existence so it’s vital that we take as good care of them as we can. However, it’s abundantly clear that the environment isn’t in great shape at the moment. In this special six-part series we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural resources, investigate what their current state is and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them. And in this episode, we’re delving into the biggest myths of biodegradability, which itself is actually a rather misleading term. To debunk the biggest biodegradability mistruths we’re joined by Mark Miodownik, a professor of materials science at University College London, and author of Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the Bitescience Masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. We humans depend on the earth's natural resources for our very existence, so it's vital that we take as good care of them as we can. However, it's abundantly clear that the environment isn't in great shape at the moment. In this special six-part series, we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural resources, investigate what their current state is, and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them. And in this episode, we're delving into the biggest myths of biodegradability,

which, as it turns out, is a rather misleading term. To debunk the biggest biodegradability mistruths, I'm joined by Mark Mendovnik. He's a professor of material sciences at University College London, and author of Stuff Matters. I'm going to start up with a big question, and that is, what does biodegradability actually mean? And why is it important in today's world? Well, biodegradability is the ability of a material to be biodegraded, i.e. consumed by microbes

and then become part of the biosphere in a safe way. So in a nutshell, is developing biodegradable materials trying to combat plastic waste? Yes, it is touted as a way to deal with our problem of plastic waste. So there's many companies out there who advertise their products as biodegradable. degradable, but what they don't say is how long it takes to biodegrade or even under what conditions it biodegrades. So, you know, the action of microbes on a material is really, really dependent on the conditions that those microbes find themselves in and whether they like to eat that material or not. So under the sea is very different in terms of availability of

oxygen, for instance, or under the earth, right, burying something. That's very different from being on the surface of a park or a garden in the air. So these are all different places where these materials find themselves, and they won't all work. And in fact, unfortunately, biodegradability is a very, very loose term that essentially can encompass loads of materials. So normal plastics are biodegradable. A normal bottle will biodegrade.

It'll just take 50 years, but it will biodegrade. So if someone says, well, this bottle is biodegradable, it doesn't really tell you anything you want to know about its environmental impact. So it's essentially everything biodegradable. Like, are we biodegradable? It's like still biodegradable eventually. We are definitely biodegradable. Most things are biodegradable.

Wood, paper. Yeah, metals biodegrade. Most metals, not all of them, but most of them do in the end, over geological timeframes. Because they're absorbed. Their minerals are absorbed back into the biosphere by the action of many different things. But yeah, over time, that has happened. They've dissolved and so on. So, yeah, the term is sort of meaningless.

If it's put on the outside of a product in order to make you feel like you're having less impact on the environment, ignore. Ignore, ignore. Because any manufacturer that's just using that word to kind of, in a sense, promote its practice, doesn't understand, I'm afraid, the fact that it's meaningless. So what word or phrase should people be? actually looking out for on that product's packaging? Well, it depends what the claim is.

If you're saying to someone, if you throw this anywhere in the world, it will not harm the environment, then you, well, there are no, there is no products we know that like that, essentially, because things don't instantly disappear. Even if they're in the right environment and there's the right microbes to degrade it fast, there's still a long period of time where they're still around. And then eventually they become small bits called micro, well, if they're plastics, microplastics. And they get blow in the wind.

They might end up in a completely different environment. They might be eaten by worms. They are. We know they are. So there is really no way you can throw something into the environment without risk, in my view. And in fact, throwing things into the environment intentionally is just a really bad thing to encourage people to do on the sides of packets. What about a term like compostable?

Is that something good that people should be looking out for on packaging? Yeah, compostable is a term which says this stuff will biodegrade under certain conditions, and it should then tell you those conditions. So there's two versions of it. One is called home compostable, which basically means it will compost in your back garden under home composting conditions, which I can tell you about. And they are particular.

They're not just, you can throw it in your back garden that's going to work. They won't work if you just throw it in your back garden. You actually have to composting conditions. them. And most people don't compost, by the way. So it's kind of, if you're selling it to the general public, you're basically selling it to most people who don't have access to home compost and they don't do it either. So it's going to end up in the bin, in the best scenario. It might end up in the environment, in which case it's going to harm the environment. The other version of compostable is industrially compostable. And this is much more reliable because what it's saying is, if you give

this to a company that is an industrial compost, they actually have the right condition set up in their organization. I've visited many of them. They're incredible places, actually. And they have exactly the right temperatures, the rightly right humidity, exactly the right microbes, and it will compost or biodegrade under those conditions

very fast within a matter of weeks. And it's also under control. They're not releasing it to the environment. So that is something you can trust, industrially compostable. But there's one caveat, which is, if it doesn't go to an industrial composter,

if you just throw it in the environment or you put it in the pond or the river or your back garden, it will be around for a long time, years. So, you know, just buying it as an industrial compost material, but then not making sure it ends up as an industrial compost or whether you've basically nullified any environmental good impact you would have. So what can you do at home then to ensure that these sort of packaging does actually turn into composting? What are these sort of home compostable conditions that you sort of mentioned?

Yeah, well, home composting, if you have a garden or access to a garden, and in fact, I don't have a garden, I have a roof, and we compost on our roof. So you can do it in lots of places, middle of a city, that's where I live, my family. We've composted everything that's come out of our flat for the last 20 years. So all, not everything, sorry, all the leftover food and drink has been composted and turn it to earth on our roof. So I really would recommend it as a practice because it makes you feel like you're not polluting the world with your leftover meals. And by the way, that is one of the biggest impacts you can have. So your leftovers, if you don't put them in black bag, which they end up in landfill, which ends up unfortunately creating methane, if you put it in the food waste collection if you have one or your own home compost, if you have one,

which is often about 40% of the weight of an average person's waste, 40% of it you can deal with at home, and you can create, by making a home compost, you create the conditions for biodiversity. So they're incredibly good because actually lots of microbes just arrive. They start eating your food and bits and bobs. And then loads of worms comes, loads of all sorts of little small insects come. Birds then eat those insects, so you're attracting all sorts of life into the back garden. I think people feel it might be smelly and horrible, and they want perhaps a back garden that's got a patio and a barbecue and a few flowers and that's all they want. But that's quite a sterile use of your back garden. If you really want to

help the environment, really, honestly, the most important thing you can do is have a home compost and compost. It really is, you will be doing the whole world an enormous favour. So did you say you have some of a compost bin on your roof? Yeah, because there are lots of ways of doing this, but the simplest way is to use what's called a Dalit Composter. So it's a plastic polypropylene kind of barrel. And you put your food waste in the top. And you start it off with a little bit of soil. So it's got some microbes in it already.

And there are the vast numbers of them in there. I mean, just billions and trillions of them, even just a few handfuls of soil. And as you put in your food waste, they and the fungi and all the other things will start eating your food. That's their, that's what they're, that literally is their food and drink. and they will then create soil with the action of other insects and worms and so on

and as you keep doing that over time in this barrel on our roof as we do it we've done it for 20 years basically you just end up creating soil and of course because we've also got a roof garden and we just put the soil on the roof garden and we grow vegetables and flowers and we honestly no food waste

has left our flat for 20 years I mean it's an amazing thought and I'm constantly baffled but also there's loads of biodiversity on our roof because we've got a compost up there. It makes more sense of you having a roof garden. I thought you were sort of opening up the window and just like throwing apple cores out into this bin not by your chimney.

Yeah, you're right. It's a funny thing. I didn't paint the picture. But the other thing, of course, you've rightly pointed out, which is, is that anyone with a small bit of space in a city or out or in a house, if you've got one in a garden, you can really help biodiversity and have a lot of pleasure growing stuff. And the two go together, right? People who grow stuff have compost generally,

because there are two sides of the same coin. If you look after the soil and make new soil, then you'll have amazing flowers and veg. And loads of insects will then thrive, and birds will thrive and bees will thrive. So the whole thing is just a good thing. So just to circle back to compostable plastics, what is it about compostable plastics

that means they will break down in certain conditions whatever plastics don't? Well, compostable plastics don't. Well, compostable plastics are made of long-chained molecules. So plastics are long-chain carbon molecules, so polyethylene, polypropylene. So the stuff of a plastic bag, the stuff of a tub you get in a tray of a supermarket holding your tomatoes. These materials are millions of atoms long-tray carbon molecules.

Their properties give it this lightweight, so they're carbon base, they're very lightweight, they're very flexible, they're very cheap to make. So they have great properties and they're inert. So there's not many things that eat them. But you can make long chain plastics out of things that microbes like to eat, not the polyethylene and the polypropylene, but other ones like PLA. And PLA is a molecule that has side chains, that bacteria and microbes have enzymes.

So these are sort of molecular mechanisms for eating things, which will break them up. So they are much more amenable to being eaten by the available microbes already out there. They will be. But you have to create the right conditions. You have to create the right temperature, the right humidity, and you have to give them, you don't want lack of oxygen. So in this case, you've got to make sure there's a good supply of oxygen.

If you can make that happen in your home compost and do it reliably over winter and summer, of course, the thing is in the winter, the temperature plummet. And if you're not careful, all that activity will stop. And if you keep putting compostable plastics into your compost bin while the temperature is too low, it'll just stay there. It won't be eaten by anything. And this is one of the issues, right, which is who can do that? Who's got the skills in their home to maintain the temperature?

Because are we talking about heating it up? No, we're not. We're talking about having enough biomass that it's creating its own heat. And that requires skill and care. And to be honest, most people don't do that. So if someone gives you a home compostable plastic and you just think, well, I could just sling it to my compost and just leave it. Well, our experiments show that that doesn't work. So we did something called the big compost experiment. It's a citizen science experiment where we got

thousands of people over the whole country to compost certified home compostable plastic. So not stuff that makes other claims, which we knew would never work. But this is stuff that is certified home compost for. And even then, 60% of that did not compost in their home compost in the timeframes that they wanted them to do. And that's because we came to the conclusion that their home composting practice just wasn't up to the job. So it's a very uncertain way to do things. And in reality, if you were to home compost all the plastic that comes into your life,

your back garden would just be a mound of plastic. I mean, you just wouldn't have the facility. So it doesn't seem to us that home composting the plastic in your life is ever going to work. What the best thing is, is that if you're going to go down the compostable route, is you go for industrial composting plastic, and you actually have an arrangement with an industrial compost who comes and picks it up and then does it for you. And of course, that sounds easy to say, but it's hard in practice to happen. And if it doesn't happen, well, then the plastic is just going to go in the bin and it's going to end up in landfill or get

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Well, there are some areas where they are going to hopefully deal with some of the big, some of some problems, but in general, they are not, the whole area of compostability and biodegradability is actually, as you probably gather from what I'm saying, probably only going to deal with some particular products. So I'll give an example, tea bags, right? 100 million tea bags are made in the UK every day and drunk every day. well, they brewed every day, right? Now, until recently, they had polypropylene in them, generally, which was a binder, a glue to keep the paper together and make sure it didn't split when you made

your cup of tea. When people found out about that, they realized that a lot of these tea bags were just going into landfill and therefore they were putting plastic in the lava. They were really appalled. So there was a big outcry, and the manufacturers have mostly moved to biodegradable plastics as the binder, which doesn't make it any better unless those tea bags end up going to an industrial composter, right? So you've got to make sure everything works. But in the case of tea bags, I think they're a really good solution, hopefully, in this country and maybe in globally.

So that's an example where you can't really separate the food waste from the packaging, and therefore they need to move together and need to go to the same place. But in most other situations, like, you know, you get some delivery of, some gadget and it comes plastic packed. You don't want it to be home compostable or you don't want it to be industrial compostable because actually you want it to be recyclable. You want that packaging to go into the recycling infrastructure because people all have recycling infrastructure.

You want the people who manage that to manage it responsibly and make new package packaging. So now you have a loop where you're not relying on some biological organisms and to work out how to get this thing to work. You've actually got an infrastructure. of recycling that is in place. There is a collection every week, right? Use it. So do you think in that way buying sort of recycle packaging and then recycling that is better than buying compostable packaging and then trying to compost it? Well, as I say, unless, oh, there are some situations where food and the packaging are so well aligned that they're always going to have to travel together.

And then it, you know, there's a lot of work going on, but they might, compostable packaging might be the right answer. But in general, 99% or 95% of the plastic problem, as I see it, needs to be solved in two ways. One is better recycling, which is not good enough at the moment. But we need to put money into it. We need to all get behind it. We really, really do. But more importantly than that, I'm afraid, is less packaging. That's the real answer. It's always better. Because otherwise you're just moving one material for another. They say, oh, I want to package this material, but I'm not. I don't want to seem bad.

So I'm going to call it biodegradable or compostable. But as I sort of talked about, like, that in itself doesn't solve the problem. And only if it's treated in very careful ways, will that solve the problem. But a much better way to solve it, it's just don't use up the world's resources to making any packaging at all, right? Okay. And that then reduces your consumption as a person because there's less packaging associated with all the things you buy. And the company wins. It's less costly for them.

It's less costly for you. So costs come down, which is what we all want. Environmental impact comes down. We all want. The answer should always be. The first solution should always be. Can we just not use this packaging? And I'll give an example of where we've actually made that happen.

So when the plastic waste crisis hit, we suddenly saw lots of magazines that were sent in the post with polythene wrapping around them, suddenly coming through the door with something said, compostable, 100% compostable on him. And these were compostable plastics. But we then approached the company that said, but that's

also using up resources and most of that plastic is never going to get composted. So that's no net gain to the environment. Why don't you send the magazines without packaging at all? Like, you'll save money and the environment wins. And they

start to agree, right? So the Guardian stopped doing it. the national film theatre stopped doing it because you can just print the address on the outside of the magazine it's not that hard the organisation needs to get into its head that actually reducing your impact on the planet is the environmental thing to do

so you mentioned tea bags before actually being a lot worse in the environment than people realised are there any other common materials or objects that might appear to be compostable or biodegradable but actually are Well, I think the example of the straw is a really good one in this case because it's another example of trying to do something about plastic waste problem, moving to a different material. So plastic straws were seen to be problematic, sold by the billion every day, definitely ending up in the environment, definitely harming the environment. Right. Government says, we're going to ban them, boom, ban them.

Paper straws come in. Everyone's like, hooray, we did something for the environment. Aren't we great? well apart from the fact you're now using loads of wood from forests which need to stay there because of carbon capture and making paper that you didn't into these new straws but the other thing is that the paper straws papers actually absorbs water so in order to make paper straws work and not to be just really annoying and dysfunctional you have to put some sort of water repellent on them okay so you're putting an additive onto them okay alarm bells what is that one what is it oh it turns out

These are fluorocarbons that are now being used. What are fluorocarbons? These are called forever chemicals. These things are brilliant. They're sort of things that end up on. Let's what make your pans non-stick. If you put them in the environment by using a paper straw and then it ends up in landfill or in a river or a thing,

well, guess what? The paper does dissolve. It is eaten by bacteria over time. But the forever chemicals are forever in the environment. And they're building up now. And they're in your blood. They're in everyone's blood. We've worked that out now.

In fact, they're probably moving across these kind of food-related items anyway. So it's not just coming from the environment. It's coming from you sucking the straw. So we're in this situation where we're like, we wanted to maintain our lifestyle by being able to buy a soda with a straw. And it doesn't seem like it, it seems like an innocent pleasure. I agree. Times it by billions.

And you make another straw that's no better, in my view. What should we do? You say, well, you're a killjoy. Don't you want people to have straws? I do want people to have straws. And here's the answer. At home anyway, or in a cafe, it's easy or a pub. You just have a stainless steel straw.

They exist on the thing. They'll be cheaper in the long run because you're not constantly having to buy new ones. You just wash them. You put in the dishwasher. They'll last your whole lifetime. They'll last your kid's lifetime. They'll last your grand. You'll be able to hand your stainless steel straw over to your grandchildren.

So they'll last. And all they require some cleaning. Then you say, oh, no. But hold on a minute. The biggest market for straws is not home. use or cafe use or pub use. The biggest market for straws is the fast food industry. Who can order a burger without ordering a soda or milkshake without a straw? It's madness. You're an idiot. Answer. Okay. So when are we going to be able to say to ourselves, do you know what? Maybe

disposability itself is just not something we can afford right now. Like maybe we need to give up a few things. Is that okay? Are there only sort of hindlights there? Like, do you think, think that there's any exciting recent developments in the world of biodegradability, or is it simply we just need to stop using these materials? Well, I think, I think two things. So the biodegradability world, I think there's some very innovative companies in there, and I don't want them to stop innovating. I just want them to be a bit more calm down on the claims they're making for being sustainable when I don't think most of them are yet. And there are areas, like I gave tea bags as an example where we do need innovation to maintain something that I think,

you know, everyone loves a cup of tea, tea bags are going nowhere. And actually, I think we can make them fully environmentally, well, not harmless, but very, very low harm. So I think that's an area where we have glues of things that are bound together where biodegradability really can be made to work. There's another area which we're working on, which I'll give an example of, which is that we're going to need to plant a lot more trees over the next two decades to reforest the world because that's a good carbon capture way, a method. But at the moment, if you plant saplings, the standard way of planting saplings is to do it with a tree guard, which is plastic, and they then stay in place for two or three years until the tree becomes

mature and able to resist predators, and then the tree guard is no longer needed, but it's very rarely taken out of the environment. So if you agree that we're going to plant a 2 billion trees in this country, which is the plan, that's 2 billion tree guards made a plastic that are going to end up in the environment. Now, that's bad. We don't want that. But also, if you take the tree guards away from the situation, you're going to lose a lot of the trees right early on. That's also bad.

So dilemma, answer, there's been lots of biodegradable work in this area. Like what you really want, the ideal material as we see it, and we've got projects in this area, is a material that's as good as normal plastic, i. completely inert, doesn't break down, nothing likes to eat it, completely protects the sapling for two or three years. And then when the tree is mature, it detects the hormones from the tree and it understands, okay, this tree can stand its own two feet now. And that then causes the plastic to biode completely in situ, then releases fertilizer, which was bound up in the tree guard before and gives the tree an extra boost. Now, that's the kind of project I feel that we need,

actually. That's really interesting. Are there any of sort of big innovations like that you're really excited about? So usually, usually the ones I think that are worth working on are not ones that are going to replace disposable item with another disposable item for consumer use. It's more about you can't get this back out of the environment very easily. And yet it's doing a good job there. So, So I'm not talking about sort of plates and knives and forks and things like that, which we have very good reusable alternatives for. But it's more things like in marine environments, there are places where you might want to have plastic that is doing a really good job, but we'll have a particular lifespan and then ends up as waste. And we would like that last bit not to happen.

We'd like that last bit not to happen, but we can't control how it gets collected. So we want that material to be benign. If you think about the whole of the maritime sector, there's huge amounts of plastic in the maritime sector in fisheries. So is it possible that a net that is currently used for fishing, which when it gets discarded because it gets stuck, is then just a menace and a terrible blight on all biodiversity in the sea, is it possible it could know that, oh my God, I'm now no longer part of the fishing process, so I'm now going to biodegrade. I'm going to I'm going to go under program biodegrading. So I think there's some really interesting areas which are current problems, which we don't

know how to solve. But I think the area of kind of consumerism, biodegradability as a solution for our consumerists, I don't see it being important at all. For instance, I've seen biodegradable phone cases. I mean, it's crazy. Like, that is not a solution to anything, right? How can a material effectively be programmed like that to sort of know when it needs to be breaking down? Well, this is the new frontier of material science. This is the area I work in.

We have examples in the natural environment where that happens, right? There's plenty of things that at the end of their life are programmed to die. Like, we have cells in our own body that are programmed to die. And then, once they start to release the enzymes that make the cell disintegrate, we have all sorts of other mechanisms that then use the nutrients and then build us healthier. So that's actually how ecosystems work, actually. So it's not like it's not against the laws of physics or chemistry. So the reason we're not doing it in our own materials where this functionality would be very helpful,

because a lot of the time we want things to last a long time. But actually, they get damaged along the way, and we want them to know they're damaged. And then if they can repair themselves, great, let's repair them. they can repair themselves. So this is called a whole class of material called animate materials which are being developed. And they exist. So there are materials that self-heel already. And you're seeing them in paints for automotive now.

These are the technologies where you're basically making products last longer because they self-repair. But the end game is also not just they self-repair along the way and last longer. But there's always going to be a point in everything's life where it's over and needs to be replaced. and then we also want to program into it the ability to disintegrate. That was Mark Madovnik, Professor of Material Science at University College London, and author of Stuff Matters. If you're interested in hearing more about smart materials, check out the previous episode in our Sustainability series.

But for now, thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as your preferred app store. You can of course also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

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