What is Biobased Plastic?

While 99% of new plastic production today derives from fossil fuels, BFA focuses on plastics made from plants. These are known as biobased plastics.

Biobased plastics offer all the valuable properties of conventional plastics, but are made from renewable materials. When sourced responsibly, they offer a more sustainable alternative to plastics made from fossil fuels.

As a society, our continued reliance on oil, natural gas, and coal has serious and lasting consequences for both human health and the health of the environment. Fossil resource extraction leads to greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion – until we break our dependence on fossil fuels, these negative impacts will continue to be a problem.

Biobased plastic represent an opportunity for positive change. We must ensure they are sourced responsibly, using principles that prioritize stewardship of natural resources and build resilience for nature and communities. Only then can we begin to realize and explore the full potential of biobased plastic.

Biobased ≠ Biodegradable

Biobased does not mean biodegradable. Whether a material is biodegradable, compostable, or neither is determined by its chemical structure, not the origin of the material from which it is made. Both fossil-based and biobased plastics can be biodegradable or compostable, depending on their specific structure.

Many biobased plastics are structurally identical to their common, fossil-based counterparts. These plastics, known as ‘drop-ins’, are therefore neither compostable nor biodegradable, and should be recycled in existing recycling systems. The sustainability benefits of drop-in biobased plastics occur at the beginning of the material life cycle.

While biodegradable plastic can be valuable in specific situations, it is not a solution to litter or marine debris. Natural conditions can be highly variable, thus impacting a material’s ability to biodegrade in a timely manner. Without a guaranteed timeframe to degrade, these materials will have the same negative environmental impacts on the environment as non-biodegradable plastic. This includes polluting habitats or harming wildlife through ingestion and entanglement.

Biodegradability does not support circularity unless biodegradable materials are recovered and processed by a system that can recapture their value. No plastic belongs in nature; compostability and biodegradability are only valuable when proper infrastructure and sufficient collection and recovery efforts can ensure these materials remain in the material management system, for example, through industrial composting or anaerobic digestion.

Compostable vs. Biodegradable

While both biodegradable and compostable plastics can break down over time, there are important differences between the two materials. Biodegradable plastic has the ability to break down completely within a reasonable time frame, but only if it encounters the correct enabling environmental conditions. Since nature does not have controlled conditions, it can never be guaranteed that biodegradable plastic will actually biodegrade as intended.

Compostable plastic, by contrast, is specifically designed and tested to be processed in either home or industrial composting facilities. Composting facilities create the specific temperature and moisture conditions that are needed for the plastic to turn into a usable soil conditioner.

For further clarification on compostable vs. biodegradable plastic, see Biodegradable Plastics Fact Sheet (PlasticsEurope) and Compostable Plastic Fact Sheet (CalRecycle).

BFA brings a science-based approach to the sourcing of bioplastic feedstocks