The Gray Lady may someday arrive at your doorstep inside a "green" plastic bag.
A company that makes delivery bags for The New York Times and other major newspapers has designed a plastic bag to biodegrade within three months.
GP Plastics' PolyGreen bags are made with fossil fuels, as are their traditional polyethylene counterparts.
However, a chemical added during manufacturing enables the plastic to be digested by microorganisms. The bags are supposed to disintegrate within a few months outdoors or three years in a landfill when exposed to oxygen and ultraviolet light, leaving behind little but water, carbon dioxide, organic metals, and salts.
The nontoxic, active ingredient speeding up the degradation includes a metal such as cobalt, according to Willow Ridge Plastics. It makes PDQ-H, an additive that enables PolyGreen's oxo-biodegradable plastic to be eaten by microbes.
GP Plastics each year sells some $100 million in plastics that include sleeves that shield newspapers in soggy weather. Customers include The New York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe and other newspapers published by Tribune, Gannett, McClatchy, and Newhouse News Service.
Each year U.S. newspapers use 7 billion plastic delivery bags, according to the Dallas-based GP Plastics. When discarded, unfortunately, plastic breaks down into ever-tinier molecules, polluting ecosystems and harming the health of animals and humans.
"If you only saw some of the hate mail we get from people saying, 'Your product is clogging the landfills and waterways,'" said Mike Skinner, GP Plastics' chief financial officer. "Well, we're working as fast as we can on this. I don't think this will be the final answer, but it's a step in the right direction."
When San Francisco last March became the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags in supermarkets, GP Plastics protested. It and other plastics makers promoted bag recycling. However, only about 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled even in that city. The companies got to work building greener bags.
GP Plastics says its new newspaper sleeves cost only a fraction of a penny more than non-biodegradable ones.
Hilex Poly Company in Hartsville, S.C., announced last month that its new HED grocery bags will biodegrade in as little as eight weeks. In Britain, Symphony Environmental Limited's D2W plastic, like that of GP and Hilex, includes an additive to accelerate biodegradation.
Companies including BioBags have made biodegradable, compostable plant-based plastic bags for garbage and yard waste for many years. However, plastic bags made from corn tend to break down too quickly to keep a newspaper dry, if flung into a puddle.
Yet some environmental groups suspect that the rise of bioplastics will only add to pollution and global warming. They frown upon growing genetically modified corn for plastics and worry that, as with harvesting plants for biofuels, food supplies will become scarcer as a result.
And some watchdogs contend that chemical additives designed to make petroleum-based plastics degrade may prove in the long run to harm ecosystems. They are suspicious that the companies don't disclose the exact ingredients in their additives.
"There is no such thing as biodegradable plastics," said Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation in Costa Mesa, Calif., which campaigns against plastic pollution.
"They're still using petroleum, which is the No. 1 cause of global warming. What other kinds of chemicals are they putting in those plastic bags? If they're saying salts and metals, well metals are damaging in high quantities."
Barger would prefer that people tote reusable bags, which are becoming chic in some circles (and nearly ubiquitous in Ireland). And how to keep newspapers dry? She suggests separate mailboxes.
GP Plastics unveiled its biodegradable bags this weekend at the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla.
It's a fact of life in China that just about anything comes in a little plastic bag. That's all about to change: In what all reports are calling a surprise move, the central government has banned (translated) ultra-thin plastic bags and will require regular bags to be sold with a clearly marked price starting June 1.
This demonstrates the way the government can simply declare an end to a technology for environmental reasons, even a 1950s technology like plastic bags. Whether enforcement will actually end plastic bags is not something I care to guess about.
The key here is to understand what an ultra-thin plastic bag is. Coming from the United States, where the question "paper or plastic" is a cultural institution, I was used to thicker bags. These are problematic enough for the environment, and several cities, countries, and stores. The plastic from these bags deteriorates into microscopic particles, but it does not bio-degrade, resulting in the gradual dispersion of tiny plastic particles throughout the world's oceans.
The bags subject to the ban are even thinner than what I was used to--less than 0.025mm thick. I first encountered them when buying jīanbǐng (煎饼), often known as Chinese crepes or Chinese pancakes, at a university convenience store. Once the 25-cent treat was ready to eat, the cook slipped it in a tiny sack, and I walked off to savor my junk food. These bags started accumulating in my trash bin. Fried noodles came in them, as did roasted nuts, baked goods, and fruit, among other things. I can only imagine that these ultra-thin bags deteriorate faster than the stronger ones.
There's even some hope that the pay-for-bags structure may make the sort of biodegradable bags used at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 appealing to more people. At the very least, one hopes the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will deal with waste gracefully.
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