Are bioplastics really the wonder alternative to petro plastics?

You need your bioplastics to be produced from extant waste products that do not cannibalise other industries. So not from coir, which has a solid supply chain. You also don't want to steal from food products or take too much land, which will be stolen from agriculture or native forest.

Waste products that go to animal husbandry are a good source. As the meat trade winds down, you are maintaining the value of the waste in an alternate supply chain.

It's OK to require industrial composting, as long as people put it in green waste bins, not home composters. The problems begin when it isn't 100% organic or looks like real plastic and is removed from the process for fear that it is.

It is also important to recognise that there is no 'pure', zero impact solution. And maybe someone should check to see if our orbit is taking us a little closer to the sun than it used to. Because if it is, none of this will help.

Regardless of the above, we really need to be improving infrastructural resilience. Governments seem happier to look busy after extreme weather events rather than spend money building lagoons, reservoirs and fire resistance to deal with flood/drought cycles. If your government isn't improving resilience, replace them with a better one.

Yes, lots of snake oil out there on this topic. Apparently you can put old newspapers out of landfill which will still be readable if the landfill lacks the microorganisms and biomechanisms required to compost them. Many products sold as "biogradable" break down much slower than newspaper. The term "biodegradable" can simply mean "will degrade under ideal conditions". This would also apply to stuff noone considers biodegradable, like metal roofing.

This does not mean all eco stuff is nonsense and we shouldn't bother. It simply means "reduce", "reuse", and "recycle" are not equal and "recycle" is easily the worst of the three. The best is "reduce". An SUV that is far bigger (more materials, more tyre pollution) than a twenty year old car that carries the same number of people and uses more gasoline than it needs to is the antithesis of "reduce".

I think rather than obsessing about what materials are used as source, it would be more important to make sure the plastic is actually biodegradable into safe compounds. I.e. no toxic components like all the rare earths, cobalt, and nickel in things like batteries and solar panels.

"What alarms us is the speed at which China is advancing its legislation to convert its packaging to PLA, aiming to abandon petrochemical plastics, while Europe is stagnating," said Frederic Van Gansberghe, founder of Belgium-based bioplastics company Futerro, which has a factory in China and plans to open one in France in 2026.

China is in the lead, bioplastics not very beneficial