A European Bioplastics meta-study has shown that mixing up to 10% compostable plastics with conventional plastics in post-consumer recycling streams shows “no or negligible impact on the mechanical performance of the recyclates”.
According to the bioplastics industry body, in the event that compostable plastics end up in recycling streams, the sorting technologies currently available are capable of sorting them with “little residual waste”.
“Studies and field trials have demonstrated that in the uneventful case a small fraction of compostable plastics ends up in the PE recycle stream, this does in no way negatively impact the quality of the recycling stream,” says European Bioplastics (EuBP) chairman François de Bie.
The amounts remaining are, says de Bie, “easier to handle” than other residual wastes in the polyethylene (PE) stream such as polystyrene, or polypropylene.
This has been “proven up to a share of 10% compostable plastics in the recycling stream”, EuBP states, in independent studies at the Institute for Bioplastics and Biocomposites (University of Applied Arts and Sciences Hannover), the Italian National Packaging Consortium (CONAI) and the company BIOTEC.
Bioplastics are biobased, compostable or both, while biobased plastics films are described as “chemically identical” to their conventional counterparts and “easy to manage” in recycling streams.
Compostable plastics are designed for organic recycling and can be collected accordingly, EuBP says, being marked for this purpose with logos such as the Seedling.
Bioplastics are said to account for “less than 1% of the total global plastics usage” (The Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc., 2012), but while in 2012 production capacities amounted to approximately 1.4 million tonnes, EuBP market data forecasts this will multiply to more than 6 million tonnes by 2017.
