Every so often, a corporate announcement gets under my skin. (I’m guessing, dear reader, this sort of thing never happens to you.) The latest culprit: Bacardi unveiled a bioplastic bottle that can biodegrade in compost systems, freshwater and oceans in 18 months. Bacardi is calling its initiative "a silver bullet in the fight against plastic pollution."
Respectfully, I’m calling it B.S.
First and foremost, context is queen. With limited global composting infrastructure, the likelihood that a theoretically biodegradable bottle will be composted in practice is low. Next, layer in the reality that industrial composters don’t actually want bioplastics contaminating their organics streams (unless they can increase the nutrient-rich food waste entering into the facility). Now, add into the mix that compostable bioplastics often look identical to recyclable bioplastics (not to mention their resemblance to recyclable and non-recyclable, petroleum-based plastics), compounding consumer confusion and leading to more bottles in the wrong bins.
For these reasons, and many others, bioplastics can often create more problems than solutions.
Don’t get me wrong: Perfection can’t be the enemy of the good. (It’s also worth noting that plastic makes up less than 1 percent of Bacardi’s packaging.) But we’re left with the unfortunate acknowledgment that Bacardi is designing bottles to end up in waterways and oceans rather than investing in infrastructure to prevent marine plastics in the first place.
If companies such as Bacardi indeed want to work towards more sustainable and circular systems, it’s incumbent upon them to invest in materials innovations, along with the enabling infrastructure for them to succeed.
What irked me most about the Bacardi story is that there are, of course, no silver bullets. Even writing that sentence makes me cringe at its cliché, as I’m sure anyone working in sustainability or circularity would agree.
Plastic pollution is a complex, systemic challenge that is produced and reproduced by disconnected design decisions, short-sighted business models, insufficient infrastructure, patchwork policy and misinformed consumer behavior, to name a few of the culprits.
In my opinion, the material itself is not the crux of the problem — nor can it be the "silver bullet" of the solution. Complex problems require a suite of diverse solutions — silver buckshot, as the cliché goes.
