Conventional plastics have excellent properties – they are strong, impermeable to liquids and gases, easy to process into complex forms and they are inexpensive. They are reusable and can be recycled. They are ideal for single use applications such as packaging but, because of their chemical inertness, they persist in the environment for a long time when they are discarded. Oxo-biodegradable technology allows for the retention of all of these good properties and it accelerates the rate at which these products return to the ecosystem when they are ultimately discarded in one of the following ways:
Landfills: Despite a desire to prevent biological activity in landfills, it happens. This is evidenced by the many landfills that recover (some of the) methane gas that is produced. A high proportion of plastic carrier bags are reused to contain organic waste. These are placed in landfills and the waste eventually (over many years) is biodegraded into methane, a particularly harmful greenhouse gas. When oxo-biodegradable bags are used, they degrade and disintegrate relatively quickly (over a few months) and allow the organic waste that they contain to biodegrade near the top of the landfill where there is more oxygen available. This reduces the rate at which valuable landfill space is used up and leads to the formation of carbon dioxide, 24 times less harmful than methane.
Litter: These bags will not solve the problem of litter – this is a behavioural problem, easily solved by a solid wrap along side the head! Ooops...was that out loud?. They are, however, a part of the management of its accumulation. Oxo-biodegradable bags will degrade within a few months when they are littered and they will disappear.
Compost: A study done by the Centre de Recherches Industrielles du Quebec (CRIQ) in 2002 (http://www.oxobio.org/criq_en.pdf ) found that organic wastes that were composted in oxo-biodegradable plastic bags made high quality compost. The bags disappeared and contributed to the organic content of the compost.
