Plant-Based Plastics Gain Favour as Companies Pursue Sustainability Goals
Bioplastic production is growing at a record clip amid strong demand from fashion and food-packaging companies, in particular
4 min
The future is more plastic. Plant-based plastic, that is.
Plant-based plastics, or bioplastics, have accounted for just 1% of the world’s plastic production for well over a decade, according to a review of more than 100 companies by research organisation nova-Institute. Bioplastics haven’t taken off largely because they are typically 50% to 80% more expensive than traditional fossil-fuel-based plastics, but their production is now growing 14% a year, putting them on track to reach up to 3% of the plastics market in the next five years.
Bioplastics are expanding faster than recycled plastic in some cases, such as in Asian countries like China and Japan that are mandating more ecologically friendly materials, nova-Institute founder Michael Carus said. Even if global plastic recycling rates someday reach 70% compared with around 9% today, bioplastics alongside materials made from captured carbon dioxide will have a big role to play asthe world transitions away from fossil-fuel-based materials, he said.
“Not one of them can do it alone,” Carus said, referring to the sustainable materials that will drive the green transition.
Bioplastics’ benefits
Bioplastics are usually derived from plants rich in starch, sugar or pulp, such as corn, wheat, sugar cane, wood and cotton, which makes them costlier than plastics made from fossil fuels because crops need fertiliser and other resources such as water. However, the environmental benefits of plant-based plastics are increasingly appealing to companies promising to use more sustainable materials by the end of the decade.
Plants absorb the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, which cuts the greenhouse-gas emissions from making bioplastics to at least half that of fossil-fuel-based plastics. Bioplastics can also sometimes cause less pollution when they degrade in the environment.
Broadly, there are two types of bioplastics: Materials that have similar performance to plastic, such as pulp-derived cellulose acetate found in eyeglasses and textiles, and bioplastics that are chemically identical to conventional plastics, such as a polyethylene, polyester and nylon. Around half of today’s bioplastics are biodegradable, according to nova-Institute, meaning they break down more naturally and are less harmful to habitats. Still, many of these bioplastics require industrial composting facilities to degrade and aren’t designed to be thrown away in a home garden.
Some of the earliest adopters of bioplastics are fashion companies, including Lululemon, which has a goal to replace the majority of oil-based nylon with plant-based nylon by 2030. A big selling point for the sportswear company is using plants to make chemically identical nylon that can be easily switched in, but still cuts emissions by nearly half.
The strongest demand for bioplastics is currently from fashion and food-packaging companies, but interest is also rising from companies in cosmetics, electronics and more durable goods such as tools, Eastman Chemical’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Killian said.
Eastman, formerly a division of Kodak, earns more than $1 billion of its $10 billion or so in yearly sales from bioplastics made from cellulose acetate, a material it has produced for more than 70 years. Cellulose acetate, which Eastman makes from cotton linters and wood pulp, was first used in Kodak film in the company’s early days, but it is now expanding into packaging, textiles and other applications. In 2022, Eastman signed an agreement with Warby Parker for the material to be used in eyewear.
“It has a great deal of legs,” he said of the cellulose acetate-derived plastics.
Challenges ahead
Plant-based plastics remain a tough sell because fossil-fuel-based plastics are much cheaper, but prices could fall if companies continue to buy more bioplastics and governments encourage their use. This year, the Biden administration called on the federal government to assess the potential for biomaterials, including for plastics, fuels and medicines. And last year, the U.S. Defense Department said it would invest $1.2 billion in bio manufacturing. The European Union is also considering mandating bioplastics under packaging rules that are being discussed.
In the U.S., there is government support at the state and federal level to convert biological raw materials into fuels such as ethanol, but that level of support doesn’t yet exist for plant-based plastics, said Manav Lahoti, chemical giant Dow’s global sustainability director, olefins, aromatics and alternatives.
“The market is ready to take off on the demand side,” he said. “But to make the economics work, there is some regulatory support that is required.”
Another hurdle to scaling up bioplastics is what happens at their end of life. Only plant-based plastics that are chemically identical to fossil-fuel–based versions can enter the existing and growing recycling infrastructure. The world’s limited amount of feedstock, which often goes to feeding cattle and other livestock, also presents challenges to using more bioplastics.
One answer: turning agricultural waste into recyclable plastics.
This year, Dow struck an agreement with biomass refinery startup New Energy Blue to buy bioethylene made from the stalks and leaves of corn grown in Iowa. Dow will then make conventional and recyclable plastics from the material and sell to companies in transportation, footwear, and packaging.
Dow is already providing bioplastics for Crocs shoes and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s perfume packaging, and sees demand outstripping supply, said Haley Lowry, Dow’s global sustainability director for packaging and specialty plastics.
“We are trying to find more sources,” she said. “The demand from our customers is there; it’s really finding the sources of biofeed that makes sense.”
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For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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