Researchers turning food waste into biodegradable plastic (video)

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Personal remarks

Turning food waste (kitchen waste) into plastics may not be wisest idea ever come up with:

• the food waste collection is highly contaminated with other kind of waste (Capital of Europe says no to compostable bags and packaging) and will cost a lot of ressources to decontaminate the waste.
• food waste … when collected separately … is actually used to create compost or fertiliser, so there will be pressure on the compost supply chain because you need a lot of food waste to create enough plastic
• It’s a highly expensive and complex process to convert food waste into plastics; while using it for compost is a simple process.
• It’s about money and it’s a business model …. researchers and industry receive lots of funding from the EU and other agencies to come up with those kind of brilliant ideas. That money could have been used to collect litter (waste in the open environment) for instance

Refs

Researchers turning food waste into biodegradable plastic