Ban it, restrict it, replace it wherever possible: for decades, the world has been trying to curb conventional plastic. And yet it keeps coming back. The case of Bangladesh shows why the real challenge is not simply to reduce its use, but to find materials capable of performing the same functions without leaving the same environmental legacy. This is where PHA deserves to return to the centre of the debate.
There is a fact, apparently local, that should prompt reflection far beyond the borders of Bangladesh. A recent article published by Sicilianews24, entitled “Bangladesh’s Packaging Law Fails to Curb the Spread of Plastic Compared with Jute,” describes a contradiction that is as simple as it is significant.
Bangladesh has a natural, traditional and abundant raw material: jute. And it also has a law. The 2010 jute packaging law requires 19 essential products, including rice, wheat and fertilisers, to be packaged using jute. And yet plastic continues to advance.
According to Sicilianews24, despite the legal requirement, the penetration of plastic packaging and synthetic fibres continues to grow. One of the problems is extremely practical: availability. When jute sacks become scarce or more expensive, producers and users return to synthetic packaging.
The case of Bangladesh therefore tells us something much bigger than the story of plastic versus jute. It shows how difficult it is to stop conventional plastic simply through legislation.
Plastic Occupies Every Space We Leave Open to It
The history of recent decades should have taught us one thing: plastic did not become dominant by accident.
It is cheap. It is lightweight. It is durable. It is easy to process. It can become an ultra-thin bag, a rigid container, a film, a fibre, an industrial component or a coating.
Above all, an enormous global industrial system has developed around plastic.
And it is precisely this combination that makes it so difficult to replace.
We can ban a bag. We can require another material to be used for certain applications. We can improve separate waste collection. We can increase recycling.
All of these measures are necessary.
But whenever the alternative material is too expensive, unavailable in the quantities required or unable to deliver certain performance characteristics, conventional plastic tends to reclaim that space.
That is exactly what makes the case reported by Sicilianews24 so interesting.
The law exists. The alternative exists. The political will exists.
And plastic continues to be used anyway.
The Problem Is Not Just How Much We Produce. It Is What We Leave Behind
This is perhaps the most important point.
For more than half a century, we have designed materials primarily around their function during use. They had to be durable. Cheap. Waterproof. Easy to process.
We devoted far less attention to a very basic question:
What happens to that material when it is no longer needed?
And this is precisely where the paradox of conventional plastic emerges.
A characteristic that is extraordinarily useful during its use — its persistence — can become its main environmental problem once that use is over.
A bag that needs to last for only a few hours or a few days can leave traces in the environment for periods enormously longer than the function for which it was produced.
It is this disproportion that we need to start seriously questioning.
We cannot continue designing billions of objects with extremely short useful lives using materials whose environmental persistence can be enormously longer.
What If We Changed the Question Instead?
Perhaps for decades we have been asking the wrong question.
We asked: how can we collect more plastic?
Then: how can we recycle more of it?
Then again: how can we prevent it from reaching the environment?
These are fundamental questions, but there is another one that should come first:
Can we produce materials that deliver the performance of plastic when needed, but that, if accidentally released into the environment, do not have the same persistence?
This is where PHA — polyhydroxyalkanoates — enter the picture.
PHA: Not Simply “Another Bioplastic”
PHA are a family of polyesters produced naturally by microorganisms.
Under certain conditions, some bacteria accumulate these polymers inside their cells as reserves of carbon and energy.
The biotechnology industry has learned to harness this natural mechanism through fermentation processes, producing materials that can be industrially processed for numerous applications.
But what makes PHA particularly interesting in the plastic debate is not simply their biological origin.
It is their end of life.
Scientific literature documents the biodegradability of various PHA materials in multiple natural environments, including soil, freshwater and marine environments, although degradation rates vary depending on the material, the thickness of the product and environmental conditions.
This point is fundamental.
Because being “bio-based” and being “biodegradable” do not necessarily mean the same thing.
A plastic can come from a renewable raw material and still be highly persistent.
The potential advantage of PHA is different: the possibility of designing, from the very beginning, what should happen to the material at the end of its useful life.
Bangladesh Is a Warning for Everyone
This is why the story of jute should also matter to Europe.
Bangladesh is demonstrating in very practical terms how difficult it is to fight an extremely competitive material simply by requiring its replacement.
When the alternative is unavailable, too expensive or does not arrive in time, the system returns to plastic.
And it is difficult to imagine that this dynamic applies only to Bangladesh.
Conventional plastic has become one of the material infrastructures of contemporary civilisation. Believing that we can rapidly eliminate it from billions of applications simply by banning it risks being unrealistic.
The real technological challenge may therefore be far more ambitious: not to eliminate the function of plastic, but progressively to eliminate the need for that function to be performed by persistently polluting materials.
Materials Must Also Be Designed With the Day After in Mind
This completely changes the perspective.
Recycling remains fundamental. Reuse remains fundamental. Reducing unnecessary packaging remains fundamental.
But no collection system will ever be perfect.
Some materials will inevitably continue to escape recovery systems. They will end up in soils. In rivers. On coastlines. In oceans.
And it is precisely for that fraction that we need to ask a different question:
What do we want to happen when the material escapes the system?
For conventional plastic, the answer is the problem we already see before our eyes.
For genuinely biodegradable materials such as certain PHA, the outlook can be radically different.
This does not mean that we can simply discard them into the environment. It does not mean abandoning collection or recycling.
It means introducing a new principle into material design: mistakes, leakage and end of life must also be considered when deciding what a product should be made from.
We Cannot Keep Chasing Plastic
The case of Bangladesh therefore contains a lesson far more important than it might initially appear.
We can chase plastic with bans, taxes, collection systems and new regulations.
We must do so.
But it probably will not be enough.
Because as long as conventional plastic remains the cheapest, most readily available and most functional material for an enormous range of applications, it will continue to find a way back.
The real revolution will come when an alternative material can compete not only environmentally, but also industrially, economically and in terms of performance.
That is the battle PHA still have to win: production scale, cost and applications.
But that is also why it would be a mistake to regard them as a marginal technology.
Scientific research in recent years continues to investigate and confirm their biodegradability in different natural environments, including marine environments.
And this introduces an extraordinary possibility.
A plastic designed not only to be created and perform its function, but also to disappear.
Perhaps the future will not be a world without plastic materials.
It could be something far more realistic and, precisely for that reason, far more revolutionary: a world in which we use the extraordinary properties of polymers without being forced to leave their persistence behind for future generations.
Bangladesh shows us how difficult it is to stop plastic.
PHA reminds us that perhaps we should not only try to stop it.
We should finally replace it with something designed not to remain forever.
astorri.eu
Source
Translated from Italian by ChatGPT