Article published in Italian on X.com by Marco Astorri, founder and former CEO of Bio-on, and translated into English by ChatGPT.
Enough with the tambourines. The real way out is called PHA.
Acqua Vera sells water in PET. Corepla manages the corpse of that PET. In Palermo, they hand Jovanotti a “recycled” tambourine and call it the future.
It is not the future.
It is a refusal to ask the real question: which material needs to disappear from the supply chain, and what should replace it?
Recycling PET absolves no one. PHA, by contrast, points in the opposite direction: instead of circulating a fossil-based molecule forever, make it disappear when it ends up where it should not.
Recycling is the religion of those who do not want to change polymer.
PET, virgin or recycled, remains PET. Hundreds of years in the sea, microplastics, bottle-to-bottle recycling that in Italy is only a fraction of the total, while the rest is downcycling — exactly like these tambourines: from a food-grade bottle to a giveaway rattle.
Two thousand pieces, one stage, four charities used as a shield. The single-use bottled-water industry buys itself an indulgence and goes straight back to filling supermarket shelves.
The press release says, “from one bottle, new material is born.”
A useful lie.
What is born is the same polymer, only further degraded, contaminated by successive cycles, further removed from food-grade use, and closer to the residual-waste bin once the child breaks it.
What is PHA, without the brochure?
Polyhydroxyalkanoates are not reformatted petroleum. They are produced by bacteria as carbon-storage materials, using sugars, waste oils, agro-industrial residues and, in some facilities, even CO₂-derived feedstocks.
It is a biosynthetic polyester: nature already has the enzymes needed to break it down.
It does not require an industrial composting facility in the way PLA does, which in the sea and in landfill behaves like conventional plastic. PHA, in soil, sludge, freshwater and marine environments, can be attacked by microbial depolymerases and converted back into CO₂, water and biomass.
Timescales measured in months, not centuries.
This is not “breaking into invisible little pieces.”
It is metabolism.
For a company selling bottles, and for a consortium whose existence revolves around packaging, this is precisely the wrong material to mention. Because if the object can genuinely degrade in the real world, the comforting excuse of “dispose of it properly and sleep well” starts to collapse.
Why rPET tambourines are the wrong solution even when they “work.”
A tambourine is the kind of object that gets dropped, soaked, dirtied, lost in a field or washed into a ditch.
Made from rPET, it becomes permanent waste with a handle.
Made from PHA, it could be an object that, if it escapes the waste-management system, does not become a lasting relic.
That is the only metric that really matters for a festival gadget: what happens when the system fails — and the system always fails somewhere. That is what systems do.
Using food-grade PET to make an instrument is also a waste of material quality.
PHA can be used for films, moulded products, composites and components intended for humid and marine environments. In Italy, work has already been carried out on PHA biocomposites combined with Posidonia fibres that disappeared within months in marine mesocosm experiments.
That is a laboratory focused on the Mediterranean.
Corepla’s tambourine is a public-relations laboratory.
The price is high. The alternative is pretending.
Today, PHA costs more than PET: fermentation, extraction and production volumes that remain relatively small.
Anyone who uses that fact to end the discussion is effectively saying: better an eternal, cheap material, provided we can photograph the yellow recycling bin.
That is the same logic that filled the planet with packaging.
PET is “cheap” because it pushes part of its cost onto the next century.
The serious path is not the gadget.
It is:
remove PET from applications that are single-use and inherently prone to leakage — caps, thin films, event products, fishing applications and agriculture;
use PHA where leakage is statistically inevitable;
and, for water, the answer is neither the tambourine nor a bottle that is merely “partly recycled”: it is reuse, refill systems and infrastructure, cans where single-use packaging is necessary, and only as a last resort a container that, if it escapes, does not persist indefinitely.
As long as Acqua Vera and Corepla finance rPET rattles, they are buying more time for the wrong polymer.
PHA does not need Jovanotti.
It needs scale, waste streams as feedstock, and regulations that stop treating “recyclable in theory” as equivalent to “harmless in practice.”
Do it now, for real.
Doing it now does not mean throwing the bottle into the tour’s oversized recycling bag.
Doing it now means stopping calling a material circular when, in nature, it does not circulate.
The recycled-PET tambourine is a reliquary: the sin is transformed into a relic and put on display.
PHA is the material proposition that does not require every citizen to behave perfectly for eternity.
Two thousand tambourines do not shift even a kilogram of the underlying problem.
A supply chain that replaces leak-prone PET with a bacterial polyester could.
The rest is music.
And this time, the music is drowning out the sound of the plastic that remains.