Bio boom
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Our economy is slowly but surely heeding the signal that carbon is the new watchword. During the past few years, a steady stream of so-called “biobased” products have been making their way to retail shelves — compostable dinnerware made from corn, plant-based laundry detergents, and bamboo flooring among them. Coke and Pepsi are now competing to be first to market with a soft drink bottle derived entirely from sugarcane or other plant materials.
The emerging biobased economy even has its own label — USDA Certified Biobased. It’s part of a federal BioPreferred program designed to help grow “green” jobs, stimulate the rural economy, promote energy independence and prompt a shift to renewable resources from petroleum, helping to manage the carbon cycle.
Launched in February 2011, the label needs a little introduction since the term “biobased,” although familiar-sounding, represents more than meets the eye. We advised the USDA on strategic marketing considerations related to the launch of the USDA Certified Biobased label. Here’s a primer — and why you need to be thinking about forming your own biobased strategy during 2012.
What is “Biobased”?
Ask a consumer what “biobased” means and they might respond with somewhat erroneous definitions such as “natural” “biodegradable” or “renewable.” Consult Webster and you’ll come up short. But the USDA (and federal law) defines it quite specifically as “commercial or industrial products, other than food or feed, that are composed in whole, or in significant part, of biological products or renewable agricultural materials (including plant, animal, and aquatic materials), or forestry materials” — hence the label depicting the soil, sea and the sun.
More important than this definition are the program's intentions — to expand the market for alternatives to petroleum-based products by promoting new uses for agricultural commodities such as bioplastics, biofibersand biobased chemicals. It thus excludes products such as office paper, cotton t-shirts and wooden furniture introduced before 1972. (See BioPreferred.gov for more details.)
Comments
Two things: first, this statement isn't quite correct: "..some traditional petroleum-based plastics are compostable in industrial (municipal) facilities, but not in backyard composters." The fact is, municipal composters can't distinguish a plastic--biobased or no--from any other products in the compost heap. Further, in may cases even municipal compost piles can't break down biodegradable plastics, forcing those compost operators to effectively screen out any plastic so as to not clog the system. It's a problem; we need better labeling of biodegradable plastics that actually DO biodegrade in municipal composting operations.
Second, many bio-based materials take "natural" materials and synthesize or break them down into so many components as to molecularly change the original material, often at substantial energy and water inputs. Bamboo-based plastics, for example, take more refining than some comparable petroleum products. So the bio-ness of a product does not necessarily indicate lower carbon emissions. We need more of an LCA-based approach that accounts for all fuel inputs and end-of-life options for products. How good is a bio-based product if you can't recycle or compost it when it's done? Take a compostable fork: they cost more and rely on heavy energy/water/otherwise food-based sources of inputs. If that fork is used and "composted" but ultimately ends up screened out and landfilled, it probably would have been better to just use a virgin plastic fork instead. Better yet... reuse metal forks. In short... biobased doesn't seem to be a silver bullet. The real solution is waste prevention. Reduce, reuse...
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