Plastic Alternatives

Scientists around the world are developing innovative and exciting new alternatives to plastic. There are now ways that we can wrap, carry, and preserve our products just as we always have, but without damaging the Earth.

Nearly 400 million tonnes of plastic waste gets into air, water and soil every year.

The TeamSeas Robot works at cleaning up this plastic pollution in the ocean , and plastic-eating bacteria is being developed to clean plastic waste up on land.  But the fact is that these solutions don’t target the source. They can only be so effective if plastic keeps being thrown into the environment.

In comes plastic alternatives.

What Are Plastic Alternatives?

Plastic alternatives are materials that replace traditional plastics. There are dozens of plastic alternatives, and they can all be categorized in two ways: traditional plastic alternatives and innovative plastic alternatives.

Traditional plastic alternatives have been used for centuries and became ubiquitous with plastic use; whereas innovative plastic alternatives are new and compete with plastic as a more sustainable alternative.

Here are the top 5 genius plastic alternatives that—while new and expensive—can help save the planet by reducing plastic pollution.

Zerocircle: Plastic Alternatives from Seaweed

Seaweed has been protecting the ocean since long before human beings have been wandering the world. It only seems logical to let it keep doing that. That’s what entrepreneur Neha Jain figured when she founded Zerocircle in 2020.

Seaweed is an easily renewable resource available in most of the oceans of the world. They provide as much as 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere and play a vital role in the health of our planet.

Zerocircle uses these plants to develop and distribute an exciting seaweed-based plastic alternative. It quickly dissolves back into water and soil, leaving no harmful chemicals behind.

WasteBased: Plastic Alternatives from Hydropol

Easily one of the biggest challenges in the battle against plastic pollution is the everyday plastic shopping bag. Wastebased, a UK-based startup has introduced an answer to that problem.

Item Bag 2.0 “… is no ordinary bag,” says their website. “It will dissolve in fresh or saltwater and leave no microplastics behind. It’s also biodegradable, non-toxic, and carbon negative.” It also dissolves in boiled water leaving no harmful chemicals behind.

Rather than the usual chemicals and polymers that traditional shopping bags are made of—like forever chemicals—Item Bag 2.0 is made from Hydropol. This biodegradable bioplastic is similar to the material used to coat dishwasher or laundry pods. Presently, it’s being manufactured from fossil fuels, but they can also be made from renewable resources such as sugar cane. Wastebased is currently working toward making the switch.

Plastic Alternatives from Potatoes

Another great idea is coming from a man at Lund University in Sweden. It’s a plastic alternative made of just potato starch and water. The potato plastic decomposes within only two months of landing in the environment. That’s a huge improvement over the 500 years it takes traditional plastics to break down.

Pontus Tornqvist, the developer of the material, took it one step further. The plastic not only breaks down quickly, but because it’s made of potato material, it actually nourishes the soil it lands in. As Pontus puts it, it’s just better to use the waste we’re already creating than to make new waste.

Ecovative: Plastic Alternatives from Mushrooms

Ecovative is a company that specializes in making packaging out of mushroom material which they grow in their own facility. They create a packaging solution with the natural binding properties of the roots of mushrooms. The solution, known as Mushroom Packaging, can be added to the compost heap to biodegrade safely and quickly into the Earth. More than that, the fungus content of the material will nourish the soil around it.

Paptic: Plastic Alternatives from Wood Fibres

Finland has another good idea about innovative plastic alternatives. Paptic is a growing company that uses a plastic, paper, and canvas alternative made from wood fibers.

They use only forests that produce more trees than they need and with careful attention to biodiversity and the natural world. The resulting product is reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable. It’s already been commercially available for several years.

Wood fiber plastic is used to make a wide variety of sturdy products including bags, food packaging, and mailers. This plastic alternative is likely to be stronger than that of plant-based alternatives.

Are Plastic Alternatives Better for the Environment?

Traditional plastic alternatives like paper, wood, and glass are heavier than plastic and release more greenhouse emissions during production. This increase in GHG emissions make traditional plastic alternatives worse for the environment than plastic. However, some innovative plastic alternatives like seaweed have natural elements that break down in the environment over time. This makes bioplastic alternatives better for the environment because it reduces plastic pollution.

The only problem is that bioplastics remain expensive to produce. This makes it difficult to gather the data needed to understand how much GHG they emit during production, and whether it is less than plastic alternatives.

Why Are Bioplastic Alternatives Expensive?

Many bioplastic alternatives are plant-based. They are made from materials that don’t just require processing like traditional plastic, but that also require growing and harvesting. Moreover, they are not widely available, and their scarcity in comparison to plastic further raises their price. All of these factors— including that they are also new—make bioplastic alternatives expensive.

Bioplastic Alternatives Are Increasing

Research and development is the key to making Bioplastics widely used. If renewable energy has taught us anything, its that things become less expensive as we continue to use them because we get better at producing them. While bioplastic make up less than 1% of the plastic currently used, its production and refinement is increasing every year.

The global production capacity of bioplastics increased to 2.6 Billion metric tons in 2024, a 22% increase from 2023. This number is expected to quadruple in 2025. If this happens, it will be the biggest yearly increase in bioplastic production ever.

Drawbacks of Plastic Alternatives

There are some challenges for adopting many of these alternatives to plastics.

• GHG Emission: Plant-based plastic alternatives require growing and harvesting in addition to manufacturing. These added layers to the production process may increase GHG emissions.
• Inefficient Production: Many innovative plastic alternatives, like seaweed, require manual processing. This takes up a lot of time and adds to the cost.

• Pesticides: Plastic alternatives made from plant materials carry with them the risk of pesticide contamination. This is something that could be remedied using AI agricultural robots in the future.
  
• Methane: Bio-based plastics alternatives are not entirely biodegradable. They are only partly made from bio-materials. When these alternatives get thrown in landfills, they can produce methane which will aggravate the global warming problem. However, this is also true of traditional plastic.
  
• Higher Cost: Some bioplastics cost 20% to 50% more to produce than traditional plastics making them financially unsustainable.
  

There is no perfect solution to plastic pollution, but the development of all these possible plastic alternatives is inspirational and brings with it some amazing innovations for the future. It’s only a matter of time before we find the best solutions to plastic pollution.