Biodegradable or Bioassimulated definitions for Plastics

Posted on October 17, 2012 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste News

The FTC’s recent guidelines on labelling biodegradable plastics make sense I doubt anyone would say otherwise.   They are trying to stop manufacturers from greenwashing of their product labels to prevent misleading the consumer on how green their products are.   So how do we describe a plastic that will biodegrade in a landfill over many years.  (5,10 or even 20 years)?   The FTC say it cannot be labelled biodegradable without substantiation.   What is substantiation?  Proof of 100% biodegraded in a certain time fame, in every conceivable landfill condition?  It is not feasible to do this by anyone.

Why not coin a new term ‘Bioassimulated’ to represent the situation where biodegradation will occur over longer time periods.  e.g. This plastic bag will be bioassimulated back into the environment when discarded to a landfill. 
If the word Biodegradable has certain implied meanings to the average consumer i.e. fully degrade in 12 months, then when they read Bioassimulated it will not have an implied association but would still inform the consumer that a biological breakdown will happen on that product.

When we say a plastic item will biodegrade in multiple years that is really only an educated guess based on some short term reputable tests that show a partial biodegradation within that test time frame.  People can’t run 5 or 10 year biodegradation tests in every landfill condition.  Yet if we know from these shorter term tests that reasonable fractions of the plastic have biodegraded away then we would expect that process to continue (at non liner rates, at different rates and for different landfills and different plastic parent materials) over time till all the plastic has been biodegraded away.    Therefore, based on these tests (Like D5511) we ought to be able to verbally extrapolate to say this plastic will be ‘Bioassimulated’.    It has no inferred time frame in it, is easy to prove (test results) why we say that and it informs the consumer the plastic has some special biological breakdown properties.