“Is it Green?”…When the answer is yes, are you really being told the truth?
With the growing Apollo range of Paper Drinking Straws, whether they be standard ones to entertain the kids, thicker diameter Smoothie Straws to handle the viscosity of the endless fruit and veg based health drinks, or shorter Cocktail Straws to flourish a cheeky bit of mixology. The emergence of PLA “compostable” drinking straws posed a serious question, especially as they are a cheaper competitor to the paper straws Apollo had recently launched. A stratospherically hot topic of conversation is about plastic waste polluting the environment, the food chain, and thanks to Sir David Attenborough, the Oceans and Seas.
Carrier Bags were top of the naughty plastic list, here in the UK and across Europe, now you have to pay for them we mostly go shopping tooled up with reusable bags including the Apollo Cotton String Bag. Various other plastics cast offs have had the finger of shame pointed at them, but one piece of plastic waste in particular has been pinned up hard against the wall…the seemingly innocent plastic straw.
Straws have been around for years, order a drink at a pub or bar in a tall glass and regardless of being asked for, it automatically came with a plastic straw. That was until we all saw images of a huge plastic waste island floating on the Ocean surface and Mr. Attenborough once again said “hey, look at this – we are all responsible for it”. The drinking straw has been singled out probably because it’s something we can all relate to as a fun thing to blow bubbles into your drink as kids, to something even as an adult we are still aware of. Over the years plastic has been increasingly used to replace so many things in everyday life; The waxed paper straws were an easy target, plastic meant no more going soggy in your drink, plastic straws could also be manufactured by the 100’s of thousands for mere pennies. With the World waking up to plastic pollution the straw presented some startling facts to ram the story home to the masses. 200 years minimum to degrade in the seas, but in reality that’s breaking down into smaller pieces that are not easy to spot, most Sea-life sieves the water it lives in for plankton and the like. Fish and seabirds who have sadly met their end have been found to have notable quantities of plastic just sitting in their stomachs. If your household rubbish isn’t incinerated, which causes its own problem as the toxic gases released when plastic is burned need to be scrubbed from the smoke before it can be released from the chimney into our air, then it’s put into landfill and your humble straw will sit under the ground for well over 200 years.
All of a sudden we are back to paper straws in the shops again, alas they are more expensive than plastic, with modern manufacturing and bought from the right factory they meet with the modern LFGB/FDA food safe regulations, in meeting these regulations and modern processes have added longevity when immersed in water. At Apollo we have tested our straws for 48 hours immersed in water and they have held up to the soggy test. Being made from paper if they do find their way into the sea they break up and disintegrate in 7-8 weeks, if sea life eats paper invariably it passes through the digestive system. They compost and rot miles faster than plastic in landfill.
Apollo Housewares paper straw quality test
Anyone who sells products in the UK knows there is a race to the bottom on retail price, in the case of drinking straws if you put a bag of paper and plastic straws on the shelf paper will be double the price of plastic and with plastic you will likely get a third more straws in the pack. There will still be people who don’t really care about the environmental issues the price is the driving factor. Thankfully most retailers and their customers are environmentally conscious and will adapt their buying to be ethically appealing. Wait a minute there is a straw available that is cheaper than paper and has the same outward properties of a plastic straw! PLA Straws and “they are biodegradable”.
Like we said at the beginning the emergence of PLA straws and their lower cost compared to paper raised a few questions in the corridors of Apollo HQ. A recent overseas buying trip presented a perfect situation to talk with manufacturers about PLA and other products that claim to have perfect green credentials. What we managed to glean was interesting, and filling in some gaps with the help of the internet just left a feeling that with so much of this “Green” product we are possibly being sold the Emperors new clothes.
PLA is Polylactic Acid – although if you rely on the words of Wikipedia its not actually a polyacid but a polymer, cynics would already be going “Hmmm?” at this breaking news. If you have a depth of knowledge in the world of Chemistry you can read acres of information on PLA variants.
The one thing that is for certain: it IS produced from plant starch, corn and sugarcane being the most common. This means that as it decays no chemical nasties should be leaching into the soil, the water table and food chain. That said we asked one maker how long you could leave it in liquid as a drinking straw before it breaks down – amazingly they said as long as you want. We later stumbled upon one of the worlds biggest manufacturers of straws, paper, glass, stainless steel and obviously PLA, they added a bit more knowledgeable meat to the bones, one thing is for certain these PLA straws do breakdown much much faster than just plastic, in the sea 7-8 months, in landfill 7-8 years (although further research does question this latter timescale) however if you dispose of a PLA straw through a commercial composting facility it takes a matter of days to break down. We have roadside collections for our green garden waste in our area, and we know that this is taken to a facility where it is processed and eventually turned into compost that is either sold back to us in, err, plastic bags or sold to commercial gardeners, excellent news I can put my PLA straw in with my green waste: apparently not. Whilst they would breakdown due to the heat generated during the composting process, drive past our local processor in the Winter and you can see through the bare trees to steaming heaps of glorious rotting compost. The problem is when people put their green waste out for collection or take it to the local dump in amongst all the rich vegetation ripe for composting there are all sorts of foreign matter mixed in with it: wire and plastic plant ties, bits of plant pot, plastic peat bags, string, etc. As the compost pile is turned all these bits of non organic material is sifted out separated and put in a skip to eventually be taken off to the local incinerator or landfill for disposal. To the untrained operatives eye the yellow PLA straw will be seen as plastic not plant starch and disposed of how you did not intend.
The only way you can be certain that your PLA straw will be wholly biodegraded is if it is taken to an Anaerobic Digester – do you know where your closest one is? If you did, do you think you would be taken seriously if you turned up with a bag of used PLA straws. That said, it appears that certain Anaerobic Digesters are designed to handle certain types of organic waste. Your PLA Straw will disappear into the organic slurry because the heat generated is constant……….That’s if your straw actually gets through the non organic separation process – very unlikely. Heat is the key in an AD. Whilst there have been successful trials to reduce the heat required to process the organic material most operate at a constant temperature range between 30-38c. Heat, at the moment, is the main ingredient to make the PLA straw truly biodegradable once you have used it. Some research into PLA straws being better in landfills believes that the lack of heat present makes the breaking down process longer than claimed, likewise if your used straw falls into the English Channel. the process will be longer.
Briefly an Anaerobic Digester is a process where micro-organisms break down biodegradable material with the absence of oxygen, food waste and purposely grown crops are mainly put through the process which produces methane and carbon dioxide that then gets processed into a bio gas which can be burned to produce renewable electricity, the digestate, remains, can be used as a rich organic fertiliser.
All of these questions into PLA straws piqued our curiosity about other products shouting about being “Green” and made with biodegradable materials. For a while, before straws, Bamboo fibre travel mugs were of interest, our only concern was the volume of Melamine used as a binding agent. Melamine is perfectly safe even if it does contain formaldehyde to make it into the resin used to manufacture plates and cutlery, if you read up on Melamine it doesn’t dissolve in much you are likely to find in natural ready abundance, which takes us back to there still being a “plastic” with a long degradation rate when the bamboo fibre has for want of a better term rotted away.
Recently a customer asked whether one of our products made from spinning strips of actual bamboo was suitable to go in the dishwasher, the simple answer was no as the inhospitable combination of heat and caustic solution would make it break apart pretty quickly. The response was “we thought not, but maybe as the bamboo fibre travel mugs can go in the dishwasher they might be able to”. Slightly loaded we asked can they go in the microwave, to which the customer replied no. When it was pointed out this was most likely because of the melamine content of the mug they were surprised at their belief that they bought what they thought was a wholly green product.
On our buying trip we were presented with a product that was headlined as being Wheat fibre, with a heap of knowledge already gleaned after a couple of days, we asked what percentage of the product was wheat fibre the reply was 30% “and the rest?” ……….Plastic.
When you buy products claiming to be green, give the surface of the claim a scratch and see what is really lurking beneath the attention grabbing headline.
……..oh and don’t forget to order your Apollo Paper Drinking Straws we have wondrous choice to choose from!