In praise of corn-based plastic
bottles--not!

By Jay Arthur

In laboratories and workshops, all over the world, men and women in white coats are toiling away on one of the most critical issues of the day: how to avoid facing the real issue.
In the past couple of years or so, there have been some major breakthroughs, fully justifying all the time the men and women in white coats have put in, and offering some solace to those who could have used all that scientific genius and all those resources to address other challenges, like illness.
The results of these breakthroughs are now being proudly displayed at trade shows in the United States and Canada.
Instead of fast food and other containers lingering for several weeks on street corners other public places, we are told they will now only linger for a few weeks, or maybe even less time. Yes, folks, welcome to the world of bio-degradability, photo-degradability and various other-degradabilities (including oxo-degradability).
You see, the problem is not that some people out there are slobs, or that entire industries have developed to feed the consumer needs of a busy but affluent society, or that municipal taxpayers are stuck with the bill to clear up after the slobs.
No, the problem is the packaging. Fix that and the problem is solved.
As a result, we are now seeing a whole new approach to packaging. Let it rot. The disposable age has come full circle. And, the irony is that we were just starting to get somewhere, belatedly but definitely.
After years of throwing "community clean-up" crumbs at litter issues, the McHortons' of this world were actually beginning to pay attention--encouraged by a province that was actually beginning to enforce 3Rs regulations that became law before half of the clientele in the fast food palaces were born.
While I am sure there are some very worthwhile uses for the various degradability capabilities now available, they do not include plastic bottles.
The theory, based on the slob scenario, is that if people are going to throw away their plastic water bottles, we should

make them break down quickly to reduce the litter impacts.
(We'll get into why they are buying water at a higher price than gasoline another time--it's part of the busy but affluent society syndrome. It is curious, though, that there is all this fuss about the packaging of water when folks have been buying water flavoured with sugar for years, using the same amount of water, and endangering their health in addition to their environment.)
So the men and women in white coats came up with a corn-based bottle, which, in the right conditions, breaks down like any other organic material.
We won't get into the fertilizers and other goodies required to produce the corn right now. Instead, let's look at what happens when the bottle is empty.
The slob, despite all the community clean-up crumbs thrown at litter programs, throws the bottle out of the car window or leaves it on the ground. Assuming the empty bottle's location is appropriate for degradation (and that's a big "if" - how many composters are made from concrete or pavement?), the composting process will begin and it will disappear from whence it came.
The conscious consumer hangs onto the bottle and puts it in a blue box or other recycling receptacle at the first opportunity. Because plastic bottles are recyclable, right? Every message the conscious consumer has ever seen confirms it. (This is where the marketing men and women in dark suits who hired the men and men in white coats jump up and down and say, "But if you look under the bottle it says: "compostable" --or it should do, anyway.")
The corn-based bottle finds its way into a recycling plant where one of the sorters grabs it from the line and puts it in with all the real plastic bottles. It ends up part of a bale and is shipped off to a plastic processor.

Part of the plastic processing involves drying the bottles with heat, and this is where the corn-based bottle, for the first time in its short life, really stands out. It is the one that (duh!) looks like burned corn syrup and has melted all over the equipment. Corn bottles have a lower melting point than the usual plastic (PET). The processor folks have been telling us about this quite regularly in recent years. One of these days, they will stop accepting loads of normal plastic from recycling programs because the post-syrup clean-up is just not worth the trouble. And who could blame them?