Oxo what? Navigating the not-quite-plastic minefield

Kate Hughes explains why pornstar martinis (probably) aren’t the beverage of choice of materials scientists

As a nation, we’ve found ourselves in a really weird place with “eco friendly” materials (Getty/iStock)

“What are you actually doing?” the seven-year-old said from the kitchen doorway, doing her best impression yet of an incredulous teenager.

It was a fair question. We’d been examining these pieces of… let’s say material, for what seemed like hours – holding them up to the light, smelling them, even licking a bit at one point as I remember, but we were still no closer to a decision.

The decision was about what on earth this stuff was. And what we were going to do with it.

It looked like plastic, and behaved like plastic, but had that silky feel of a starchy, plant-based, compostable something. There were no helpful symbols or printed instructions, and although my mother-in-law had laid it on the kitchen worktop with a cheery “Don’t worry, it’s biodegradable” before disappearing out of the front door at remarkable speed, we weren’t entirely sure what she, the retailer, the manufacturer, or anyone else in fact really meant by that.

As a nation, we’ve found ourselves in a really weird place with “eco friendly” materials. Some of them look compostable but aren’t; others you’d swear were plastic but can go in the food waste, though I’d be hesitant about merrily flinging most of it in there with the onion peelings, overexcited worms and yellowing sprouts.

(Nope, our kids won’t eat them either, even if we spin them as mini cabbages. The sprouts, that is, not the worms. I’m pretty sure the four-year-old would gobble a worm just for the craic.)

None of which helps us navigate our way through the immediate biodegradable, degradable, oxo degradable (what?), compostable, home compostable soup of seemingly interchangeable terms.

There is work going on to put some rules around the Wild West of materials science we’ve got going on at the moment – to make this all a little less greenwashable for the manufacturer and less impenetrable for the consumer – but in the meantime there’s a whole list of terminology to sense-check. And who has time for that?

I certainly didn’t in the run-up to the first house party we had after going zero-waste a few years ago. I merrily handed round the drinks in decidedly non-plastic beakers, only to have to pull them out of the compost the next morning because they were biodegradable, not compostable.

And because they were biodegradable, and not typical plastic, they then had to go in the bin because they couldn’t even go in the recycling.

It was a total fail, not least for the vicious, pornstar-martini-induced hangover I was trying to do the clear-up with (don’t ask).

We’ve got to get this right, though, and to know what we’ve bought or been given, because it makes a massive difference.

“Oxo biodegradable”, for example – a stamp that regularly appears on items next to some sort of green symbolism – is plastic, but with additives in it that are designed to turn it into biodegradable plastic.

Which basically means it just accelerates the breakdown of plastic into microplastics. Which is surely a terrible idea – exactly what we’re trying to get away from, given the impact of microplastics on marine and land-based life, including ourselves.

Don’t get me started on the studies about the effects of microplastics on the brain. They haunt my dreams.

And anyway, according to an open letter to the government last year from various trade associations and Greenpeace, which called for the ban of such a hideous material, it doesn’t work.

“Overwhelming scientific evidence, including research commissioned by Defra and the EU, has demonstrated beyond doubt that the claims these additives transform polyolefin plastics into biodegradable plastics are unfounded,” it said in no uncertain terms.

This summer, the EU banned “oxo degradable” materials outright.

So while we wait for the UK to get on with doing the same, “oxo degradable” is not welcome at ours for its particularly unpleasant brand of greenwashing.

“Biodegradable” seems to mean about 25 different things, so that was vetoed pretty quickly too, if only for our own sanity. And “compostable” is another fun one to drill down into if you get your kicks out of industrial processing.

“Compostable” can simply mean it will break down into organic matter under industrial conditions, including high heat. Don’t sling that in the compost bin: those worms will throw a fit.

So we were quickly down to “home compostable”, if we ever needed anything that behaves vaguely like plastic, which is pretty rare these days. Fine. Works for me.

But it seems that a dive into materials science isn’t many people’s idea of fun, and in good faith, consumers are putting the wrong thing in the compost and the recycling bin all the time. And that’s costing all of us a fortune.

The Local Government Association warned last spring that half a million tonnes of household recycling was rejected at the point of sorting in 2019-20 because it was full of non-recyclable materials.

Perth & Kinross Council, for example, recently appealed to households to double down on their recycling sorting after contamination cost them £100,000 in the second half of 2020.

I imagine a decent chunk of that was down to people getting confused over terminology.

In lots of ways, then, we really can’t afford for this misleading materials labelling to go on any longer. All of which I’ll tell the seven-year-old the next time she lands some withering comment on her confused mother.