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Wonder plastic PEF will not yet help solve the plastic soup
5 January 2022
This article appeared in Food+Agribusiness (in Dutch) on 24 December.
With over EUR 100 million worth of capital available, Avantium recently announced the construction of a factory in Delfzijl. The stock market responded eagerly. It will be the first factory in the world where FDCA (furandicarboxylic acid) will be produced at a commercial scale. This is the building block for PEF (polyethylene furanoate). This new type of plastic made from plant-based sugars has huge potential. The material has superior properties to PET, which is made of fossil fuels. PEF can be used to make bottles, textiles and wrappers. So is PEF really the wonder plastic that the world is desperate for? Will it help solve the problem of the plastic soup?
The plant-based PEF is not necessarily being made with the intention of it being biodegradable. Tests show that it only breaks down in industrial composting systems at temperatures of 58 degrees Celsius and needs between 250 and 400 days – so about a year – to do so. Other bioplastics compost within an 11-day cycle. This raises the question of whether PEF may actually be called compostable. What is clear is that composters will refuse to accept the material. Should PEF end up in the environment, it will only show the beginnings of degrading after years. How long it will really take for PEF to break down entirely in conditions such as at sea with low temperatures, little oxygen, and little sunlight, is still unknown. It may take hundreds of years. Avantium still needs to come up with the answer.
It was known as early as 2017 that PEF is not biodegradable. At the time, Avantium top man Tom van Aken stated in an interview that ‘companies such as Coca-Cola and Danone emphasised to us to completely focus on recycling PEF’. This worked out as PEF is said to be as easy to recycle as PET. The two types do not have to be separated from each other and no recycling plants have to be modified. Companies like the two named above can later benefit from all material advantages such as a barrier effect for oxygen and carbonic acid that are six and three times better respectively. This means that many new applications using PEF can be thought up. What will transpire is a complete mystery. Paper beer bottles with a PEF coating already exists. Can it be properly recycled and will it then replace the refillable glass beer bottles? Will it undermine a well-functioning bottle deposit system that reuses bottles?
The plastic soup is largely formed by the massive use of single-use plastic packaging materials. PEF will change nothing. Quite the opposite. PEF seamlessly fits the times we live in with its excessive packaging that in the best case can be recycled after use.
Unless … the material can be used multiple times. You could then take a PEF container to the supermarket to fill with the required amount of a particular product. It is disappointing that Avantium remains vague about this aspect. Avantium says that ‘The performance potential of PEF in reuse [is] under development’.
PEF undeniabley has major application advantages compared to PET, but in terms of the plastic soup, there is little difference. PEF can be just as disastrous for the environment as traditional types of plastic. It is thus up to regulators to define or adapt the terms and conditions for the production and use of packaging materials. They must be built on multiple reuse and deposit systems. Only then will PEF help reduce the plastic soup.
Harmen Spek, Manager Innovations & Solutions at the Plastic Soup Foundation.
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