PHA: 

It’s Complicated

Other kinds of bioplastics are known to better biodegrade in marine

environments. However, whether that really happens in a specific case, and
how long it will take, is highly unpredictable.

It’s about time — and placeFrom beaches to shallow waters to the open
ocean and the deep sea, from the tropics to temperate waters to the Arctic,
conditions in the oceans can be multifold. Some habitats are warm, some
ice-cold, some light, some dark, some saltier and others less. Each
ecosystem is inhabited by different organisms, including the microbes that
might or might not be able to break down the plastics. Similarly, soils, rivers
and lakes can also offer a variety of conditions.The amount of time it takes
for a biodegradable plastic to degrade (and whether it ever degrades)
depends on conditions. This is why claiming that a material is biodegradable
in the natural environment is so problematic. You never know where it will
end up.And how fast would a plastic product need to fully biodegrade without
causing harm in the environment around it? A turtle could choke on a
bioplastic bag the moment this bag is blown into the sea. Harm can happen
right away. So biodegradable plastics are not a license to litter.
Marine biologist Christian Lott and his colleagues at HYDRA, a private
research institute with a research station on the Italian island of Elba, have
field-tested different biopolymers in a range of aquatic environments from
tropical beaches to the Mediterranean seafloor. They found that materials that
had been shown to biodegrade in seawater in lab testing also do so in the
environmental conditions they tested.

Among the materials tested at HYDRA are bioplastics called

polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). Produced by microbes, PHAs currently
comprise a tiny slice of the market. However, demand is expected to grow
strongly in the next few years.

A thin film of PHA will degrade in a tropical environment on the seafloor in

one to two months, Lott says. But in the Mediterranean, it can take 10 times as
long. “And imagine, in the Arctic, in the ice or at ice-cold water, or in the deep
sea where we have 0 to 4 degrees, hardly any nutrients around, bacteria will
have a hard time to digest these materials,” he says.

This is the caveat to PHAs, says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist

at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “While
they can biodegrade in the marine environment, we still need to appreciate
that part of the marine environment is not compatible with biodegradation.”

In some regions of the ocean biodegradation is so slow that even organic

material like fish or algae can leave their traces in the fossil record.

“Life is complicated,” Lott puts it, “and it’s about life — because it’s bio-
degradation.”

Super-Biodegradable?
Even with the best waste management systems, it’s realistic to assume some
plastic will always escape. Think of the abrasion from car or bike tires, from
ship paints, sneakers, or synthetic garments. If bits of plastics are small
enough to travel through the air, they will be hard to ever contain.

So could we design a plastic that breaks down pretty much anywhere?

Wurm says it would theoretically be possible to build molecular triggers into

materials so that they know when to biodegrade. “It sounds fancy, and it is
fancy and it’s expensive,” he says. But even if the funding were there, finding
and including molecular triggers for each and every material in each and every
environment seems to be a nearly impossible task.

awater, it does not seem to biodegrade at all.