Potato packaging

The worldwide production of plastic is around 100 million tonnes per year. If we take into consideration the amount of energy required to process this material, this equates to around 200 million tonnes of oil, or ca 4 per cent of the world's annual oil production. This is significant if we consider that oil is a dwindling resource.  

The UK uses ca 4.7 million tonnes of plastic and throws away 3 million tonnes, over half of which is from packaging. Moreover, while petroleum-based polymers commonly used today in packaging, eg polyalkenes, have some advantages over ceramic and metallic containers - they decrease food wastage and transportation costs, for example - they do not degrade rapidly in the environment. Typically, plastic bags last for anything from 20 to 1000 years. Putting such waste into increasingly scarce landfill sites is not a long-term solution.  

More sensible would be to use less, and reuse and recycle more, but this goes against a consumer society and fads like drinking bottled water which consumes around 1.5 million tonnes of plastic each year alone. Much of this ends up in rivers and canals, and kills thousands of aquatic wildlife. So chemists are looking to Nature for renewable sources of plastics for packaging - ie natural polymers such as cellulose and starch. Plants produce about 50 million tonnes of these carbohydrates every day, which could potentially satisfy our current addiction to plastics in just two days a year.¹