The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Commercial plastics claiming biodegradable status: Is this also accurate for marine environments?
Abstract
Concerns about plastic pollution and global public policies have encouraged consumers to acquire environmentally friendly products. Thus, products made of biodegradable plastics have been preferred by the public, despite their costs. However, greenwashing practices, promising more environmental benefits than the products actually offer, has become frequent. Nevertheless, no studies assessing the occurrence of greenwashing in commercial plastic products sold in large world economies have been performed. The present study aimed to experimentally evaluate alterations in structure and chemical composition of selected plastic products marketed in Canada, USA and Brazil. The aging experiments carried out by seawater immersion for 180 days showed no evidence of degradation in 4 out of the 6 studied samples, despite product claims of biodegradability or 100% degradability status. This finding denotes unequivocal greenwashing practices, even including bags made of polyethylene, an ordinary non-biodegradable polymer. Thus, the inadequate adoption of green marketing is deceiving to consumers and may lead to improper disposal of these materials. These practices are highly counterproductive in view of the global public policies recently adopted to control plastic pollution. Therefore, considering the technologies currently available for identification of polymers, a strict control should be exercised over products that claim biodegradable status.
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Cites
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Cited by
Are biodegradable plastics a promising solution to solve the global plastic pollution?
Shen, M., Song, B., Zeng, G., Zhang, Y., Huang, W., Wen, X., & Tang, W. (2020) · Environmental Pollution · doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2020.114469 · Cited by 656
Veerasingam, S., Ranjani, M., Venkatachalapathy, R., Bagaev, A., Mukhanov, V., Litvinyuk, D., Mugilarasan, M., Gurumoorthi, K., Guganathan, L., Aboobacker, V. M., et al. (2021) · Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology · doi:10.1080/10643389.2020.1807450 · Cited by 561
Biodegradable Plastics: Standards, Policies, and Impacts
Filiciotto, L., & Rothenberg, G. (2021) · ChemSusChem · doi:10.1002/cssc.202002044 · Cited by 495
Payne, J., & Jones, M. D. (2021) · ChemSusChem · doi:10.1002/cssc.202100400 · Cited by 426
The Chemical Recycling of PLA: A Review
McKeown, P., & Jones, M. D. (2020) · Sustainable Chemistry · doi:10.3390/suschem1010001 · Cited by 294
Metadata
- Authors
- Nazareth, M., Marques, M. R. C., Leite, M. C. A., & Castro, Í. B.
- Venue
- Journal of Hazardous Materials
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-03
- Volume
- 366
- Pages
- 714-722
- ISSN
- 0304-3894 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2904683107
- Cited by
- 169
- References
- 8
- FWCI
- 4.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Nazareth, M., Marques, M. R. C., Leite, M. C. A., & Castro, Í. B. (2019). Commercial plastics claiming biodegradable status: Is this also accurate for marine environments? Journal of Hazardous Materials. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2018.12.052
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
