How can sugarcane ethanol become the same types of plastic as crude oil (e.g., PET, HDPE, PP)?

Question

With all the green-washing going on in marketing, I’m confused about how to recycle plastic products that are made by sugarcane. If the “plastic” is made by something other than crude oil, shouldn’t we call it something other than plastic? I’m worried if I try to recycle a sugarcane-based plastic it will contaminate an entire batch of recycled petroleum-based plastics.

In: 3

Answer 1

Sugarcane based PET, is “plastic”, it’s not biodegradable. Just because the feedstock came from a plant, that doesn’t make it biodegradable. We modified those molecules to give them the plasticy properties we wanted, including shelf life.