How to Know Biodegradable from Common Plastic Bottles

In the past months you have learned a lot about plastic and its natural alternatives, like special materials made from plants that look and feel like normal plastic but are biodegradable and thus nature friendly. If you missed it you can read about plastic made from corn in one of our previous articles.

But how do you actually know which plastic is made from plants and which isn’t? The answer, unfortunately, isn’t that easy.

In the case of bottles, the first step to finding out what they are actually made of is looking at the small imprint on each of them: A small triangle made from three arrows with a number in it and a code made from letters below it, called a recycling code. This imprint will give you a hint as to what type of plastic the bottle is made of.

Most plastic bottles used nowadays are made from a substance called PolyEthylene Terephthalate, or “PET”. It is a kind of plastic that usually consists of two other materials: 30 % MEG (Mono Ethylene Glycol) and 70 % PTA (Purified Terephthalic Acid). While many companies, like Coca Cola, have been producing MEG from plant sources, such as sugarcane, for quite a while, producing eco-friendly PTA doesn’t seem that easy. Scientists have been able to produce PTA from plant sources in the laboratory, but as with many technologies working in theory, putting its use into practice has been difficult for several reasons, among them financial downsides and the massive amount of plants required to cover market requirements. Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola are, however, currently both working on raising the percentage of plastic made from plants in their bottles.

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