I understand the benefit of not having plastic in landfills and not making it from fossil fuels! My question is "when could I depend on something using this plastic?"
In fact, most plastics don't actually do that well over time (some exceptions of course) and aren't that durable. Quite a few types of plastic degrade under UV light for example. Of course not enough to fully degrade but they become brittle, get ugly, etc. If it stayed in one piece and just sat there not changing, plastics would actually be less of an issue. The issue is that they do degrade and gradually turn into micro plastics. Which end up in animal and human tissue causing all sorts of issues.
Wood and other biodegradeable materials are available. Plenty of products already on the market, not just for cutlery but things like product packaging, too. Companies exist all over the planet, like BioPak from Australia, WoodAble from Chile, Sulapac from Finland, Hunufa Compostable from Vietnam, etc.
Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down. Most just use regular cheap plastic and some still use Styrofoam.
I think a bioplastic that actually biodegrades in average municipal landfills at a minimal cost markup vs current plastics, that say 40% of restaurants adopt voluntarily (or by regulation), will be more impactful than the boutique reusables we currently see but only at like one restaurant per thousand.
I don't ever see places like Walmart or Costco switching to wooden bowls, for example. But bioplastics that look and feel the same and only cost a few percentage more? Maybe. Especially if encouraged by local regulations, similar to plastic bag bans.
Restaurants can be perfectly sincere (and branding isn't incompatible with sincerity), but they have tight margins. It's their customers who really have the choice, and there are very few customers willing to pay extra for the eco stuff. It reminds me of this evergreen Onion article:
https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-...
Culturally, I don't think customers would accept a choice on the matter either, like I've never seen a place offer "you can have the plastic box for free, or buy the sustainable wooden one for $2". In lieu of that, I used to bring my own reusable tupperware to the restaurants for takeout, but got a looooooot of strange looks and comments about that. What I'd really love to see is more of a "borrow a tupperware, bring back a tupperware" model where they just loan you containers. I'd only ever seen that on college campuses, not in the real world.
Anyway, none of that is really the point. There's nothing wrong with fancy sustainable/reusable dishware, but something that's incrementally better and not much more costly than regular plastic is much more likely to see widespread adoption. I think the gradual phase-out of styrofoam to plastics is one such example, and cheap bioplastics of the less-biodegradable kind are more common now (though not everywhere), paperboard boxes with some wax paper/foil lining are popping up, some places are doing away with bottled plastic water in favor of water in milk-like cartons... gradual incrementalism seems to work better than revolutionary approaches in that industry.
Or, as you say, let people provide their own container. In any case, if you charge people for the externality you will likely end up with less of it.
In Sweden, the take-away food I tend to buy is always packed in a cardboard box or paper containers. Even the drink straws are cardboard in hamburger places. The drink cup is cardboard with some sort of biodegradeable (?) plastic surface inside. Basically all of that gets recycled into the cardboard bin.
Plastic food packaging is not so easy to find, at least in places I tend to visit. Even the dip sauces are packed in tiny cardboard containers. I guess some places still use styrofoam packs, but I have not visited those places in many years.
I don’t know quite how it’d work with this kind of plastic, but maybe someone will come up with an indicator or rule of thumb that helps. Like how you don’t eat food out of a dented tin can.
The trick will be producing a plastic that is stable enough for use but can break down once it is no longer needed. This would be useful to replace a lot of plastics that are not used long term and are used in dry environments. It probably would not be good to store liquids.
I would think places where wood is, or could reasonably be, employed might also work. Table top game tokens, for example. Uses where environment factors (rain, contact with the ground, etc.) typically aren't relevant.
> I think it's realistic that different prototypes in soft and hard packaging, such as trays, bottles and bags, will be developed within one to five years,"
It sounds like the environmental triggers for degradation are naturally occurring microbes.
I hope we keep supporting and funding these projects and solve the scale issue!
It might be a step backwards to consider cars single-use.
If a material only biodegrades at 60 C, then it for practical purposes it doesn't biodegrade.
I'm not sure many people would be happy coming back to their car to open the door to a plastic blob on their floor.