Our Green Streets Blog

For us sneering at the notion of plastics and biodegradability, it is time to stand back and jump up!

Biodegradable plastic bottles will soon be on grocery shelves. Source: Enso Bottles, LLC

What’ll it be: 10,000 years, or two years? That is the question when it comes to the life expectancy of the plastic bottle you drink from.

For those of us looking for the next level of plastic – something that’s not going to be around for eternity – even compostable – we may need to look no further than Arizona.
That’s where ENSO Bottles, LLC is making plastic drinking bottles that are – yes – biodegradable. Not only biodegradable, but when they go to the landfill, digestible to microbes making methane, which can be captured and converted to energy.

This is exactly the kind of cycle in waste-to-energy that ENSO Bottle co-founder and president, Danny Clark, wants. “When our bottles go into the landfill, the idea is that the bottled will break down and create methane.”

Thus Clark can proudly list one of his company’s operating mantras that it develops products that can create value when they are discarded. Clark says there is no exact time for how long it takes his bottles to break down, but estimated the time to be about two years.

ENSO Bottle logo on Times Square Source: PR Newswire"Our new logo demonstrates the ethos of ENSO Bottles. We chose the name, ENSO Bottles(TM) to reflect the concept and life cycle of our products. Our name and the ENSO logo, represents wholeness and the returning to where it initially began. Our bottles reflect this precept, originating from the earth, providing a value of use, and then returning to the earth in a reusable organic state."

Specifically, the bottles are designed to biodegrade, leaving behind harmless inert humus and biogases. An ENSO bottle contains an organic compound, called Ecopure, that has been added into the crude oil-based polymer chain to attract microbes.

ENSO Bottles is not the only company developing biodegradable plastic bottles. Clark says other scientists are also involved in developing plastics from renewable sources such as corn and switch grass.

Creating bottles that are biodegradable means expanding the molecular structure of the plastic, altering the polymer chain and adding nutrients and other organic compounds which weaken the polymer and attract microbial activity.

This is good news, considering more than 150 billion plastic bottles are annually produced in the United States alone, with less than 30 percent going to recyclers, with many of the remains ending as roadside or water-born trash.