I Sell a Sustainable Product I Believe in, But My Industry Is Misleading Consumers. Here’s the Truth.

I run a bioplastics company. I have spent years telling people our materials can help solve plastic pollution. And I need to tell you that most of what my industry says is, at best, misleading.

I call it misleading not because the science is wrong, but because the promises we make are detached from the infrastructure, the chemistry and the economics that determine whether those promises are kept.

This is not easy to write, but entrepreneurs owe their audiences the truth, especially when the truth implicates their own business.

So here are the common and lesser-known claims companies in my industry make that paint a blurry picture of half-truths.

Claim 1: “Our packaging is compostable”

When you see “compostable” on a coffee cup or a food container, you probably picture it breaking down in soil somewhere. Maybe in your backyard compost bin. Maybe in a municipal facility down the road.

To understand what actually happens to that “compostable” cup, you have to understand PLA. Polylactic acid is the dominant compostable bioplastic on the market today, and it needs sustained temperatures of 55 to 58°C to break down. Your backyard compost pile never reaches that.

So PLA needs an industrial composting facility with controlled heat, humidity and microbial activity to actually decompose.

A 2024 Beyond Plastics report found that of 173 U.S. industrial composters surveyed, only 46 reported accepting compostable packaging.

Ten states in the US have zero composting facilities. Twenty states have between one and three.

So what happens to the “compostable” cup you tossed in the bin? It goes to a landfill. And NatureWorks’ own published study estimates that under typical landfill conditions, PLA takes over 100 years to degrade.

One hundred years. For a cup labeled “compostable.” The industry knows this. It keeps printing the labels anyway.

Claim 2: “Our product is a bioplastic.”

Here is something most people outside the bioplastics industry do not realize.

The word “bioplastic” does not mean what you think it means. It covers three entirely different things:

• Bio-based: something made from plants, but not necessarily biodegradable
• Biodegradable: something that breaks down biologically, but not necessarily made from plants
• Compostable: something that breaks down under specific industrial conditions within a set timeframe

These three properties do not overlap the way marketing suggests. A plastic can be plant-based and persist in the ocean for centuries. A plastic can be fossil-derived and still biodegrade in certain conditions.

The reverse is also true.

Bio-PE and bio-PET are made from sugarcane instead of petroleum. But they are chemically identical to conventional polyethylene and PET. They do not biodegrade. They persist for centuries. They fragment into the same microplastics. The only thing “bio” about them is where the carbon came from.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the global authority on chemical terminology, has explicitly discouraged the use of the word “bioplastic” since 2012. Their recommendation: use “biobased polymer” instead.

Early messaging in the industry used “bioplastics,” and I cannot accuse anyone of deliberate intent to mislead. But after IUPAC issued its clarification, nothing changed. Probably because a precise, scientific-sounding term does not serve marketers as well as a vague, green-sounding one.

And the biggest players, either knowingly or unknowingly, exploit this confusion at scale.  

Claim 3: “Our material is plant-based, so it is safe.”

There is a deep assumption, shared by consumers and many entrepreneurs, that if a material comes from a plant, it must be safe. Corn is food. Sugarcane is food. So plastic made from them must be harmless.

The science says otherwise.

Zimmermann et al., in a 2020 study published in Environment International, tested 43 bio-based and biodegradable food-contact products against 30 conventional plastic samples.

Two out of three bioplastic products triggered toxic responses in at least one lab assay. The toxicity profiles were statistically indistinguishable from those of petroleum plastics. Some PLA and starch-based products contained more than 20,000 distinct chemical features.

The problem is not the plant, but the additives added to the plant-based polymers to create usable plastic products.

These additives — the plasticizers, colorants, stabilizers and processing chemicals — give bioplastics their functional properties, and are quite often the same chemicals used in conventional plastics. Nobody regulated them differently just because the base resin came from a crop, for instance, corn.

The PlastChem Report published in 2024 catalogued 16,325 chemicals used across all plastics. Of those, 4,219 are flagged as hazardous. And 66% lack publicly available safety data. These chemicals appear in both fossil and bio-based products.

So the hard part of bioplastics is not making plastic from plants. It is making sure you have not added the same chemicals that made fossil plastic dangerous in the first place.

Ask any bioplastics company for full chemical disclosure. If they hesitate, that tells you everything.

Claim 4: “The biggest plastic users are massively increasing their bioplastic use.”

The bioplastics industry talks in growth rates. And the growth rates do sound impressive. But absolute numbers tell a different story.

European Bioplastics’ 2025 market data puts global bioplastics production at 1.67 million tonnes against roughly 431 million tonnes of total plastic production. That is 0.5%. And the European Environment Agency notes that this share has remained “quite stable” because fossil plastic production keeps growing alongside bioplastics.

Coca-Cola recently pushed back its goal for reusable packaging. PepsiCo and Nestlé face ongoing challenges in reducing waste and scaling up reusable packaging. Unilever’s goal to halve its use of virgin plastic by 2025 was at risk due to setbacks.

So when a corporation announces it will “increase bioplastic use,” it has to be asked, “By how much?” In tonnes. Not percentages. Because a 200% increase in a rounding error is still a rounding error.

Claim 5: “Our product meets all applicable standards.”

This sounds reassuring. But look closer, and you will see it is a statement about the gaps in regulation, not the strength of the product.

The pattern across everything I have described is the same: Voluntary standards are not working.

1. The U.S. FTC Green Guides governing terms like “compostable” and “biodegradable” have not been substantively updated since 2012. A revision process opened in late 2022 has not produced a final update.
2. The UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations failed to reach agreement at both INC-5 in Busan and INC-5.2 in Geneva. More than 100 countries pushed for binding production cuts and chemical bans. A small bloc of petrostates blocked them.
3. Meanwhile, the EU has already taken the cleanest regulatory position available: Its Single-Use Plastics Directive treats bio-based, biodegradable and compostable plastics identically to conventional plastics for the purpose of single-use bans. A compostable PLA plate is banned the same as a polypropylene plate. The regulation does not care about your feedstock story. It cares about whether the product ends up as litter or not.

I believe the bioplastics industry needs mandatory regulation. Not because I want more rules. But because voluntary self-policing has let too many actors hide behind good branding while the infrastructure, the chemistry and the accountability remain absent.

So why am I still in this industry?

After everything I have just written, this is a fair question. If bioplastics are compromised, why do I keep striving to build a bioplastics company?

Because I think there is still real value to be created.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve realized that entrepreneurs in the bioplastics space in India and many other countries of the Asia-Pacific can embrace at least guiding principles and live with a guilt-free conscience.

1. Make bioplastic from waste

India generates roughly 500 million tonnes of crop residue per year. That residue — the hemp stalks, the flax stems, the nettle fibers — is not food. It does not compete with farmland. Converting it into biopolymers does not just substitute fossil carbon. It displaces combustion that kills people and creates a revenue stream for farmers who currently earn nothing from their residue. That is a materially different proposition from growing corn in Iowa to make PLA cups that will sit in a landfill for a century.

2. If you sell compostable, invest in composting

I also believe a bioplastics company has to demonstrate, profitably, that it can co-invest in composting infrastructure. Not just sell “compostable” products and hope the system catches up.

The system will catch up, the same way EV charging stations followed viable electric cars, but someone has to push it forward. Every bioplastics company that sells compostable materials without investing in the infrastructure to compost them is free-riding on a system that does not exist yet.

3. Be an advocate for “no plastic, less plastic, better plastic”

The hardest admission of all: Reduction matters more than replacement.

Bioplastics are not a license to maintain single-use consumption at current scale. Saying this openly might hurt demand for my own products. But the world does not need different plastic. It needs less plastic. Bioplastics should replace fossil plastics only where single-use is genuinely unavoidable. Everywhere else, the answer is to use less.

I started in this industry because I believed agricultural waste could become something better than smoke. I still believe that.

But belief without accountability is just marketing. And marketing without infrastructure, without chemical transparency and without binding standards is just greenwashing. The first step for every entrepreneur in this industry is to accept the flaws in our models and our language so we can start correcting them one step at a time.

I run a bioplastics company. I have spent years telling people our materials can help solve plastic pollution. And I need to tell you that most of what my industry says is, at best, misleading.

I call it misleading not because the science is wrong, but because the promises we make are detached from the infrastructure, the chemistry and the economics that determine whether those promises are kept.

This is not easy to write, but entrepreneurs owe their audiences the truth, especially when the truth implicates their own business.