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AFAIK the claim was never that bioplastic are "healthy", the claim is that it breaks down way faster. Preventing a buildup as we have seen with mikroplastic.
Sensationalist headline IMO.
It doesn't breakdown as fast as claimed, either. PLA needs high temperature composting to breakdown.
It's not impossible to do, but nobody bothers. It's one of the more sustainable options for 3d printing, so we should get on that.
I actually see it as weirdly counterproductive. When bioplastics degrade they release their carbon into the air as carbon dioxide. Whereas a properly landfilled piece of plastic takes its carbon permanently out of circulation, it's literally sequestered.
Landfills get a bad rap. When they're done right they're a clean and reliable way to deal with waste. They're just easy to get wrong if you don't care, and they look so unphotogenic it's easy to campaign against them. But one of my favourite parks is a former landfill done right, aside from the occasional monitoring well scattered around the place there's no way to tell what it used to be.
It's only releasing CO2 that was already there. We're not digging the carbon out of the ground after it was sequestered millions of years ago. PLA is currently mostly from corn, though there are other crops that can work. There's even a hemp-based path, though I don't know how viable it is.
PLA is one of the most recyclable plastics. Grind it up and you can melt it back into 3d printer filament. The machines for this have been improving a lot. The bad news is that you have to make sure you only put PLA stuff into the grinder. This makes it hard to do at makerspaces where you can't trust people to separate PLA prints from others. I am hoping that my own makerspace gets a machine, and then you can at least handle your own prints that way.
CO2 is CO2, it doesn't matter where the carbon came from. If you're sequestering plastics that were made from plants then you're taking it out of the atmosphere for a net benefit.
“Starch based” plastic is just a way to greenwash PLA.
Just because the C, H, and O originally came from starch, does not automatically make the chemically synthesized product safe.
It does mean no petroleum was used to make the plastic, which is one environmentally-friendly aspect.
It barely makes it that far.