THERE WAS SOMETHING DIFFERENT about the takeaway coffee cup. It didn’t feel quite right.

Being in a hurry, I had bought the takeway at a coffee shop I frequented when I lived over on the northern beaches. There’s this little place in the small strip that calls itself the Fairlight shops — Minxy’s and Charlies. What I liked about the place was that it sold only Australian grown coffee from the Nimbin area of northern NSW. Caffiend brand, sold by the hot, steaming cup or by the bag of beans and ground on the spot if you didn’t want to do that yourself.

But back to the cup. Noticing how it felt a little different, I looked at it and discovered that this was not your usual cardboard takeaway cup. Why? Because it was made of bioplastic.

Takeaway coffee cups and lid made from bioplastic.

I later encountered bioplastics at a packaging trade shop I attended with other directors of Manly Food Co-op. You couldn’t tell the difference between these products and their synthetic look-alikes. They came in the same array of products — disposable cups and plates, takeway food boxes and eating utensils, all the way to clingfilm wrap.

For someone interested in resource use and innovation, there were two aspects to these products:

1. They were still throwaway products and did little to stem the mentality that goes with our disposable product culture.

2. They were biodegradable and compostable, which went a little way to ameliorating number 1. above though not enough to turn me into an outright supporter of the products.

Takeaway food, however, is part of our culture and I can do little to change that. At least, I thought, if that’s the case them better the products be packaged in biodegradable materials. As for people composting the used bioplastic packaging, I know that only the enthusiastic few would do that. Probably, like cornstarch  utensils, it could take some time to break down in the compost, necessitating separate treatment for it.

Unlike the cornstarch food packaging already available, bioplastics hold hot liquids without deforming. I was shown a line made of what the company representative claims was “waste” corn from Cargill in the USA. I relais that the company is one of those dealing in genetically modified crops and wonder about the dilemma for those with concerns about GM technology of bioplastics possibly made from GM corn. Ah, the dilemmas of modern living for those with the troublesome habit of applying lifecycle analysis to what they buy.

Both he and other representatives told me that bioplastics can be made from any vegetable material, including forestry waste. One gave me a little clear (bio?)plastic tube of leafy raw material, the bioplastic pellets made from the raw vegetable material and the packaging made from them. He told me that his company was interested in farming cassava in North Queensland as a feedstock to the eventual production of the material in Australia.

There’s lots of questions about bioplastics — the GM issue, the agricultural  sustainability of the source material, the question of whether growing the raw material displaces food production. But, taken at its face value, it has to be a step forward from using oil based packaging… doesn’t it?