13.1 Introduction

In Europe, biodegradable polymers were originally developed and introduced to the market for two main reasons. Firstly, the limited volume of landfill capacity became more and more of a threat and secondly, the bad image of plastics held by the public prompted the call for more environmentally friendly products. While the first issue has largely disappeared from the top of the agenda due to the introduction of plastics recycling schemes and due to newly built incineration plants, the environmental performance is currently the main argument for biodegradable polymers. Against this background, this comparative review of publicly available life cycle studies may provide useful information to manufacturers, processors, consumers and policy makers.

In this chapter all major biodegradable plastics are discussed, i.e., starch polymers, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), polylactic acids (PLA) and a small group of other materials. All of these polymers are manufactured by use of renewable resources. Only materials which are generally acknowledged as being completely biodegradable according to established standards are included in this chapter. For this reason, starch-polyolefin blends and polyolefins containing ferric salts have not been taken into account. The types of end products covered are pellets, loose-fill packaging material (packaging chips), films, bags and mulch films. These are compared with products made from petrochemical polymers, usually polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) or polystyrene (PS).

All major European producers of biodegradable polymers and several European research organisations known for environmental assessments in this area were approached to ensure that the coverage of this...