Bioplastics share many of the same drawbacks that make traditional, petroleum based plastics hazardous to the environment. Bioplastics will not degrade under any sufficiently short timescale unless handled properly in a municipal compost facility. If bioplastic materials escape the waste hauling process and end up in a natural ecosystem, like the earth’s oceans, they will not degrade, posing physical and toxic hazards to the species that live in them. 

 

UCLA Dining currently uses several single-use items made from the bioplastic material polylactide (PLA). Our team’s goal is to assist Dining management in replacing each PLA item with a marine degradable alternative. These alternatives will be comparable in function, cost, and fitting of each restaurant’s brand. They will also be fully degradable in a marine environment and thus lead to a much smaller ecological footprint than PLA.