A new water bottle from a startup called Cove looks like it’s made from ordinary plastic. But it’s the first of its kind to be made from a blend of PHA, a type of bio-based plastic that’s designed to break down when it’s composted—or, in the worst-case scenario, if it ends up in the ocean.
“The plastic water bottle is the poster child of plastic pollution,” says Alex Totterman, Cove’s founder and CEO. “We believe that creating a real solution for the 1 million bottles discarded every minute will begin to demonstrate that it’s possible to solve the global plastics problem.” The product launched today at its first retailer, Erewhon, a health food store in Los Angeles.
The material is made through fermentation: Microbes are fed vegetable oil, sugar, food waste, or captured CO2, and then naturally produce a polymer in their cells that can be extracted and made into plastic. If the plastic later ends up in the environment, other microbes can then break it down.
Right now, if one of the 500 billion-plus plastic bottles made this year reaches a lake or ocean, fragments of the plastic could last for decades or possibly even centuries. But Totterman expects Cove’s PHA bottle to fully degrade in less than five years in the environment.
Exactly how long it will take isn’t proven yet, and will depend on the ecosystem. Lab tests can’t perfectly predict what will happen. TÜV Austria, a testing and certification company, tests how PHA may degrade in the ocean in seawater that’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit, though the average ocean temperature is around 39 degrees, and cooler water means slower biodegradability. Humidity, temperature, and other conditions also affect how PHA will break down if it ends up by the side of the road or next to a hiking trail.
“Biodegradability isn’t magic. [It’s not that] you throw it away and it’s gone,” says Ramani Narayan, an engineering professor at Michigan State University who studies biodegradable plastic. He points to the fact that wooden Viking ships have been well-preserved for centuries in some conditions. It’s not possible, he says, to make a blanket claim that something will biodegrade in the same way everywhere.
Cove is working with researchers at the New Materials Institute at the University of Georgia to run real-world tests in various environments, including Arctic and Atlantic ocean sediment, lake sediment, and soil.
“No two environments are the same. . . . Generally, the idea is just to get sort of an estimate that gives you an upper bound and lower bound for how long it will take,” says Ben Kogan, Cove’s head of sustainability and policy. Based on a previous study, the company expects that the bottle could take between 1.5 and 4.5 years to break down.
Of course, there’s also hope that the packaging never ends up in the environment in the first place. At the first retail store, a bin will collect the bottles for composting. As the company designed the bottle, made with different types and mixes of PHA, it worked with an industrial composter to test each formula. Third-party tests showed that the bottles can break down in compost in 90 days. “You can see in pictures that the cap and the bottle both vanished completely,” Totterman says.
Still, getting the bottle to a composting facility can be a challenge. Los Angeles is starting to roll out curbside pickup for food waste, but doesn’t yet accept compostable plastic. (Some other cities do, but it’s rare.) The packaging can also be composted at home; the company is currently working on a formal test but already filmed a Cove bottle fully disintegrating in a home compost pile over the course of six months.
Other plant-based plastic, like PLA made from corn, doesn’t decompose easily at home or even necessarily in industrial compost facilities. (Notably, there’s a California law that appears to prohibit using the word biodegradable on packaging, so Cove’s current design may have to change. State officials did not respond to a request for comment.)
The material also could be recycled with the right equipment, although until there’s more PHA packaging on the market, recyclers wouldn’t have a reason to invest in new infrastructure. “You can even recycle it by feeding PHA to the bacteria that produce it,” Totterman says. “So they’ll consume the PHA and then produce more inside of themselves.”
The bottles can’t be recycled with PET, the standard plastic used in other bottles. If they accidentally land in a recycling bin, a recycling facility should be able to sort them out using infrared scanners that recognize PET. Then the bottles would go to a landfill. In a modern landfill, without oxygen, they won’t break down.
The new bottles are expensive to make, though the company says that costs will decline with scale, and the inputs used to make the material (like food waste) are very low-cost. They were also very challenging to design. Because no one else uses PHA, the company couldn’t just buy bottles from a supplier, and ended up building a factory to make the bottles itself.
Cove was initially set to launch in 2019, but there were multiple hurdles to get over, from pandemic-related supply chain problems to issues with the material. One form of PHA is very brittle, and prototype bottles would break if they were dropped or even squeezed too hard. The final design uses a blend of different types of PHA. The bottles are white, rather than the typical clear packaging, because of the challenges of making PHA transparent.
At Erewhon, the L.A. retail store, Cove will be targeting customers who arguably could be convinced to carry a reusable water bottle instead. (You could also go further and say that everyone could switch to reusable bottles, other than in places where tap water is contaminated.) At a premium cost—$2.99 per bottle—the market for Cove’s product may be limited. But the hope is to scale up and begin to displace conventional bottled water. The first factory has the capacity to produce 20 million bottles per year, and the startup, which has raised $20 million since 2018, has plans to build an even larger facility next year.
“What we’re trying to do is sort of effectively create a case study that then others follow, with a large consumer demand signal, and see kind of a similar progression in PHA that’s happened in electric vehicles,” Totterman explains. “There really just needs to be one very strong, compelling case study, and then the rest will follow.”
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