Is bio-based packaging really sustainable?

Businesses are increasingly looking for alternatives to conventional plastic, thanks to consumer demand and regulatory pressure. Online retail and food-delivery platforms are leaning towards paper and bio-based packaging. These shifts are, of course, welcome. But a product can be made from agricultural residue, carry a “biodegradable” or “compostable” label and… still end up in a landfill.

The “bio” in bio-based does not tell the whole story

Bio-based plastics and other alternative materials cover a wide spectrum. Some are made partly or entirely from biological sources. Some are designed to biodegrade or compost. Others are fibre-based and made from agricultural residues such as bagasse, areca and palm leaves.

These categories are often blurred in public discourse. In reality, a material can be bio-based without being biodegradable. A biodegradable material may not be compostable under ordinary conditions – it may require an industrial facility to actually break down. And a material can be technically recyclable, but may actually never be recycled in practice.

This distinction is becoming increasingly important. The global bio-based materials market is expected to grow by21.5% over the next five years, with the Asia-Pacific accounting for around 40% of it.

India is part of this growth. Bio-based packaging and tableware gained prominence following the nationwide ban on several single-use plastic items (under the Plastic Waste Management Amendment Rules of 2021 and 2022). Consumers are also paying greater attention to how their food and other purchases are packaged – for health and environmental reasons, among others.

As mentioned above, Zomato recently launched PackSwitch, an application to help restaurants choose plastic-alternative packaging for their products. Similarly, the Department of Consumer Affairs, in collaboration with the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), launched Biopackathon 2026 to find biodegradable packaging.

This direction is understandable – plastics should indeed be avoided except in the most essential applications such as in medicine. But it’s not accounting for whether the waste system is ready for what comes next.

What happens when “biodegradable” meets the real world

“Biodegradable” is an incomplete description of a product. It tells us that a material can be broken down biologically, but not necessarily how quickly it will degrade, under what conditions or whether those conditions exist where the product is discarded.

This is a fine distinction because many compostable and biodegradable materials require specific conditions to break down effectively. Industrial composting facilities provide controlled conditions that are very different from those found in a landfill, an open environment or even a household composting system. These conditions are essential for various kinds of plastic alternatives to decompose.

Currently, India does not have dedicated infrastructure for processing compostable plastics at the scale that would be needed if their use expands significantly. Therefore, a product certified as compostable can still end up in an overflowing landfill.

Even when such materials reach composting facilities, they do not necessarily behave in the same way as ordinary organic waste. Different materials require different processing conditions and some may leave residues if those conditions are not met.

The problem becomes even more complicated with fibre-based alternatives. Products made from bagasse, areca or palm leaf can compost under suitable conditions in their relatively simple, untreated forms. Commercial food-service products, however, often contain coatings, binders or barrier layers to resist water, oil and grease.

Those additions can fundamentally change what happens after use. Depending on the formulation, a product that looks like a simple natural-fibre plate or container may actually be a composite material containing synthetic polymers or other substances that are much harder to separate and process.

The material the consumer sees, in other words, is not necessarily the material the waste system has to manage.

Don’t fall for “recyclable” plastic

Recyclability presents a similar problem. A material can be technically recyclable without there being a viable system to collect, sort and recycle it.

Data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) indicates that substantial plastic recycling capacity and significant amounts of plastic waste have been recycled. Yet, a 2024 national circular-economy assessment estimated that only about8% of plastic consumed in India was actually recycled in 2019.

India’s recycling economy is also highly uneven. Established markets are concentrated around materials such as PET (polyethylene terephthalate, the clear, strong and lightweight plastic we see in water and soda bottles), rigid HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene, the tough plastic used in, e.g., detergent bottles, recycling bins and hard hats) and rigid PP (Polypropylene, commonly used in microwaveable food containers, medicine bottles and yogurt cups).

Flexible plastics, including several forms of LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene, used in bags, cling films and squeezable ketchup containers), PP and multilayer packaging, have much weaker markets.

New bio-based materials do not only have to be recyclable – they also require a robust collection mechanism. Someone has to sort the material. A recycler has to be equipped to process it. And a buyer must exist for the recycled output.

Without those links, “recyclable” is a technical claim rather than a real-world environmental outcome.

New materials can also disrupt existing recycling systems. Bio-PET and PEF, for instance, can resemble conventional PET. Bio-PET is partially plant-derived, and PEF (Polyethylene Furanoate), though fully plant-based, is recyclable but needs a separate stream within a recycling facility.

If incompatible materials enter established PET recycling streams, they can affect the quality and properties of recycled material. This creates additional challenges for sorting facilities and recyclers, particularly where identification systems are designed around conventional materials.

This is why new materials should not be introduced at scale without understanding how they interact with the recycling systems already in place.

The role of certification

India’s move to restrict several single-use plastic items through the Plastic Waste Management Amendment Rules of 2021 and 2022 increased interest in compostable and biodegradable alternatives. It also created a greater need for standards and certification.

BIS adopted provisional standards, including IS 17899, for evaluating the biodegradability of certain new materials. These standards considered degradation and ecotoxicity under different environments, including soil, municipal solid waste composting and aquatic systems.

But, regulators have in certain circumstances issued provisional certification while testing is under way. And there is a crucial distinction between testing a material and managing it after use.

Also, certification can establish whether a product meets specified technical criteria. But it does not automatically create a collection system, a composting facility, a recycling market or an operational protocol for the municipality that receives it. This creates a potential gap between product certification and waste management.

A manufacturer may demonstrate that its product is compostable under specified conditions. But if a consumer puts it into the dry-waste bin, a waste worker sends it to a material recovery facility and no processor is equipped to handle it, the theoretical environmental benefit doesn’t materialise.

We have seen this before

For decades, products have been designed primarily around convenience, cost and functionality, with insufficient attention to what happens once consumers are finished with them.

The expansion of disposable products during the second half of the 20th century brought enormous gains in convenience, accessibility and hygiene. Disposable nappies, plastic takeaway containers, multilayer sachets and other difficult-to-recycle formats also created persistent challenges for waste-management systems.

The danger today is that we repeat the pattern with a new generation of materials.

We replace a petroleum-based disposable product with a bio-based disposable product, put a sustainability label on it, and celebrate the switch. Only later do we discover that the collection system cannot identify it, the recycler cannot process it or the composting facility does not exist.

UNEP reports from2015 and2021 have highlighted the risks of presenting biodegradable or compostable materials as straightforward solutions without considering the conditions and infrastructure required for their degradation.

Simply replacing one single-use material with another does not address the underlying problem of disposable consumption.

Design for the bin, not just the shelf

India’s solid waste management system is not a neat journey from household bin to final destination. It is a complex network involving households, waste workers, municipalities, transporters, material recovery facilities, recyclers, composters, processors and informal-sector enterprises.

Every new material introduced into that system changes the equation.

That means sustainability assessments for new materials need to go beyond their feedstock and manufacturing process. They should ask what happens throughout the material’s life cycle, including its final destination.

Can it be collected? Can it be identified and sorted? Is there a processor that can handle it? Is there a market for the recovered material? If it is compostable, does the required composting infrastructure exist? Can the product be safely processed if it is contaminated with food? And who pays for the system that makes all of this possible?

These questions should be answered before new materials are scaled up, not after they have entered the waste stream.

The transition away from conventional fossil-fuel-based plastics is necessary. But bio-based does not automatically mean sustainable, biodegradable does not automatically mean compostable and recyclable does not automatically mean recycled.

The real test of a sustainable product begins when the consumer is finished with it.

And perhaps the most important question we should ask before developing yet another alternative to a disposable product is a much simpler one: Do we need the disposable product at all?

A truly circular economy will depend not only on finding better materials, but on using fewer materials, designing products for reuse and ensuring that whatever we do use has a realistic end-of-life pathway.

The piece is published in arrangement with Climate Action Live https://www.climateaction.live