How Now Green Cow
How Now Green Cow is examining how farms and food are shaping and being shaped by the climate crisis. Got a food and climate question? Send it to kma@greatwest.ca so it can be addressed in a future story.
Trevor Kloeck holds a handful of fluff in a barn in Sturgeon County. It might look like ordinary straw, but it’s the end result of years of experimentation.
Kloeck’s company, Plantae Environmental, takes wheat and barley straw from Sturgeon County farms and runs it through specialized machinery that slices and dices it with micron-level precision, resulting in this high-tech fluff. Shot out of a water cannon, the fluff (marketed under the name ReCover) acts as a sort of spray-on lawn oil companies can use as a cheaper, compostable alternative to plastic erosion control blankets.
Established four years ago, Plantae opened its new production plant in Sturgeon County earlier this year. It’s one of a growing number of companies trying to turn agricultural waste into new products to address climate change. Kloeck said his company hopes to use its expertise to turn plant straw into Amazon boxes, bioplastic trays, and other products in the years ahead.
“It’s not a question of if we go this direction; it’s a question of when,” Kloeck said, noting the federal government is already cracking down on plastic waste.
“We have to find viable sustainable alternatives for our feedstock requirements for the products people use every day.”
Biomaterial benefits
Plastics have a vast carbon footprint, producing fossil-fuel related greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life, writes Anna Kanduth of the Canadian Climate Institute. While there is little data available on the footprint of Canadian plastics, one study estimated that the American plastics industry alone cranked out the equivalent of 232 million tons of CO2 a year as of 2020 — comparable to that produced by 116 coal-fired power plants.
Greenhouse gases aren’t the only environmental harm caused by plastic waste. Animals eat it and get tangled in it, with sometimes lethal consequences. It also breaks up into tiny indigestible bits called microplastics that end up virtually everywhere — even inside human brains — where researchers suspect they may cause health problems.
Biomaterials are one solution to these problems, explained Mohini Sain, director of the Centre for Biocomposites and Biomaterials Processing at the University of Toronto. Made from plants instead of fossil fuels, biomaterials generally require less fossil fuel to make, reducing the amount of ancient carbon we’re digging up and adding to the atmosphere. They also decompose rapidly, reducing their other potential environmental impacts.
One 2003 study Sain co-authored estimated that replacing half of the traditional fibreglass used in North American cars with hemp-based composites would reduce U.S. industrial carbon emissions by about 4.3 per cent and make those cars lighter and cheaper.
Many possibilities
Biomaterials come in many forms, including car parts, trays, Kloeck’s fluff, and Alfie Hsu’s plant-based drinking straws.
Hsu is the co-founder of Plant Plus, which is based out of the Edmonton International Airport. It makes a compostable straw out of rice hulls, sugar cane, and other plant waste. That waste comes from Taiwan for now, but Hsu is working with Kloeck to see if he can instead make the straws using waste from Sturgeon County. Doing so would let area farmers sell their waste for use in his straws instead of paying to have it hauled away.
“We are creating extra value for the farmer,” he said.
Hsu’s straws start out as a mix of calcium and plant waste pellets fed into a hopper. The pellets get squeezed through an extruder at about 160 C — much cooler than the +200 C used for regular plastics, Hsu noted — to create a long tube of brownish bioplastic. The tube runs through a water bath to cool and over a sponge taped to a wooden post (for support) into a chopper, which goes “chunk, chunk, chunk” as it lops the tube into straws. The straws are then wrapped, boxed, and shipped.
“We can produce 9.5 million straws a month,” Hsu said — equivalent to less than one per cent of the number of straws Canada uses every day. (They were making about 500,000 a month as of August 2024.)
Once used, Hsu said, the straws completely degrade in an industrial composter after six weeks, returning to the dirt from whence they came. This results in substantial greenhouse gas reductions compared to conventional straws: 27 per cent, if the straws are landfilled, and 70 per cent if they are composted.
Hsu said the same process to make these straws could be (and has been) used to make plant-based containers and cutlery.
Not all golden
Hsu said his straws cost about twice as much as conventional ones, adding he hopes to bring the price down as he scales up production.
Cost is a barrier when it comes to widespread adoption of biomaterials, Kloeck said. It takes a lot of expensive science to turn plants into products with the same traits as plastics, and that raises their price significantly.
“You can’t ask people to produce a green product for the same price as a polluting product,” he said, as the polluting product isn’t paying for the cost of its pollution.
Kloeck said biomaterial producers have to find specific niches for their goods where they are cost-competitive with plastic, as is the case with his company’s goods.
Sain said government policy, such as requiring a certain proportion of plastics to be made from biomaterials, could help more biomaterials reach the market. Accounting for the carbon offsets created by biomaterials could also lower their price.
Not all biomaterials are equally good for the climate. Mehr Nikoo, senior manager of sustainable materials with Alberta Innovates, noted the carbon footprint of any one biomaterial varies depending on how it is produced, what it replaces, and how it is disposed of at end of life.
“You have to really think about the whole life-cycle,” she said.
A December 2023 study published in Nature Communications of some 98 bio-based materials found they produced about 45 per cent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on average than their fossil-fuel counterparts. None reached net-zero emissions, while one was nearly three times worse in terms of carbon footprint. While bio-based products typically used 37 per cent less non-renewable energy, they also caused 369 per cent more eutrophication than their fossil counterparts.
“This suggests that most bio-based products thus reduce GHG emissions if they replace their fossil-based counterparts, but bio-based solutions are no guarantee for emission reduction and could in a few cases in fact lead to higher GHG emissions,” the study reads.
The study noted higher recycling rates, more use of renewable power, and reduced demand in addition to bio-based products would be needed to reach net zero in the plastics industry.
Kloeck said finite natural resources mean humanity must find alternatives to conventional plastics.
“Unless we find new ways to make packaging, to make plastic components, and ways to make them sustainable, we’re going to be in big trouble as a civilization.”
