The agriculture sector uses a lot of plastic products, from bale wrap and silage bags to plant pots, greenhouse plant clips and semen straws.
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How to recycle, reuse or otherwise safely and responsibly dispose of these types of products is an ongoing challenge, but the industry is tackling the search for solutions from various sides.
Why it matters: There is a global movement toward more sustainable production as people and businesses address waste reduction and the impact waste has on the environment.
The Northern Ontario Farm Innovation Alliance and the northern caucus of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture just wrapped up a three-year pilot project evaluating the viability and logistics of an agricultural plastics collection program for Northern Ontario.
An assessment study estimated that northern Ontario produces more than 819 tonnes of recoverable agricultural plastic waste per year. But sustainable disposal options are limited due to distances in the region combined with lack of local recycling capacity and low value of recovered plastics.
By the project’s end, 25 compactors were in use in Northern Ontario and five in Eastern Ontario to help farmers consolidate and pack their farm plastics into tight bales for easier transportation. During the pilot, 151 bales were collected and sent to Tri County Plastics in Brighton, which recovered about 100 tonnes of plastic into composite products for patio stones.
Funding from the Canadian Agricultural Partnership helped offset transport costs. Although the original intent was to establish centralized drop off locations in various municipalities, COVID restrictions changed that plan to direct on-farm pickup, said the alliance’s executive director, Emily Seed.
“We couldn’t do as much ground work with the municipalities as we would have liked because of COVID,” she said, adding on-farm pick wouldn’t be sustainable from a time or cost perspective in a larger scale program.
“We are looking at how we could do a phase two project with closer-to-home solutions to deal with the plastic instead of hauling it to southern Ontario.”
A long-term solution will need buy-in across the supply chain to be successful and financially viable, Seed said.
“We had really good uptake at the farm level. Farmers are really interested in getting involved and having an option to deal with it,” she said. “It helped that we had a farmer who was an early adopter who could champion it and promote it as a good option instead burning or landfill.”
At the University of Guelph, Erica Pensini, an associate professor in environmental engineering, is tackling the plastics issue from another angle. With funding from Beef Farmers of Ontario and Dairy Farmers of Ontario, she’s looking at plastic alternatives made from renewable ingredients.
According to Pensini, who gave an update on her research during a recent webinar hosted by Livestock Research Innovation Corporation, plastics recycling overall in Canada isn’t as effective as it could be. Only about nine percent of the nation’s total annual plastic waste production is recycled.
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The production of plastics, from petroleum extraction to fractionation into components to make polymers, also comes with environmental impacts, including high water use.
“It’s not just about improper disposal. There is a big environmental cost associated with the use of plastics, so it is another reason we need to think about other options,” said Pensini.
She’s been working with a corn protein called Zein, that when mixed with linseed or tung oil, creates a rigid bioplastic that can be mixed with natural fibres to make plant pots for the horticulture industry.
The search for a flexible, stretchy bale wrap alternative that is easy to use on-farm is still ongoing, although a solution using epoxidized soybean oil, citric and oleic acids shows promise.
Getting commercial partners to help bring these types of products to market will be important, but conventional plastics will need to start being phased out or become more expensive before bio-based alternatives will be widely produced and used, she believes.
