The problem with plastics is that once they come into existence, they don't really just go away. This is great for things like electronics casings, reusable food containers and guitar parts, but when it comes to disposable packaging, not so much. Your average petroleum-based plastic clogs landfills and uses up valuable fossil fuel resources that could be either saved or put to use elsewhere. Even the most popular biorenewable plastic, polyactide, has to be rendered down in industrial facilities, adding to its overall cost.

Researchers at Imperial College London set out to create a real biorenewable plastic that didn't require a lot of energy to create or destroy and didn't use active food crops as a source of material. Their new polymer material is made from sugars called lignocellulosic biomass. This type of biomass can come from anything from non-food crops to agricultural waste to saw mill discards.

The process to make the new plastic has taken the group, led by Professor Molly Stevens of ICL, three years to bring up to 80% efficiency. But where polyactide requires a large amount of energy and water to produce, the ICL plastic is the opposite. Further, polyactide uses food crop like corn and sugar beet for its prime ingredients, causing concern from many over the use of viable food sources in creating non-edible products.

But the best part about the ICL plastic is that it doesn't require any high energy process to break down. Its oxygen-rich structure absorbs water and biodegrades the structures into harmless components. This means to safely discard the material, all a consumer has to do is toss it on their compost pile. And if you don't have a compost pile, that's fine -- it will breakdown just as well in a landfill if exposed to the elements.

This plastic doesn't only show promise for packaging materials though. A group of several parties, including at least one commercial entity, brought together by Stevens is looking into ways the polymer may be useful in medical capacities such as stitches and tissue regeneration scaffolding. Another use may be controlled drug delivery as the plastic also breaks down into harmless compounds in the body.