Frequently Asked Questions About Earth Nurture Additive (ENA)
Q. Is ENA a bioplastic?
A. No, ENA is an additive that is added to conventional plastics that makes the conventional plastic biodegrade in both compost facilities and in landfills.
Q. Is ENA an oxodegradable additive?
A. No. Oxodegradable additives require extensive pretreatment by either heat (60C / 140F,) or ultraviolet light to cause plastic to biodegrade, so oxodegradable additives rarely cause plastics to biodegrade, in actual practice. ENA requires absolutely no pretreatment to cause conventional plastics to biodegrade.
Q. What kinds of plastics can be treated to make them biodegradable?
A. Every kind of conventional plastic can be treated with the appropriate ENA version, including polyethylene (PE, used to make bags, typically,) polypropylene (PP, used to make plastic buckets and similar items,) and polystyrene (PS, clear, hard, brittle plastic used in disposable cups,) as well as polyethylene terephthalate, (PET, used to make bottles for water, soda, cooking oil, etc.)
Q. What are LLDPE, HDPE, and LDPE? Are they different plastics?
A. No, they are all PE, of different densities. ENA makes all three biodegradable.
Q. How much ENA is added to the plastic?
A. Depending on the kind of plastic being treated, the plastic will have between 1% and 1.67% ENA active ingredients. This does not count the added plastic used to dispense the additive in pellet form.
Q. Does ENA require any special manufacturing equipment to use?
A. No, plastics converters (manufacturers,) can add ENA with the same equipment used to add other pelletized additives and colors.
Q. How could this possibly work? Aren't conventional plastics non-biodegradable?
A. Conventional plastics will not biodegrade without ENA, except in the very, very long term. Essentially, ENA greatly increases the speed of natural processes that normally take centuries to biodegrade conventional plastics.
Q. Arent there other additives that will do what ENA does?
A. There are some additives that will work to make conventional plastics biodegradable in special conditions, such as oxodegradable additives, that take oxygen and very high heat or prolonged very bright UV light to make plastics biodegradable. These conditions do not exist in either landfills or in compost facilities. There are other brands of additives that will typically cause a very light weight PE shopping bag to biodegrade in landfills over a period of several years. ENA works in both landfills and compost facilites, and it works much, much faster than competing products.
Q. I've heard some alarming things about Bisphenol A, (BPA.) Don't all plastics have BPA in them?
A. No, BPA is not found in plastics such as PET, PP, or PE. BPA is used to make hard plastics softer. Epoxy food can lining is probably the commonest use of BPA and similar compounds. It is also used in large commercial water jugs used with coolers, which are made out of polycarbonate, (PC.)
Q. What about additives in plastic, such as Bisphenol A (BPA?) Does ENA cause Bisphenol A to biodegrade?
A. Yes.
Q. Wouldn't bioplastics be better for the environment than ENA treated conventional plastics?
A. More than 98% of the plastic used in the world is conventional plastic made from either natural gas or petroleum. Nature cannot dispose of these plastics, and it is leading to plastic pollution that is damaging to marine life. Every year, more conventional plastic is made than was made the year before. There are more than 300,000,000 tons of conventional plastic made every year, and 40% of that amount, 140,000,000 tons, is made into disposable products. If we don't want to choke the world's environment with indigestable plastic, we MUST make it biodegradble.
Q. Aren't bioplastics more natural than conventional plastics?
A. No. Most so called "bioplastics" are complex polymers made in factories, and do not occur in nature.
Q. But isn't it best to make plastics that are renewable?
A. Maybe some day it will be best to make plastics are are renewable. Right now, bioplastics are made out of food - a lot of food. Right now, a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Do we really want to make that problem worse by making over 800,000,000 tons of food into plastic?
Q. Do conventional plastics break down into toxic products when they biodegrade?
A. No. ENA treated plastics biodegrade into the same substances as plants, when they are mineralized.
Q. Is ENA safe to use in containers and utensils that contact food?
A. Yes. ENA is made only with substances which the US Food and Drug Administratin (FDA,) has declared safe, that is, substances found on the FDA's GRAS list. In fact, you could put ENA's ingredients IN food.
Q. What do all of those test numbers on your website mean?
A. Those numbers are the production of biogas, which is the ultimate breakdown product of the plastics biodegraded with the help of ENA. All governmental regulations that we are familiar concerning the biodegradation of plastic with use biogas production as the measure of the amount of biodegradation of plastic.
Q. Is biogas production a normal part of our environemt?
A. Yes, all plant and animal materials ultimately break down into biogas, which is recycled by nature.