We’ve been keeping an eye on how captive audiences at major sporting events and concerts can serve as laboratories for new sustainable packaging systems and materials—general these tend to be foodservice packaging systems. That’s why it piqued our interest when we heard that a F1 race in November had marked the first time a major global sports event used compostable bioplastic beer cups. That’s according to Gaia Biomaterials, who created the substrate, and Happy Dolphin, a converter of “plastic-free” bags, utensils, and packaging who made the cups. At the Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, 150,000 beer cups made of emerging compostable substrate biodolomer were used in place of traditional beer cups in order to keep waste, microplastics, and CO2 to a minimum.
"It's a fantastic sign of recognition to have been chosen by such a prestigious event,” says David Hughes of UK-based Happy Dolphin. “The cups are very durable and stable and are suitable for printing. They can be collected along with food waste and put straight in an industrial compost. The result will be soil that is very high in minerals.”
Industrially compostable materials are uniquely intriguing for these sorts of closed-system events, usually in ballparks or other venues where collection efforts can be concentrated to a single location, without much spillover into the communities around the gates. These sorts of locations can be incubators of ideas like industrial compost before the wider, municipality-based infrastructure is in place to make them practical. Industrially compostable packaging could contaminate mechanical recycling streams if an uneducated public were to try to recycle them, and wouldn’t degrade in your flower garden the way backyard compostable materials would.
