The development of plastics from plant matter - bioplastics - holds great promise to address many of the sustainability problems and national security concerns generated by the manufacture of plastics from petroleum and other fossil fuels.
We are witnessing everyday the unconditional enthusiasm coming from the manufacturing industry, that has realized that Green sells and is trying to put the green label to every product, from building materials to packaging, leaving the consumers overwhelmed with a whole set of environmentally friendly

materials and miraculous solutions, which at the same time, shows a lack impartiality in the research and rating protocols, which mostly come from the manufacturers.
This behaviour, according to Bill Walsh, Executive Director of the Healthy Building Network can lead to the same crisis that the financial market has recently self-inflicted, as "our major industries – mining, timber, energy, chemicals, plastics – have been reinventing their images, not their industries". As he explains "relying upon the plethora of greenwash labels and certifications will cause the most committed environmental consumers unwittingly fuelling the industrial engines that have driven and continue to drive us towards ecological collapse".
On the other hand, according to the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, an American network of sustainable agriculture, environmental health, clean production, recycling, social justice and other public interest organizations that work together to spur the introduction and use of sustainable biomaterials in the marketplace, bioplastics are not, however, an automatic panacea.
Modern industrial agriculture creates a host of health, environmental, and social and economic justice problems including the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the field, toxic pesticides, and destruction of family farms. Increased demand for agricultural products for energy and materials as well as food may well exacerbate the problems already posed by modern agriculture and create competition for crop land with a potential increase on food prices and scarcity. According to The Guardian, the industry is forecast to need several million acres of farmland within four years.
Manufacture, use and disposal can still result in hazardous emissions, particularly if the bioplastic is mixed with petro-based chemicals. Biodegradable bioplastics are not proved to degrade completely in landfills due to insufficient temperature and, in anaerobic conditions, they release methane gas, some of it cannot be captured, incrementing the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.
At the end of life, bioplastics pose new requirements for recycling systems in order to avoid get them mixed with conventional oil-based plastics in the recycling facilities, as they contaminate the waste stream making other plastics unsalable. The compostable ones have also issues, since some countries don´t have developed appropriate systems for composting (collection and facilities) them so they end up in landfills or contaminating the recycling systems.
Although some of these problems have been showing improvements in the last years, sustainability is a complex issue and there is still a long way to go in the path to attain it.
Regarding the use of disposable plastic for packaging, environmental campaigners at Friends of the Earth would argue that a better alternative to oil-based packaging would be no packaging at all, but they also promote compost able materials as part of a wider waste management solution.
Similarly, Greenpeace states that renewable and biodegradable polymers provide a promising alternative so long as GM plant bases are removed from the equation. According to Graham Thompson though, their approach would be to "follow the 'reduce, re-use, recycle' formula, where the number one task is to remove unnecessary plastic items from the market, the second is to make the remainder reusable (this would more often than not mean switching to another more durable material - glass for bottles, cotton or hemp for bags, etc. - and only then would you consider whether you wanted the remaining plastics to be recyclable as plastic or as compost".
To help put bioplastics on a sustainable path, the Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative has developed a set of Guidelines for the bioplastic industry and for potential purchasers of products made from bioplastics.

The goal of this document is to encourage the development and use of bioplastics that are healthy and sustainable, and on it we find that, for them to be truly sustainable, it requires attention to a number of key principles:
Reduce the amount of material, product and packaging used.
Eliminate single-use products that can be neither recycled or composted .
Avoid fossil-fuel-based materials in favor of materials and products derived from renewable feed stocks.
Address sustainability across the life cycle of the material: the growing of the feedstock, manufacturing of the polymer and final product, using the product and reclaiming the material at the end of its     original use.
Define sustainability to include issues of environment, health, and social and economic justice.
Design and use products that are reusable, recyclable or compost able.
Encourage agricultural systems that are sustainable for farmers, the environment, farm workers and communities. Support small- to mid-sized family owned and operated farms.
Do not use genetically modified organisms in agricultural feedstock production.
Use chemicals that meet the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry.
Avoid engineered nonmaterial’s and chemicals that have not been tested for environmental and public health effects across the life cycle.
Decentralize production and buy local to reduce the environmental footprint of production, transportation, and consumption.

What is clear is that this is a hot subject and it has to be addressed properly. According to Climate Change Corp, until 2006, bioplastics have lingered at the margins of the plastics market. But not for much longer. The sector is exploding. Global production capacity for bioplastics is set to quadruple by 2011, unleashing roughly 1,5 million tonnes of products onto the market, according to the optimistic industry representative body, the European Bioplastics Association. There are other organizations, though, that see the case more prudently, as we have reviewed, since there are still some issues to be addressed and although prices are lowering, they are not yet competitive with oil-based plastics. See this article for more details.
Bioplastics must be developed with clear sustainability goals and guideposts to avoid the pitfalls and realize the promise of this technology. Additionally, the current excessive consumption of materials and products will overburden the earth’s capacity, whether the materials are fossil fuel based or biobased in origin. Reduced consumption, more efficient product design and applications and shifts from disposables to reusables will be critical to achieving sustainability.