The Truth About Biodegradable PPE — Is It Really the Future?

By Mia Barnes

Health care systems around the world aim to protect human health. However, a hidden paradox is emerging from that mission. Single-use gloves, masks, gowns and shields are now common, and are intended to keep patients and providers safe. However, they come with a heavy environmental price tag. Biodegradable PPE is widely seen as an innovation that greatly reduces this paradoxical harm. But is it truly a viable path forward, or simply a partial solution to a much larger problem?

The Staggering Environmental Cost of Medical Safety

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world’s reliance on PPE into sharp focus. For example, in 2020, demand for masks ballooned from the previous 89 million per month to 129 billion per month at the height of the pandemic. Much of this was fueled by legislation around the world requiring citizens to wear masks in public. 

Projections estimate that medical plastic waste has continued to increase 20% year on year, and is expected to reach 20.9 million tons by the end of 2025. 

Most conventional PPE is made from petroleum-derived plastics like polypropylene (PP), polycarbonate (PC), polyethylene (PE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). These polymers are prized in medical settings because they’re cheap, durable and effective. However, left in landfills or leaking into the environment, these materials can persist for centuries.

The downstream effects of this are serious:

• Landfills are filling faster as PPE contributes to growing municipal and medical waste streams.
• Marine ecosystems are threatened when PPE ends up in rivers and oceans, posing entanglement and ingestion risks to birds, fish and other animals. 
• Microplastics from degrading PPE enter soil and water systems, contaminating food chains. Under lab conditions simulating long-term ocean wear, a single weathered mask can release up to 396 billion microplastics (MPs) per day.

These extraordinary figures demonstrate the scale of the problem. While PPE has saved countless human lives through disease prevention, it leaves a growing and highly problematic environmental legacy. 

The Promise of Biodegradable Alternatives

In response to this challenge, researchers and manufacturers have turned to bioplastics as an alternative to traditional materials. But what does that mean in practice?

The key lies in distinguishing between the terms biodegradable and compostable. While all compostable plastics are biodegradable, not all biodegradable plastics are compostable — and when it comes to PPE and environmental hazards, it’s an important distinction. 

In the context of PPE, biodegradable materials often come from renewable biological sources, such as plants or bacteria, rather than petroleum. Common candidates, all of which are compostable, include:

• Polylactic acid (PLA): Made from fermented sugars such as corn or sugarcane. Research has identified this as one of the most promising bioplastics for medical applications. 
• Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs): Produced by microbial fermentation. This material naturally breaks down over time and is already used in some health care products.
• Other biodegradable copolymers: For example, polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT), which can offer flexibility and water resistance.

Some PPE marketed as biodegradable is made of materials like PE, with additives to make it degrade faster. Often called oxo-degradable plastic, this is designed to begin breaking down within a few months or years after production. However, according to multiple studies, the additives may be even more harmful than the polymers and can leach into the environment. Plus, the breakdown process still results in harmful microplastics.  

So, compostable PPE requires industrial composting, and non-compostable, oxo-degradable PPE still poses environmental risks. Neither type offers a complete solution. 

The Practical Challenges Facing Biodegradable PPE

Despite the promise, PPE made from bioplastics faces key practical limitations. 

The Infrastructure Gap

One of the biggest challenges is the lack of end-of-life infrastructure for these items. Unlike conventional plastics, which are designed for recycling, many biodegradable materials require specific industrial facilities to achieve complete breakdown.

Under standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency, compostable plastics must biodegrade within a set time frame in an industrial composting facility. If these items end up in a regular landfill or in the natural environment, they may not break down completely or within a useful time scale. 

Unfortunately, access to industrial composting facilities remains limited in many regions. Even where such infrastructure exists, there are often sorting issues. Biodegradable items can be visually indistinguishable from conventional materials and are frequently mixed into recycling or trash streams, undermining their ability to biodegrade. 

The Risk of Incomplete Degradation

When biodegradables don’t reach the conditions needed for full decomposition, they can break down partially and generate microplastics. These are just as persistent and harmful as those from conventional materials. 

Because there are no unified federal standards for labeling, consumers may be confused about how to dispose of such PPE, further exacerbating the risk that items will not completely degrade. 

Immature Supply Chain

The manufacture of biodegradable PPE is still at a relatively small scale. There are, therefore, concerns regarding the industry’s ability to scale up to the levels required for this to become the norm in health care settings around the world.

Is It Greenwashing?

Beyond the practical challenges, there have been questions about whether the claimed benefits of biodegradable PPE really add up. For example, the London Health Sciences Centre, one of Canada’s largest teaching hospitals, has recently gone public with its concerns. 

It found that switching to biodegradable nitrile gloves, which it had intended to do, would actually increase its emissions by roughly 4,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent every year. This is because such gloves in a landfill quickly produce methane, the vast majority of which is not captured before the landfill is sealed. Therefore, the hospital decided that it was more environmentally responsible to remain with its current glove supply. 

Clearly, biodegradable PPE presents a complex picture, with many advantages but many challenges, and the potential for confusion, greenwashing and unintended harm. 

Re-Thinking the Solution — Beyond Single-Use

Perhaps the most fundamental problem is that biodegradable PPE is still rooted in a disposable mindset. The classic sustainability tenets of reduce, reuse and recycle could offer greater insight. 

With other medical equipment, recycling is already being successfully applied. This is cost-effective and reduces the embodied carbon footprint that has already been incurred through the production of equipment. Furthermore, it reduces the need for additional raw materials in manufacturing new items. Recycling medical equipment supports a circular economy model, which is more sustainable in the long term than biodegradable options. 

So, if reuse and recycling work for other medical items, could they work for PPE? The answer increasingly appears to be “yes,” if systems are redesigned with circular principles in mind. 

The Case for Reusable PPE

Among the traditional tenets, reuse often yields the most significant impact because it avoids waste generation in the first place. In the context of PPE, reusable alternatives are emerging in several categories:

• Sterilizable gowns that can be safely cleaned and reused multiple times
• Masks with replaceable filter inserts, allowing the body of the mask to be reused while only the filter is discarded
• Durable face shields and eyewear that withstand repeated sterilization without degrading

Advances in technology have produced, for example, reusable masks that maintain 95% filtration efficiency over 100 washes. Switching to such reusable masks in a dental clinic is estimated to result in 85% less waste and 3.7 times lower costs. 

Studies have shown that reusable gowns offer performance advantages over single-use gowns, including better water resistance and strength. By reducing the volume of waste created, facilities can significantly decrease disposal costs and reduce their environmental footprint over time. 

Barriers to the Adoption of Reusable PPE

Although 60% of health care workers prefer reusable PPE over disposable items, adoption can be challenging. There is still a need for education regarding its perceived safety, and decision-makers must be persuaded that disposable PPE is not the only option. 

An immature supply chain may be an issue here, just as it is with biodegradable PPE. Many large health care institutions are tied to group purchasing systems, which further hinders a switch.

The public may also require reassurance about safety. However, 46% of consumers are purchasing more reusable products themselves, so this may not be as difficult as one might think. 

The Last Resort — Recycling Traditional PPE

Some PPE is likely to remain single-use due to safety or regulatory requirements. And, undoubtedly, reusable or biodegradable options may be slow to become widespread. In the meantime, there are some promising advancements in recycling systems tailored specifically for medical plastics.

Emerging technologies such as mechanical upcycling and advanced sorting can transform certain types of PPE waste into new materials. One example is blending infection-free plastic from discarded face masks with vegetable oil to produce versatile composites that can be used in 3D printing, packaging or the automotive industry.  

While these technologies are still evolving and will face economic and regulatory hurdles, they demonstrate a feasible path toward closing the loop on medical plastics.

So, What Is the Future of Sustainable PPE?

After examining the evidence, it is clear that biodegradable PPE, while welcome, is not a silver bullet. It has real potential, but its effectiveness is limited by infrastructure challenges and variable degradation outcomes. 

A sustainable future for PPE will likely involve a multi-pronged strategy:

• Prioritize reusable PPE wherever safety and sterilization allow.
• Invest in recycling systems specifically designed for medical plastics, from enhanced sorting to mechanical upcycling.
• Use biodegradable options selectively where industrial composting facilities are available.

A Circular Strategy for a Safer Future

Ultimately, the most meaningful progress won’t come from a single innovation, but from a systemic shift in how health care thinks about protective equipment and waste. That shift — toward reuse and smarter recycling — represents the true future for sustainable PPE. If you work in health care or can advocate for this, you will play your part in transforming the enormous PPE waste crisis into a much less environmentally costly issue.