Plastic Mulch is Problematic—and Everywhere. Can We Do Better?
Plastic is used abundantly in agriculture, but it’s nearly impossible to dispose of sustainably. Researchers and growers are searching for solutions, and they're using strawberries to do it.
Four rows of strawberries grown in soil-biodegradable mulch between rows of polyethylene (plastic) mulchPhotography by Jazmine Mejia-Muñoz
In Washington’s Skagit Valley, the beginning of summer is largely marked by the first ripe, red strawberry. Just off of State Route 20 headed west out of Burlington sits the Skagit Valley location of Viva Farms. Viva Farms is a nonprofit that helps new and limited-resource farmers with access to land, equipment and more, and this site is home to 18 incubator farms and a half-acre student farm. Sales and education manager Katherine Myrvold teaches students in the Practicum in Sustainable Agriculture course how to grow many things here, including two beds of strawberries.
Strawberries are one of many crops that often use plastic mulch during their growing season. Mulching is the process of covering the earth around a plant with something to help it grow. Myrvold says that for the strawberries at Viva Farms, plastic mulch—long, thin sheets of polyethylene—serves two main purposes.
“It adds heat to the soil, which is really beneficial for a heat-loving crop like strawberries. And it also helps with weed suppression, which is always a challenge in organic production.”
But there is a critical downside. There are no consistently accessible mechanisms for sustainably disposing of plastic mulch film at the end of its life. What’s more, research shows that renegade pieces of this plastic can break down into the soil and waterways as microplastics—pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long that present serious health and ecosystem concerns.
“We always talk about this on the student farm—it’s kind of like the dirty secret of organic agriculture and agriculture in general, is just the amount of waste—the amount of single-use plastic,” says Myrvold. “So, that’s something that we’re very open to finding an alternative to.”
But the current alternatives also have drawbacks. Myrvold says they tried using paper mulch one year, and it tore too easily, wasn’t flexible enough and large swaths of it blew away in the wind.
“It didn’t get the job done at that time,” says Myrvold.
A new $8-million USDA grant will allow researchers from Washington State University (WSU) to investigate end-of-life recycling solutions for plastic mulch, as well as effective biodegradable mulch options. Researchers across several institutions and industry partners, such as Natureripe and Driscoll’s, will participate, with contributors spanning both coasts. Although many crops use plastic mulch film, this project will focus on a fruit that uses it extensively: the strawberry.
The ubiquity of plastic
The use of plastic in agriculture, known as “plasticulture,” is expansive. The United States agriculture sector uses one billion pounds of plastic mulch every year. When it comes to disposal, the vast majority of this film gets taken to the landfill or is buried or incinerated.
When the use of plastic mulch began in the 1950s, it proved to be immensely helpful to growers. The benefits include trapping heat for faster growth, retaining fertilizer and suppressing weeds. It has also proven to be the most economical option for people growing on a commercial scale.
Plastic mulch is made out of polyethylene, or PE. PE is recyclable, but most plastic mulch film is not recycled because of a few key hurdles. “There’s quite a few things against you,” says Karl Englund, a research professor in WSU’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, who is leading the recycling component of WSU’s grant research.
Recycling plastic mulch is not as easy as putting your household recycling in a blue bin.
Plastic mulch film spends its life in the dirt, and contamination is a real obstacle. Recycling is generally only possible if contaminants make up less than 5 percent of the weight of plastic mulch. But by the end of the growing season, the weight of plastic mulch can increase by as much as 80 percent—all directly due to dirt and organic matter.
Moreover, consistent industry pathways for recycling plastic mulch don’t exist yet.
“If there’s no avenue for it to go, then who cares if you clean it?” says Englund. “You build an industry that’s out there that can handle this or at least a group that can say ‘I’ll take this but you got to clean it,’ I think you’ll start to see more and more people starting to clean it. That’s the hope.”
Englund and his team will investigate three different avenues for recycling plastic mulch lifted from strawberry fields: through pyrolysis, for use in road asphalt and as potential added material to deck boards. They’ll use mulch from strawberry fields at different partner sites across the US in Florida, California, Nebraska and Washington and at different levels of cleanliness. Strawberries are an ideal crop to focus on for this research because they’re a popular thing to grow across the country, spanning various soil systems, climates and growing conditions.
But the conversation about how to deal with end-of-life materials needs to start in their initial design, says Englund.
“It’s a quagmire, the position we put ourselves into with these specialty polymers,” says Englund. “[There’s] a lot of design that goes into them and not a design for deconstruction. We have to start designing this stuff better.”
In the fields
The bulk of US strawberries are grown in California—more than 40,000 acres this year. Plastic mulch used for strawberries and other crops has become a problem, however, as plastic pollution can infiltrate waterways.
“There’s a lot of agricultural fields right next to the coast. And so we try to work really closely with ag stakeholders to look at preventative strategies that can help reduce the amount of plastic that can escape out into the ocean,” says Jazmine Mejia-Muñoz, water quality program manager at the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation (CMSF), on detail for NOAA’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. By working with researchers and major berry producers in the area, the organizations are attempting to break the link between agricultural plastic use and plastic marine debris.
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Microplastic pollution is a global problem. Although it is difficult to estimate the true extent of the problem, it is thought that there are between 50 trillion and 75 trillion pieces of plastic or microplastic in the ocean. While mulch is far from being the only contributor to this issue, agricultural plastics are certainly a factor. Mulch that breaks down over time could be part of the solution, although a main obstacle associated with the soil-biodegradable plastic mulch currently on the market is that it doesn’t behave consistently across different climates and field conditions. CMSF is collaborating with the WSU team to run trials for biodegradable mulch in strawberry fields. It’s also working with California Sea Grant to investigate new technology to remove contamination from the plastic film without creating wastewater, which would aid in efforts to recycle the material.
The future of mulch, says Mejia-Muñoz, likely won’t align with just new plastic recycling strategies or biodegradable mulch. It’s going to depend on a combination of different strategies to create a path forward that works for different farm systems with different needs. It’s not only about finding new pathways that work—they also have to be efficient and scalable.
“In order for the technology to be implemented, it has to be viable, and it has to make sense with the system and the economics around it,” says Mejia-Muñoz.
Should growers just be ditching plastic completely? It’s not nearly that simple, says Mejia-Muñoz.
“Growers here are responsible for meeting food demand, and they feed the world,” says Mejia-Muñoz. “And in order to meet this demand, they rely on really effective technology.”
Beyond plastic
There are several alternatives to plastic mulch—but none can totally fill plastic’s shoes just yet.
Soil-biodegradable plastic mulch film is already on the market, but there are notable obstacles. It degrades inconsistently across varying field conditions and cannot be used for organic farming if it is not 100 percent bio-based, which is required in order to be used in certified organic operations in the US.
Last year, trials began at WSU and North Dakota State University to determine the most effective formula of hydromulch, a material made of paper, water and tackifier. Hydromulch could contribute to a closed-loop system in agriculture, if the boxes used to transport produce could then become the paper needed to make the hydromulch.
Katherine Myrvold of Viva Farms says that despite its less than satisfactory experience with paper mulch in the past, Viva Farms would be open to new techniques or tools. She’d really like whatever the alternative is to add heat to the soil—in the Pacific Northwest climate, the heat boost really makes a difference.
“We would love to try it again, if there’s a newer variety that would last better through the season,” she says.
Myrvold thinks others would be open to it, too.
“I know that there are a lot of people who are working in organic agriculture for all kinds of values-related reasons,” says Myrvold. “It seems like it would be a natural fit to extend that into making an effort to recycle the more wasteful components of what you use on your farm.”
Take Action
What You Can Do About The Overwhelming Problem of Plastic Packaging
research wool mulch!
Dried brown leaves can be used
But we don’t like simple solution
We like to find complex solutions to solve simple problems satisfy our ego
An alternate to plastic mulch could be the Weed Control Mat. It’s made of Polypropylene tapes and then woven into fabric form. Although this also is made from a type of plastic and also costs 3 to 4 times of regular plastic mulch but there are several benefits of it. 1. It has a life of 4 to 5 years where as plastic mulch lasts max 8 to 10 months. 2. It is water, air and nutrients to pass through it, so the soil can breathe, thus it helps in better soil condition. 3. Definitely it blocks sunlight so this… Read more »
Whatever happened to straw?
Great to see this article. The plastic problem needs much more discussion and study in alternatives. There have to be better options than single use plastic.
Another 100% biodegradable option is sheep wool. Specifically, waste wool from stomach and hind quarters. Lasts longer than straw, naturally fertilizes adding nitrogen (more nitrogen than chicken manure), repels slugs, lasts two years, holds moisture in the soil, regulates soil temperature, and biodegrades into fields. There are so many options to plastic.
We are Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum KESSFF a registered grassroots village based membership network of Small Scale Farmers SSFs operating in 75% of the Republic of Kenya and part of a similar larger regional network for East Central and South African Countries ESAFF. Born out of the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development WSSD02 in Johannesburg South Africa we bring together SSFs through empowering them with capacities to articulate issues affecting them namely domestic and global policies domestic and international market access and availability of SSFs friendly credit this is in our efforts to participate in the implementation of… Read more »
Maybe using mushrooms or some combination of mushrooms and a “tackifier” would work. This would help in establishing a resource for the new mushroom manufacturing industry, improving soil productivity, and providing a replacement for the plastic row covers. This has been successfully used in forestry and packaging. The mushroom row covers could be creased so they could be stacked when not in use and used 2 or 3 times before being put between rows of strawberries or anything else that grows to finish composting by being weathered and walked on during harvesting whatever you are growing. We are talking about… Read more »
Has anyone tried basalt fabric in this application?
It would cost quite a bit more, but should last indefinitely.
The production of the fiber uses not inconsiderable amount of energy and the fibers themselves might be hazardous in the same way other mineral fibers can be.
Chemically, the fiber is very inert.
Wow, you somehow draw a connection between the use of plastic in farming with the microplastic problem from ocean dumping of plastic everything. Yet you say the vast majority is placed in landfills, burned, or buried. If it goes to a landfill (the vast majority), then it cannot be a part of the microplastic problem you describe. I think bright scientific minds are working on biodegradable alternatives, but those will cost more initially. It will reduce farmer profits and increase the potential for the import of cheaper versions from countries whose farmers don’t give a flip about the problem of… Read more »