It is expensive, relatively speaking. It's also a valuable project. We've also done packaging using bamboo, and mushrooms. It's going to take some experimentation and some commitment to bring viable products to market.
I'm pretty jaded on these things, been there done that kind of outlook. This stuff, all of it, has been around for decades now. The core issues aren't going away, I can't see how "commitment" fixes them. But, it's a great PR bump for a company, often as not. They spend some money for PR anyway, and this is one way to do it.
After the PR is done, the numbers guys start wanting to save a few bucks and it goes away, quietly, and no one notices. Back in the 90's and 00's, soda/water bottle makers advertised using some PHA in their bottles, and then it quietly went away. I worked for several years on a project that was of this ilk because of the notion landfills were filling up with diapers. That was a completely false notion of course hyped by the insane media, you'll notice you don't hear that fear at all today. It's not because there was any solution, it's because the problem definition was clearly wrong, and faked.
I was personally spending Company money like crazy during that period. It took me a while to realize it was only a PR project, it wasn't meant to DO anything.
PHA was one of the primary candidates for one product, also polyethylene made from bagasse in Brazil, that was some other outfit and it came to naught. We're supposed to be using cellulosic ethanol now, but that also went to nearly zip.
So much of this stuff is vaporware, just really fake at the core, for PR.
