“Plastic”— it’s almost becoming a bad word. And it makes sense: some 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic have found their way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—an island of floating trash and plastic that’s now bigger than France, Germany, and Spain combined. And it’s not going away anytime soon—that plastic could take hundreds, or even thousands of years to finally biodegrade. Yikes.

That—combined with the giant carbon footprint that results from producing standard, petroleum-based plastic (hello, fossil fuels)—is urgently driving the need to come up with alternatives to one-use plastic packaging. More and more, brands are turning to bioplastics as a viable option.

Until now, PLA (polylactic acids) has been leading the bioplastics pack, with brands and retail giants like Newman’s Own and Walmart using it in some of their packaging.