Economic Evaluation of Biodegradable Plastic Films and Paper Mulches Used in Open-Air Grown Pepper (Capsicum annum L.) Crop

Abstract

Black polyethylene (PE) is the most common mulching material used in horticultural crops in the world but its use represents a very serious environmental problem. Biodegradable films and paper mulches are available alternatives but farmers are reluctant to adopt them because of their high market prices. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the economic profitability of eight biodegradable mulching materials available for open-air pepper production. The economic evaluation is based on a four-year trial located in a semi-arid region of Spain. Three scenarios of PE waste management are examined: (i) absence of residues management, (ii) landfill accumulation, and (iii) total recycling. The inclusion of the costs of waste management and recycling under the current Spanish legislation only reduced the final net margin by 0.2%. The results show that an increase in subsidy rates of up to 50.1% on the market price would allow all biodegradable films to be economic alternatives to PE. The study supports the mandatory measures for the farmers to assume the costs of waste management and recycling. Despite savings in field conditioning costs, high market prices of biodegradable materials and papers are not compensated by the current level of subsidies, hampering their adoption in the fields.

Benchmarking the Agronomic Performance of Biodegradable Mulches against Polyethylene Mulch Film: A Meta-Analysis

“…The agronomic benefits of mulch documented herein (i.e., increased soil temperature and weed suppression) are important and may help explain or predict changes in crop yield, but growers' willingness to adopt BDMs will ultimately be driven by effects on crop yield and profitability [12,51]). Thus, it is significant that results of this meta-analysis of crop yield (292 observations across 66 studies) suggest yields in BDMs are greater than those in bare soil and are not different from PEM yields (Figure 5).…”

Can Hydromulch Reduce the Emergence of Perennial Weeds?

“…Other target situations are the first development phases of vegetable crops [8] and in the first years of orchard planting, when ploughing may harm the plants. Other mulches such as polyethylene (PE), biodegradable plastic or paper mulches might be good solutions in annual vegetable crops [9][10][11][12][13], but installation is complicated or impossible in already established perennial crops. Moreover, in perennial crops, mulching materials should assure some degree of self-incorporation, which is not guaranteed with mulch sheets that easily tear and can be wind-dispersed, polluting the environment [14].…”

The effects of biodegradable and plastic film mulching on nitrogen uptake, distribution, and leaching in a drip-irrigated sandy field

“…Biodegradable films could effectively overcome these problems because they are mainly made of degradable materials (Henry et al, 2003), such as starch-based materials, cellulose acetate (CA), cellulose nitrate (CN), and mixed cellulose filter membrane (CN-CA) (Moreno et al, 2017;Khalil et al, 2018) that can disintegrate directly into CO 2 and H 2 O by soil microbes without causing any significant environmental damage. Therefore, biodegradable films are regarded as valuable alternatives to plastic films that have been adopted in many countries, such as Norway (Touchaleaume et al, 2016), Japan (Wen, 2005), China (Wang et al, 2019a,b), and Spain (Mari et al, 2019). A large number of studies have shown that soil temperatures and soil water contents under biodegradable film mulching (BFM) were similar as under PFM during the early growing season, decreased a little during the middle crop growth stage due to the partial degradation of the biodegradable film, and decreased significantly during the late crop growth stage due to the considerable film degradation (Gu et al, 2017;Saglam et al, 2017；Sun et al, 2018Wang et al, 2019a,b).…”