Firms all over the world are advising us about how green they are and how many trees, birds and babies they are saving buy flogging their new "eco" merchandise to us. Whole companies have sprung up dedicated solely to selling us with green merchandise, advising us on how to behave, and coincidently selling the eco merchandise we need in order to stave off Armageddon.
It is truly amazing just how many companies are singly handedly saving us from ourselves and our nasty consumerism, boo, hiss.
Trading on ones green ethics, particularly when there are none is pretty unashamed behaviour in my book and I feel companies are simply not looking at the big picture when moving from one product to another, only thinking about portraying themselves as a green, ethical firm.
One of the newest "green" products to be promoted in this way are Poly Lactic Acid lined paper coffee cupsold by
catering supplies firms, coffee shops and supermarkets.
Polylactide is a biodegradable derived from natural resources, such as corn starch (U.S.) or sugarcane (Outside the U.S). Although Poly Lactic Acid has been known for a while, it has only been of commercial interest in recent years, because of its biodegradability.
As well as being used to line the inside of
paper cups in place of the plastic lining normally used Poly Lactic Acid is in use in
plastic cups, plastic cutlery, carrier bags, food packaging, all manner of catering supplies and even diapers.
These new "bio" paper coffee cups are now very much in vogue as we all try in our own little way to stop global warming.
One of the major problems associated with this new Poly Lactic Acid lined paper coffee cup on sale at numerous stores and coffee shops all over the planet is that people are expecting them to biodegrade in their trash when they must be sent to industrial composting facilities or composted at home, individually plantedand surrounded by lots of compost. If these
paper coffee cups are simply trashed they decompose at the same rate as normal paper cups, ie decades
Unless individuals compost all their biodegradable disposable coffee cups at home (should they are aware they have one) there will inevitably be two types of disposable paper cups needing to be sorted through at waste reclamation centres whereas before all waste paper cups could be simply sent for recycling without having to undertake this time consuming and expensive operation.
Moreover once these
PLA disposable cups find their way into normal recycling channels (and you cannot visibly tell the difference) it will contaminate the whole recycling batch as oil based plastic lining on standard disposable paper cups and the starch based natural lining on the PLA cups does not mix. You get the oil on water scenario.
Most companies manufacturing, selling or using these products also seem not to have considered what was taken from the land in order to grow crops to make this "eco" product. Like bio fuels land once used for production of food is now being turned over for fields to grow alternatives to plastics and petroleum. There are even stories of trees being felled in order to make space to grow the sugar cane plants. This contributes to increased food prices, the effect of which most will have noticed over the past 12 months. There could never be enough available land to fully switch over from our reliance on plastics to enable us to move to farming this natural alternative, everyone would starve.
On the topic of people starving one other point to think about regarding these new PLA plastic products is that we have spent years giving farm subsidies to farmers in Africa to help them create crops and to not need financial assistance. Some of the crops these farmers are harvesting are sugarcane and corn.
As we are now mass producing those same crops for Bio Fuel and alternatives to plastics, lowering the prices, removing their livelihoods.
There are alternatives that given a little more consideration could do many of the jobs these firms hope to achieve through their use of Poly Lactic Acid lined or produced cups. Oxo-biodegradable Plastic (OBP's) for example are normal plastics such as polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyethylene (PE) to which is added a proprietary mixture that speeds up the decomposition of the chemical structure of the plastic.
OBP'sdegrade, then biodegrade, without the need to compost, at a pre determined rate, leaving no residue, giving off no methane and leaving no harmful fragments.
The residue is then amenable to conversion by micro-organisms, for which these products are an energy source or food and also into CO2 and H2O; thereby returning otherwise intractable plastics to the ecosystem.
These Oxo-biodegradable Plastics can now have a shelf life, pre-determined when manufactured Utilising these plastics does not mean they cannot be recycled.
Sadly plenty of other short sighted green ideas are out there, such as the international fast food restaurant that stopped using its plastic coffee stirrers and switched to wooden stirrers in an attempt at greening their company. Out of fear of lawsuits from customers for splintering customers mouths with their wood stirrers they insisted that they are covered with gelatin (like your prescription capsules). Adding this extra process to the production of the stirrers costs a lot of time, energy and expense, to the point where the wooden stirrers became more energy intensive than simply using plastic. One other classic greening was the banks saving millions of trees by using green bank accounts which use paperless statements, an idea I learned about from a paper flyer and saw advertised on billboard advertisements.
Plastics are not "evil" as many would have you believe, reducing our dependence on it is an ok notion however we cannot simply replace all plastics with a seemingly greener alternative without thinking about all the consequences, and definitely not just to be seen to be greening your firm
