Last month, my family and I took a trip to Washington DC to the
Green Festival. This was our first Green Festival and our first trip to DC in several years. Since then, I have praised the festival for their numerous fair trade vendors, tasty vegan food choices and use of compostable kitchenware. The forks, spoons, cups, plates and even the plastic water bottles were made from potato and corn starch and presumably break down in fewer than 120 days.
Large "compost bins" were strategically located throughout the convention center along with well-marked recycling bins for paper, plastic, cans and glass. (I'll bet the garbage cans were hardly used.) I thought two things: "How cool is that?" and "Are they really going to dump this stuff in a giant compost pile on the outskirts of DC?"
Two days after the festival I had a client meeting at a multi-billion dollar software firm. The corporate cafeteria where we picked up our lunch to take back to the conference room was stocked to the ceiling with styrofoam everything: food containers, soup bowls, coffee cups, etc. It did, to their credit, have several vegetarian dishes to choose from.
After that meeting, I did a quick search of the web for compostable and biodegradable cups, forks, bowls and carry out containers and found the following prices:
Compostable 7oz cold cups: 5 cents per cup (qty: 2000)
Biodegradable take-out containers: 9 cents per container (qty: 600)
Compostable forks, knives and spoons: 3 cents per item (qty: 1000)
According to Cereplast, manufacturers of the resin used to make these plastic products, price is no longer an issue. In this
CNET article, the CEO of Cereplast says:
"Just as important, the stuff may be cheaper, thanks to improved technology and rising gas prices. A pound of Cereplast's resin sells for around 58 to 60 cents. A pound of petroleum-based polystyrene, meanwhile, sells for around 60 cents. We believe we are the same price or lower. In the past, one of the problems was everybody wants to be green, but nobody could afford it."
The article goes on to say that in 2000, a box of 1000 biodegrable utensils cost around $60. Today, that same box costs around $10. That's much cheaper than the prices I quoted above - and that's a good thing. If you want to know the difference between biodegradable, degradable and compostable, check out this page on the
WorldCentric site - the same site that I found the pricing above.
I'm pretty sure that this multi-billion dollar software firm could get quite the volume discount considering it employees nearly 22,000 people - most of whom probably eat in the convenient (and subsidized) company lunchroom. What I'm not sure of is this: at the end of the day (a saying they like to use), who's going to compost all this stuff?
11 Comments:
Good information. I am surprised that there is such a thing as bio-degadrable or compostable "plastic"ware. Too bad they don't have a budget (I am guessing) to publicize the product more to large companies as well as individual consumers.
PlanetThoughts, at
7:52 AM
David Alexander
http://www.planetthoughts.org
By
Hey,
P, at
5:33 AM
Nice piece! I really like your blog. But I disagree with David above. Have you ever seen commercials for non-biodegradable plastics? The problem, I think, is not so much the advertising, but the unawareness of people about
their environment. Commercials may help, but it's the mindset of people that needs to be changed.
Regards,
Pieter
By
Here I recommend a web-paper. Link to http://e-info.org.tw/subscribe if interested.
Willusion, at
10:06 AM
By
Great stuff! Your blog is fantastic!
James Joyce, at
7:30 PM
By
Nice blog. You get a lot of readers here.
Anonymous, at
2:21 AM
I gonna do junk mail collection for a year. Whatever junk lands in my letterbox. We'll see what's hot at the end of the year.
REad more here.
http://web-to-print.blogspot.com/2006/12/my-new-hobby-junk-mail-collection.html
it would be great if you could spread the word. We then can compare different locations / countries / etc.
By
Awesome blog, and a very informative post.
mcar2185, at
10:25 PM
By
I completely agree with your tag line "Believing that if people knew more, they'd do more." In my work as a professor of public health, I am asked questions all the time about environmental health problems. I know how hard it is to find trustworthy and practical answers to these questions. To help improve people's access to this information, I decided to post these questions and my responses in a blog. You can check out my blog at http://ecohelper.blogspot.com. I would be curious to know what you think. Or, ask me a question!
Prof. Helen, at
11:00 PM
By
Wendy,
Anonymous, at
6:44 PM
Great blog. Could you do me a favor and enter some thoughts on "Protecting the Environment" on a Wiki project I started A Guide. I created a snub for it that can be edited.
Thanks,
Paul
By
You will find that more and more people are not thinking about the price of things to help with the environment as you can not put a price on such an important issue
pete, at
5:33 AM
By
On the 'company size' vs 'ecological conscience' note -- I worked (albiet briefly) for an ~ 1,000 person company and there was a wide range of attitudes there. Given that we lost ~ $40 million per quarter pre-merger, there was a BUNCH of personal responsibility there. Many people rode thier bike to work (picture stairwells clogged with mountain bikes!) and many people brought their coffee mugs from home and treated the surrounding area respectfully.
Anonymous, at
1:00 AM
Keep up the good work, push sustainability, and steadily ride those that are 'immobile' -- they only THINK they are immovable... but they fear what they really know: They cannot ignore the connected nature of this world.
Peace and love,
- R
By
There are compostable everything now. Packaging is one of great use, considering globalized shippings efficency of moving boxes around. There are companies that can make clear packaging for such items as self phones that brake down into environmentally friendly products in only a few months, the costs of which are comparable to traditional plastic.
david palinsky (II), at
4:57 PM
By
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