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?