Corporate firms far and wide are advising usabout how green they are and how many trees, birds and babies they are saving buy introducing their new “eco” merchandise to us. Whole companies have been created dedicated solely to supplying us with green merchandise, telling us on how to behave, and coincidently selling the green merchandise we must have in order to avoid Armageddon.
It is truly amazing just how many companies are singularly saving us from ourselves and our nasty consumerism, boo, grrr.
Trading on ones green concepts, particularly when there are little is pretty bad form methinks and by my reckoning companies are simply not looking at the big picture when moving from one type of product to another, only caring about marketing themselves as a green, eco company.
One of the popular “earth friendly” products to be marketed in this way are Biodegradable paper coffee cupsold by catering disposables firms, coffee chains and supermarkets.
Polylactic acid is a biodegradable derived from “renewable resources” (I use the term loosely), such as corn starch (in the USA) or sugarcane (Outside the U.S). Although PLA has been known for a while, it has only been of commercial interest in recent years, in light of its biodegradability.
As well as being used to line the inside of paper coffee cups in place of the oil based lining normally used Poly Lactic Acid is in use in plastic cups, plastic cutlery, carrier bags, food packaging, all manner of catering disposables and even diapers.
These new “biodegradable” paper coffee cups are now very much in vogue as we all attempt in our own little way to stop global warming.
One of the biggest problems with this new Biodegradable paper coffee cup on sale at numerous stores and coffee chains all over the planet is that customers are expecting them to biodegrade in their bins when they need to be sent to composting facilities or put in your compost at home, individually plantedand covered by lots of compost. If these paper cups are simply sent to landfill they break down at the same rate as oil based plastic lined paper coffee cups, ie decades
Unless individuals compost their biodegradable paper cups at home (should they even know they have one) there will inevitably be two types of disposable paper cups requiring sorting at waste reclamation centres whereas in the past all waste disposable paper cups could be easily sent for recycling without having to separate them.
Moreover once these Poly Lactic Acid lined disposable cups end up in normal recycling channels (and you cannot tell the difference) it will ruin the entire recycling batch as oil based plastic lining on standard paper cups and the natural lining on the PLA cups does not mix well. You get the oil on water scenario.
Most companies producing, selling or using these products also seem not to have considered what was taken from the earth in order to create crops to make this natural product. Like bio fuels before them land once used for production of foodstuffs is now being used for crops to grow alternatives to plastic and fuels. There are even stories of forests being removed in order to make space to grow the sugar cane crops. This contributes to increases in food prices, the result of which everybody will have noticed over the last 12 months. There could never be enough available space to fully switch over from our reliance on plastic to enable us to move to using this naturally produced alternative, the world would starve.
On the subject of people starving one other point to consider regarding these new  Poly Lactic Acid plastic products is that we have spent considerable time giving subsidies to farmers in Africa to assist them grow crops and stand on their own two feet. Many of the crops these farmers are producing are corn or sugarcane.
Now we are 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 companies hope to achieve through their use of Poly Lactic Acid lined or produced cups. Oxo-biodegradable Plastic (OBP’s) for example are conventional plastics such as polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyethylene (PE) to which is added a proprietary mixture that accelerates the breakdown of the structure of the plastic.
Oxo-biodegradable Plasticswill degrade, 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 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, determined at the point of manufacture Using this new technology does not prevent them from being recycled.
Sadly there are many more stories like this, such as the international burger house that dropped its plastic drink stirrers and moved to wooden stirrers in an attempt to be seen as green. Out of fear of being sued for getting wooden splinters in customers lips with their wood stirrers they had the stirrers covered with gelatin (like your prescription pills). Adding this extra process to the production of the stirrers costs a lot of time, energy and expense, to the point where the natural product becomes more energy intensive than simply using plastic. Another classic example of short sighted greening was the banks saving acres of rainforest by switching paperless bank statements, about which I learned on a paper flyer and noticed advertised on billboard advertisements.
Plastic is not “evil” as many would have you think, reducing our use of it is an ok notion however we cannot simply replace all plastics with a seemingly natural alternative without considering all the repercussions, and certainly not just to be seen to be greening your firm
Event Supplies (UK) Ltd
15/17 Devonshire Street
Keighley BD21 2BH
sales@eventsupplies.co.uk
Telephone: 0844 499 5456
event supplies stock a huge range of quality catering disposable items used throughout professional catering businesses, whether you are organising a large event or small party, event supplies service, prices and product range ensure your catering disposable needs are exceeded.
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