Tuesday, May 01, 2007
A different sort of Reggae sory
Forgive me if I crow for just a moment, but I just found out I'm a finalist for an award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association's 2006 Better Newspapers Contest. What, if anything, does this have to do with Reggae? Well, the story was one I wrote for the Journal's August 24, 2006 edition, just after last year's Reggae on the River, regarding the greening of the festival, specifically the use of corn plastic.
Here's the beginning of "How Green is my Plastic?"
(click on the title to read the rest...)
THE FORK MOVED ALL ON ITS OWN. Not much, just a slight twist, but it definitely moved. It was the summer of 2004 and I was standing in front of the Rasta Pasta booth at Reggae on the River, eating a hot dish of pesto. I'd left the fork stuck in the hot food while talking with a friend. When I pulled it from the pasta I found that the tines were warped into a claw shape. My plastic utensil had melted from the heat of the pasta pesto.
I learned the reason why from the Whitethorn School folks running the pasta booth: The utensils were biodegradable, made from corn. This was explained further when I took the plate and fork to the nearby complex of garbage cans for proper disposal.
A smiling woman sat on a stool amid the barrels and bags dressed in rolled up jeans and a grey Reggae T-shirt with bold letters on the back identifying her as part of the recycling crew. Her job was to direct festivalgoers regarding the proper disposal of their waste: cans here, plastic bottles and cups there, glass in another barrel and so on.
She explained that the large bag marked "plates and utensils" was destined for composting, one part of a plan to move toward a "greener" festival. While garbage duty was not the most glamorous job at Reggae, she was happy to be playing a small part in making the event waste-free and thus more ecologically sound.
aka PLA
The fork I used that day and the cups used to serve beer and soda were made from a plastic resin, polylactic acid, aka PLA, a material most often made from corn but also using other plant starches including potatoes and wheat.
Just about anyone you ask will tell you that bio-based PLA plastics sound like a great idea. With awareness about the relationship between petrochemicals and greenhouses gases at an all time high (along with the cost of gasoline), people see this new plastic derived from renewable resources as an attractive alternative to our dependence on oil.
Add in the fact that we are getting buried by an avalanche of plastic containers used to carry and hold this, that and the other thing. Around 25 percent of the material in our landfills is plastic.
The notion that bio-plastic is "biodegradable" would also seem to be quite a plus. The people who make the stuff certainly seem to think so. The word is embossed on the handles of the forks and spoons used at Reggae this year.
The use of corn plastic has grown by leaps and bounds since I first heard about it. Last year NatureWorks, a major player in the industry (and the company that makes the cups used at Reggae) signed a deal to supply Wal-Mart with clear plastic containers for produce.
In a press release Wal-Mart noted that PLA plastic will be used for 100 million containers per year and bragged that, "with this change to packaging made from corn we will save the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline and reduce more than 11 million lbs. of green house gas emissions from polluting our environment." They also pointed to PLA's "ability to provide a price stable product as the price of oil needed to produce conventional packaging keeps climbing higher and higher."
Could there be any downside to this picture of an eco-groovy plastic future? A closer look into the world of corn plastic shows that there are problems yet to be resolved. (more)
