Davidherron's List: Sustainability

• Initially, biodegradable and compostable plant material based bottles seemed to be the cure for this convenience quandary.
• beyond the simple math of eliminating petroleum as source material, there’s a problem: Most bioplastic doesn’t compost, unless in a professional environment (some don’t, even then).
• To make matters worse, bioplastic, when tossed in the trash by people believing it would biodegrade, actually releases methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
• in Coke’s case it’s 30% plant based, sourced from purpose grown sugar cane ethanol
• Coca Cola representative told me “Estimates show that sugarcane production in Brazil could increase thirty times without endangering sensitive ecosystems or taking land destined for food crops,” the question arises, why even grow food crops for bottles when Pepsi is currently creating bottles sourced primarily from food production scraps?
• an interesting third option has been quietly innovating: Casey Container.
• Casey Container has created an additive usable with a wide range of plastics, even rubber, that allows the resulting product to be usable in all its usual applications, while being both recyclable and biodegradable. The resulting biodegraded material is not simply smaller pieces of plastic that continue to be an ecological issue. It becomes harmless biogas and biomatter. And rather than needing heat, light and moisture to begin the process of biodegrading and thus not working in tightly packed landfills, it is activated by the very microbes typically found in landfills.

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