From the Ground Up Blog – July 25, 2011: You Are What You Eat
A great article recently reminded me of the challenges we face when we make changes to be more sustainable. One of these changes is the current compost movement – returning things to the earth from whence they came. The article “Are There Toxins In Your Compost” was especially relevant given more major cities around the world, including our own Vancouver, BC, are expanding weekly collection of yard and food waste for composting, making it easier for everyone to participate. While simple and sustainable, and something I have done for years, not everything everyone tosses in a compost bin should actually be going in there. The problem stems from lack of education, laziness and our world still being filled with products that don’t return to the earth from whence they came.
Common items that show up in a municipal compost, despite the best efforts of city staff and contractors to remove them, include pieces of plastic from all kinds of products: bags, toys, containers – the list goes on. This is a similar scenario to the small plastic particles that are floating around in the ocean right now, creating a toxic soup that gets back into the food chain through the fish that we eat; a process known as bioaccumulation. With compost, the small plastic bits that don’t get filtered out end up in the fields where our food is grown and leach their toxins into the soil, and ultimately the food that we eat.
This is one of the reasons that I am really passionate about the products we develop at Solegear. Our high-performance, compostable plastic, Polysole®, is not only produced using 100% non-toxic and natural feedstocks sourced from the earth, but can also be disposed of in an industrial compost pile at the end of its useful life. Petroleum-based plastics can’t compete when it comes to the lifecycle of compostable plastics, as they require up to 1,000 years to break back down into their organic building blocks. Polysole has been designed to come full circle in under 1 year.
The day is coming, and sooner than we think, when it will be commonplace for the right plastics to end up in our compost bins. I see a time when compostable plastics will be widely encouraged and we won’t have to worry about toxins bioaccumulating in our food chains anymore. A safe, efficient and sustainable approach to making the products that we use everyday, returned to the earth from whence they came. Being a new dad, that’s peace of mind for me as the world gets passed on to future generations.
I’m interested to learn more about plastics you use and what applications you see compostable plastics having a strong future in. Share your stories and comments below, and as always, if you have an idea for a blog post send it my way – I’ll do my best to tackle it!
Toby Reid, Solegear CEO
A good reminder form the folks at BioCycle that you are what you spray, as well:
http://www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/002410.html