About a year ago I remember a rep from a producer of compostable corn plastic service ware came to visit me at the shop. I told him that our business participated in the Portland compost program and that I was having a hard time figuring out if his company's products were acceptable to the compost facility, Cedar Grove. I'd used some of his products at a previous job and his were the only compostable/biodegradable trash bags my paper distributor carried. He assured me that their products were completely compostable, but that Cedar Grove just wanted to them to pay an outrageous fee for certification of each of their products. Since they produced everything from forks to clam shells to trash bags, the thousands and thousands of dollars for all of this testing effectively excluded them from participation. Sounded like a classic David and Goliath. To circumvent this injustice, his company planned their own composting facilities on the outskirts of Portland. Sure all of the corn to make their products came from China, but ocean shipping is the most efficient form of transport, he said. The guy at the paper company assured me that even though the bags weren't technically certified, they composted just fine and were far cheaper than the "approved" ones. Seemed like confirmation that you had to grease the right palms to play in this hot "green" market.
I felt a little better about using his trash bags until one day I got a memo from the composting facility stating that if I continued using the same bags, my compostables would be diverted to landfill because the bags didn't break down fast enough and thus compost made with them in the mix had lots of ripped up plastic included. Not the sort of thing you want when you're trying to sell the finished product as a premium soil amendment. So what was the deal! I'm paying extra for compost service and don't want my coffee grounds and veggie scraps sent to landfill. I forwarded the memo to my paper company and started poking around.
It turned out that the standard laid out in ASTM D6400 was what set the bar for "compostable" products of the kind my composter wanted. 6400 was an industry standard and not some arbitrary rule set up to exclude the little guys. It however did exlude many of the products that the maker of my bags produced. I recently went to their website to check out their current claims. Now they only say that their main line consists of "biodegradable" products instead of "compostable" ones. They even have a few disclaimers that their main products don't meet the ASTM D6400 standard (they have a couple of other small lines under different names that do, it seems). Still, they also advertise how they helped out a NW restaurant chain to "go green" by replacing 16 pieces of service ware with their "biodegradable" products. They claim that food on their plates will be wholesome while food served on petroleum-based ware will be tainted with poisons, and that their biodegradable products will make a difference by breaking down to benign components in the landfills. Thing is, I would think that what you get from anaerobic landfill breakdown is the potent greenhouse gas methane! Of course I'd guess most of the 6400-compliant compostable cups end up making methane in the landfill too. Especially since compost cans are basically non-existent on the streets.
All of this raised more questions than I had answers for. I still need to find some for these:
1) I assume that it's better to compost a cup than to put a compostable or biodegradable cup into the landfill. Of course the haulers still have to move my compostable cup to the compost facility which uses petrol (looks like 2 hours and 45 minutes away from me!! CLICK HERE FOR MAP), and their the machinery to help turn the compost uses more energy. What's the total energy when you consider how the corn for the PLA corn plastic is grown in China, shipped here (as plastic stock already?), turned into products, shipped around the country, used, hauled away and composted, and the finished compost hauled to point of use. All of that versus the garbage chain for a basic paper cup for petrol lining that goes into the landfill (versus compostable cup in landfill). And those two versus a reusable durable cup.
2) I've heard that the Cedar Grove facility is already almost maxed out and that it may become harder to enter Portland compost program. I need to fact check that.
3) Is number 2 the reason we don't have compost cans or sorters with compostables/recyclables/landfill everywhere? I suspect that reusable durable cups will be WAY better from an energy and resource impact perspective than compostables, but we need to check that out. If compostables are the way to go, lets get more collection facilities. Seattle already collects foods scraps and compostable wares at home green cans (http://www.seattle.gov/util/Services/Yard/Yard_Waste_Collection/WhatsAccepted/index.htm). Can they do it because the compostig facility is so close by? Why don't we get one going? What's Portland waiting for???
4) Is any other city doing this already? I tried to google for Curitiba, Brazil and reusable cups, but nothing came up. If not, why not? What am I missing? Interesting to see what did come up though. Dart, the maker of cups including styrofoam still, has a study that says disposables are often just as good as reusables if you take the dishwashing into account: http://www.dartcontainer.com/web/environ.nsf/files/ILEA.pdf/$FILE/ILEA.pdf
Starbucks has its analysis about ceramic and glass cups here: http://innovation.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=30802
And the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison has the closest thing to the Portland Cup I've heard of so far, though it was going on in 2004, so who knows if it's still active: http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentid=2197
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