Yesterday I spotlighted a grocery store and now it's on to restaurants. Awhile ago (actually a long time ago) I got the chance to check out this place - Bark Hot Dogs - with my friend Mark, who writes on urban policy for Forbes and whom you should check out. This title is actually the query I googled to rediscover it. TimeOut New York says it has the best dogs in town, but I'm more into the business idea.
For what is, in essence, a fast food joint, they do well minimizing on packaging and have eliminated persistent waste. When I was there, everything was biodegradable and our food was served up on these charmingly lackluster cardboard troughs.
Perhaps most interesting, they list all their suppliers on their site, under the aptly named 'Resources Menu.' Their culinary repertoire is biased toward nearby farmers, largely from New England, with an occasional western state in there.
Other highlights include that they acquire all their energy from hyrdoelectric and wind power via a local utility and convert their cooking grease into biofuel. For me this establishment is a vision of the future, illustrating how it's already possible through existing services to keep all outputs - including conventional wastes - in the production loop.
Bashing plastics has been one of my more common themes here. I've gone on at length about how they're not truly recyclable and thus create waste management, industrial and public health issues.
At the same time, switching to nontoxic biodegradable substitutes for all current plastic products - packaging, durable goods, medical supplies - would trigger its own set of problems. The additional methane produced from the decay of that much material could feasibly exacerbate climate change, as research from North Caroline State University suggests.
Clearly the solution to waste management issues is not to replace one type of waste with another, but to reduce how much we waste. And within that amount, to have a hybrid solution.
I'm not waiting around for microbes to take care of plastic for me (although bacteria have apparently already adapted to take care of nylon for us), but if we can manage it in a more viable way and avoid the hazards of getting it into our food system, then plastics won't be the enemy. That's precisely what Mike Biddle's succeeding in doing.
He's overcome the challenge of sorting plastics into their respective types for maintaining their integrity and as a result, has turned a nonrenewable petroleum-based resource into a renewable one. His method is cheaper both financially and from a social cost perspective. For that reason it stands to redress a fundamental wildcard that has been distorting our economy.
In an earlier post I mentioned that Coca-Cola has already had its green bottle on the market for a couple years now. What makes the bottle green is that 30% of its content comes from materials that are renewable as they're made from plants. I was excited to see at work today that our latest shipment of Dasani, which is produced by Coke, is also housed in the container. It had previously only been available in the Western United States in this form.
As Coke explains on their site, they've been able to create the bottle by using different ingredients in the synthesis of its plastic, polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which is commonly known as Type 1 and the material most plastic bottles are made from. This involved replacing a petroleum-based ingredient with the same chemical derived from sugarcane-based ethanol. This accounts for the renewable component of the bottle. The remaining 70% consists of terephthalic acid, which Coke has not yet been able to derive from plants. With the release of Pepsi's latest green bottle, however, it now seems that they've been beaten to the punch. As it is Coke's aim to take that step themselves and shift all of its packaging to renewable forms I expect that we will soon see plant-based plastics dominate the marketplace.
As Coke astutely points out "Just because a material is made from plants doesn't mean it's necessarily better for the environment or society." For that reason they've made efforts to remedy the issues their campaign could potentially give rise to. By using sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil they've better ensured that their latest operations don't actually produce more additional carbon than is saved. This supply choice simultaneously keeps production from crowding out food supplies. That Brazilian ethanol is so conducive to these aims has interesting implications for the agricultural subsidies in America keeping it out of this country.
It's worth noting here that the plant-based components of the PlantBottle are not necessarily biodegradable and that even biodegradation doesn't always eliminate toxic chemicals. In other words, once Coke launches its 100% plant-based bottle, it still won't be as simple as throwing it into a compost bin, which arguably isn't very effective in terms of energy and resource use anyway. Rather, these bottles will have to be channeled into a recycling system that could conceivably go on to have the materials reused indefinitely if well-managed.
This initiative has highlighted for me a couple of best practices in sustainable business that I have in part articulated elsewhere. First, if you're going to create persistent or harmful wastes as a byproduct of production, make sure the channels for indefinitely reusing them are available and utilized. That's the direction Coke is currently moving in. Second, in the event that wastes escape your recycling system, work it out such that they don't come back to bite us, preferably by making them nontoxic, if not both nontoxic and biodegradable.
I say nontoxic and biodegradable because as I alluded to earlier 'biodegradable' is too vague a term to adequately guide sustainability decisions. It's even been used to describe PET and other plastics, since they inevitably break down into smaller pieces. But that's actually a problem, since their fundamental chemistry remains the same and poses threats to biology. What I propose is coining a new term for these purposes - perhaps bioconvertible - to describe materials that we know can be chemically transformed into something useful or at least harmless by natural processes, a class that would largely consist of time-tested, "natural" materials.
PlantBottle leaves us with some of the same issues that the conventional PET bottle does. We wouldn't want it to get into our oceans, for instance, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. The growing niche for recycling Coke and Pepsi's efforts are creating promises to make the collection process more widespread and efficient and thus reduce the risk of persistent litter. Most importantly, plant-based plastics take advantage of an underutilized resource in the form of agricultural byproducts and reduce our dependency on foreign resources and fossil fuels. Let's just hope that the resulting decrease in oil demand won't lead to a commensurate drop in its price that would tempt us to use it even longer.
This move has come about as a result of public pressure exerted by citizens either at the consumer level or as it translates into government policy. Thanks to consciousness of the repercussions of their actions, market actors are improving the efficiency of how the market operates. That process has afforded us healthier alternatives at no greater financial cost while creating business opportunities in the recycling industry and elsewhere. Without that development, business would have gone on as usual and these advances wouldn't have materialized until precipitated by external shocks, such as spikes in oil prices. This dynamic underscores the importance of continuing to build such awareness of the consequences of our decisions and the responsibility that comes with freedom.
Perhaps Coke's experience will one day lead it to push bioplastics more than carbonated beverages. Who am I kidding?
This is what I find to be a beautiful short film that gives some perspective and pause for thought on a phenomenon we are already fully aware of: many of the materials we use to produce goods last long beyond the useful lives of those goods:
Whether made of plastic or another substance, if our trash cannot decompose or otherwise degrade it stands to adversely impact not only the natural ecology, but also the quality of our lives. In the absence of a natural pathway for breaking down our trash into a more innocuous form or state, the possibility remains that we could accomplish it through the use of artificial or industrial means: recycling or engineering closed input-output loops into the production process.
But as we are aware of from our daily lives, even if we do not always think about it, the lugubrious reality is that the means for fully processing our waste do not exist and much of it slips through the cracks of our waste management system. It then escapes into and contaminates the environment, both human and natural.
This process is already playing out in the now well-publicized Pacific Garbage Patch and elsewhere. The problem is that plastic and other persistent rubbish cannot be converted into matter that can be usefully employed by organisms, existing natural cycles or by industry.
What is worse, what remains of our waste impairs life. At the macroscopic level this has taken the form of chicks dying after their parents feed them garbage, mistaking it for food. As far as plastic goes, once broken down into its basic molecules it interferes with biological pathways. Since plastic is photodegradable - broken down by light - this process inevitably occurs wherever plastic is exposed to light.
Plastics and other industrial chemicals have entered the human food web and trace amounts of them are already present in our bodies. In light of these developments it becomes clear to me that one of the major tasks before us on the path to sustainability will involve eliminating persistent waste. This will have to be accomplished either by taking advantage of natural processes to capture and recycle our wastes or by establishing synthetic means to do so.
Since I am not an engineer and in any event hold little top-down sway over the planning of manufacturers' production systems, the most salient way I can have an impact on the push to create no impact is, paradoxically enough, as a consumer. I may not be able to dictate what ingredients go into producing one product or service or another, how the outputs of those processes are disposed of, or how much it costs, but I can lend my support to businesses that incorporate sustainable practices. The rationale behind this approach is that if a critical proportion of consumers begins exhibiting such behavior, companies will respond accordingly, having been pitted against one another by the market in a race to do greener business. Once this process is well under way the system will transform itself from the inside out and we might already be witnessing the beginnings of this.
It is easy to criticize this approach, and even easier to criticize it without offering an alternative solution. One objection I expect is to the idea that people would be willing to engage in sustainable purchasing. It is seemingly irrational for someone to pay the higher costs traditionally associated with pursuing a more sustainable lifestyle. However, people engage in seemingly irrational economic behavior on a regular basis. They are willing to pay a premium on a product no materially different from a competing one for such things as a sense of status, aesthetics or other criteria.
Informed consumerism could similarly be motivated by such considerations. What is more, the premium on more sustainable alternatives in part translates into not just these abstract benefits but also material ones, such as cleaner water. If this were not a sufficient incentive it would be mainly because deterioration in environmental quality results from a tragedy of the commons and might warrant greater measures.
The difficulty is that it is not easy to determine what the sustainable alternatives are. You can attribute this to political spin, marketing and greenwashing, cryptic standards or more generally limits on individual knowledge and time. In my effort to find out to what extent the production of plastic could be made more sustainable, I discovered that some plastics are already biodegradable. One would think that this information would be pertinent enough to warrant the implementation of a clear standard and labeling systems for such plastics, but finding out which were was riddled with as much complexity as anyone who has looked into the recycling process for plastics has encountered.
My solution for this and similar issues is to overshoot. Instead of letting the complexity of these issues justify inaction, I have opted for the simple solution of cutting out of my consumer basket products incorporating anything other than those substances I know can be metabolized by ecology or industry. What that really means is that I am now refraining from buying any disposable or nondurable products unless they are biodegradable or fully recyclable - i.e. capable of reconstituting what they originally were - as glass and metal are.
The philosophy behind this is that if something consisting of essentially immortal materials will not be used in one way or another indefinitely, people should not buy it. As such, I have not completely ruled out laptops or other durable goods made from plastic. First, they last, and second, services exist for channeling their components back into production after the useful lives of the products themselves have ended. The reason such services exist is because there is money to be had in them and that will grow increasingly the case as people choose to make more sustainable purchases over those that promote persistent waste.
