The Wall Street Journal had one of the most interesting articles I’ve read about trash in a while.  So often it’s easy to throw something away and think that it will magically disappear.  Out of sight, out of mind.  I’m guilty.  This article helps you remember that’s not the case.

The average American generates 7 pounds of trash per day.  The average person in Japan generates 2.5 pounds per day.  Other countries are similar.  Why is there such a disparity?  My hypothesis is that they have better producer responsibility laws and more regulation to incentivize recycling and penalize landfilling.  There’s probably also a bit of consumer responsibility involved in which people (and companies) don’t want to over-packaged products.

I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer, but the only way to make changes is to periodically stop and think about products we use everyday and consider how much is essential vs how much is unnecessary.  It makes me reflect on my trip to Bhutan and Thailand last year in which I witnessed societies that don’t believe in over-packaging and over consumption.  You take what you need and that’s it.  And what you need is far less than what you might think you need.  Napkins in Asia are like small squares of toilet paper.  Products aren’t packaged in multiple layers of plastic.  It’s a societal norm.

Here are a couple shocking data points from the Wall Street Journal article that will make you stop and think:

• Trash has become America’s #1 export (waste paper, soiled cardboard, aluminum cans, electronics, and more).  Other countries export computers, cars and other value-add products.  We export garbage.

• American communities on average spend more money on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries or schoolbooks, according to the U.S. Census data on municipal budgets.  Ouch.

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Eco-Products just launched an innovative marketing campaign last week to give away free cups and plates to anyone who wants to have a green BBQ, picnic or party this summer.  The campaign is called Tweet for the Planet™.  We reward people for tweeting, sharing, or pinning about Eco-Products.

If you want a free pack of compostable cups or plates, all you have to do is follow the Tweet for the Planet™ link and do just that – tweet about the free product you just received or share it on Facebook or pin it on Pinterest.  We’ll send you a free pack of cups or plates to use at your next BBQ, party or picnic.  Simple, right?

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There’s nothing like a good prank.  Here’s one that a really cool Boulder startup called Orbotix did on coffee shop customers using an Eco-Products cup.  The device Orbotix makes is called Sphero and it’s a robotic ball that is controlled via an iphone/ipad/android phone.

Checkout the GreenStripe cup in action…

Sphero Robot Pranks: Ball Under A Cup from Sphero on Vimeo.

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A couple of notable events in the foodservice industry occurred this week that highlighted the continued movement away from foam.  Granted, over 100 cities across the country have already banned foam take-out packaging, but the announcements this week could be even more impactful than legislation.

1.  McDonalds announced that they are launching a pilot program in 2,000 U.S. stores (15% of their total US locations) to move away from foam coffee cups to an insulated paper hot cup.

Why is this important? When McDonalds goes a direction with packaging, the rest of world usually follows.  I commend them on giving paper cups a shot.  This move is exactly what the industry needs to continue to move towards more environmental alternatives.

2.  Dart Container, one of the largest producers of foam cups, just purchased Solo Cup Company, one of the largest producers of paper cups.

Why is this important? Dart has historically been very pro-foam even to the extent of trying to sell foam as more environmental than paper.  It will be interesting if this billion dollar acquisition will shift the direction of a major foam company to paper.  I hope for the planet that it does.

I know all eyes from the foodservice industry are on these two events.  I’ll be interested in how they shake out in the coming months.  Hopefully this means we’ll be seeing less foam cups out there in the world.

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Although you can’t get a great view in the pic below, my daughter is holding an Eco-Products custom printed cup from the Hyatt in Maui. She was too cute in her hula dress to not post a pic.

It has been great to see our products over here, but I was shocked to see how much foam I saw in Oahu in particular (not as much on Maui). And the recycling infrastructure was pretty poor compared to what I was expecting. Not many options to recycle various plastics. Maybe it was just where I was, but I would have thought that an island would be super into zero waste which didn’t seem to be the case. Aloha!

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Sadly, the industry I’m in is laden with myths, false claims, misleading statements, and general consumer confusion.  The most common falsity I encounter is when a customer thinks a certain product is compostable or biodegradable when in fact it isn’t.

That is a challenging situation to navigate through.  A customer has made a conscious decision to try to be more environmentally responsible, often going against what he’d prefer to do – the easy route of not making a change from his conventional disposables use – and usually paying more money to do so.  You can imagine, it doesn’t always go over well to tell him that he has been completely misled.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are customers who adopted environmentally-friendly disposables early on and subsequently think that what they were told several years ago by the first salesman that called on him still holds true today.  This situation is equally as challenging to navigate because the customer has relied on the sales pitch from several years ago to educate his staff and patrons about the products.  He has donned himself a thought-leader role which makes it all that more difficult to inform him that what he was told several years ago is actually not correct or no longer valid.

This is one of the most difficult situations to overcome with prospective customers – convincing them that what they believe, or at least what they were told by other people, is not correct.

The only way I’ve found to be able to do this is by presenting facts.  I can do that in the example above when I have to convince someone a product isn’t compostable when he believes it is.  It’s not that hard to get data to prove that a product is compostable or not.

However, there aren’t always product tests and hard data available.  Sometimes the only way to know the truth about products is to dive deeply into the supply chain, the waste stream, and the industry in general.

For example, companies who don’t sell bioplastics often sell against them by stating things like “they contaminate the recycling stream and create major problems for recyclers.”  The truth of it, though, is that if you talk to people who run recycling facilities (MRFs) around the country, bioplastics are not showing up as a contaminate.  Bioplastics are typically removed from the recycling process because they are usually made into shapes like cups and tubbed-shaped containers which largely can’t be recycled anyway even if they are made out of plastic and even if someone puts them in a blue bin.  Those shapes of plastic containers end up being landfilled anyway or shipped to China, at least with the current U.S. recycling infrastructure.

That’s hard to explain to a customer if he adamantly believes that bioplastics are bad because some sales rep told him so one day a few years ago.  And that’s not something in which hard data is readily accessible or easy to present.  It’s based on industry knowledge, time spent in recycling facilities, and getting to know subject matter experts.

I don’t know a better way to overcome this obstacle that I routinely face.  I guess I just have to keep presenting the facts, keep educating myself with accurate data, and hope that people will be open to change and new ideas.  Do you have any suggestions for me?

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A couple months ago I wrote about the latest municipal solid waste report published by the EPA.  It indicated that America’s recycling rate for PET bottles/jars is 21%.  (I’m doing everything in my power right now not to go off on how pathetic that is – 8 out of 10 plastic bottles are landfilled.)

Despite how low that 21% number is, there is something very deceiving about it that was shared with me this week when I had dinner with a very knowledgeable person in the recycling industry.

California has an approximately 70% recycling rate for PET bottles.  (Now that’s more like it.)  They have a bottle bill you have probably heard of that tacks on a 5 cent deposit to every bottle purchased and is refunded to the individual when the bottle is brought back.  That bottle bill is a massive incentive for people to recycle their bottles.

What this industry expert shared with me is that if you exclude California from the EPA’s recycling figures, the other 49 states actually only recycle 10-12% of their PET bottles in aggregate.  (Geez.  I thought 21% was bad.)

Take out the other bottle bill states (OR, IA, MI, NY, HI, ME, MA, VT, CT), which most average at least 70% redemption, and the national PET recycling rate is down to around 8%. (I didn’t think it could go any lower than 10-12%.)

All these years, we’ve been applauding the gradually improving recycling rate in the U.S. when, in fact, it’s actually much lower than we think.  The more accurate way to present recycling data would be to present it for bottle bill states vs non-bottle bill states and I wish the EPA would do that.

I tried looking through the EPA website to see if I could find the statistics myself to clarify all of this.  I wasn’t successful, so email me if I’m totally off base.  I don’t think I am and until I’m notified otherwise, I’m going to believe the recycling expert I referenced.  He knows his stuff.

And now for my soapbox… If your business or household doesn’t recycle, do something about it.  It’s not hard and it’s possible you’ll save money on your trash bill when you start diverting waste into the recycle stream.  Seeing a water bottle being thrown away is like hearing fingernails scratching across a chalk board.  It just shouldn’t ever happen.  Plain and simple.  Do something to make it never happen again in your home or business.

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As a parent of two young kids and a self-proclaimed Eco-Patriot, I’m often frustrated by the un-eco-friendliness of the diaper world.  Admittedly, I don’t have the commitment, stamina, desire, or whatever else is required to use cloth diapers.  Frankly, I’m not very excited about the thought of scraping my kids’ poop off of an article of clothing and then putting it into the washing machine that my clothes go into.  I have a hard enough time when my 2-and-a-half year old, whom we’re trying to potty train, has an accident in her underwear.  I usually just throw the underwear out so I don’t have to deal with the mess even though it’s her coveted Cinderalla underwear that she will never forgive me for getting rid of.  “Cinderalla got messy,” I say.

Sure, there are services out there that can handle washing cloth diapers for us, but I just don’t have the time or desire in my busy schedule to manage another vendor in my personal time.  I manage enough vendors at work.

I know, I get a mark against my eco patriotism for this one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slighting people who use cloth diapers.  The world needs more people like them and less people like me.  I  just can’t get myself to convert.

And I know there are diapers that apparently dissolve in water when you flush them down the toilet, but I haven’t had success with those keeping doo-doo inside those when my kids crap.  All it takes is one massive blowout – and I’m talking excrement out the leg holes of the diaper and up the back to somehow reach the top of the head – to make me never want to try any other kind of diaper again except for what has worked well thus far for us.

Anyway, I’ll stop defending my un-eco-patriotism and get to the topic of this post.  I just read that TerraCycle is now in the business of “recycling” dirty disposable diapers and then making products out of them.  That’s right, collecting kid dookie and making a salable product out of it.  Needless to say, I live in (well, actually, my amazing wife does much more so) a dirty diaper vortex so I was blown away to read about what TerraCycle is doing (especially after having just changed a massive explosion from my 6-month old).  How could anyone want to buy a product out of ka-ka even if it is washed incredibly well?  Hopefully there’s a big FDA approval process somewhere along the line.

Apparently TerrCycle is trying to partner with Huggies to capture the baby fecal matter.  Then TerraCycle will make outdoor furniture, pallets, and composite building materials out of the kid dung.  Questionable decision in my opinion by the Huggies brand manager to buy into this program.  I’m all for extended producer responsibility, but holy Tebow, this is another level.

In all seriousness (sort of, but not really), good job to TerraCycle on thinking outside of the box and on trying to solve a big waste problem.  Don’t put me on your mailing list when your furniture comes out though.  I’ll pass on the shit-derived patio chair.

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Here’s an interesting article about vermicomposting at the Charlotte airport.  Great timing to move forward with an initiative like this with the Democratic National Conventional hosted in Charlotte in later this year.  Hopefully all the legislators and other people flying in for the event will read about the city’s efforts and try to implement them in their own cities.

“While it seems logical that many restaurants have already begun to reap the benefits of installing onsite worm composting operations, airports may not be the first place people would think of to have such systems in place. The Charlotte Douglas International Airport will change that fact when they open a $1.1 million recycling center in February 2012, to include a vermicomposting system that will use 300 pounds of worms to chow down on up to two tons of airport patron waste per day.”  Read more…

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The EPA recently released it’s annual municipal solid waste and recycling report for 2010.  Congratulations America.  We generated 2.5% more waste in 2010 than in 2009.

Does 2.5% not sound like a big number?  Think again.  Starting from 243.7 million tons (that’s 487 billion pounds) in ’09, that’s another 6.2 million tons (or 12 billion pounds) of waste in ’10.  Here’s my reaction when reading the report.

Report: Americans are now generating 4.43 pounds per person per day.  But don’t worry.  Only 54% of that is going to landfills.  34% is recycled or composted and another 12% is combusted for energy.

Reaction: What if I gained 4.43 pounds per day in body weight, but then lost 46% of it before I stepped on the scale?  Would I be happy about losing 2 of the 4.43 pounds I gained even though I was going to gain another 2.43 pounds the next day?  Umm… no.

Report: Well, at least the overall recycling/composting rate of Americans continues to climb to a U.S. record of 34%.

Reaction: So basically people don’t give a shit 66% of the time.  Actually, wait.  I can’t blame ourselves as consumers for this whole mess.  Manufacturers need to take some producer responsibility.  And trash haulers, material recovery facilities and municipalities have to take responsibility somewhere in this blame game as well.

Report: But we’re now recycling 49.6% of all aluminum beverage cans.

Reaction: Jesus.  That’s the easiest thing to recycle ever.  Yet people throw away more of them than they recycle. That’s pathetic.

Report: Well, the recycling rate of plastic bottles has improved to 21%.

Reaction: That’s the 2nd easiest thing to recycle ever.  Pathetic.

Report: Composting has actually declined.  We’re composting less now than we did even 2 years ago to the tune of 1.9 million tons less.

Reaction: Ouch.  That decline is 2x as much as the entire City of San Francisco recently announced they have composted in 15 years.  How is the country’s composting decline possible now that there are compost facilities popping up all over and several cities have mandated organics waste collection programs?

Report: The are 137 fewer community composting programs in 2010 than there were in 2002.

Reaction: Oh, I guess that’s how.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s pretty pathetic how much waste we generate and how little of it we recover.  I’m as much to blame as the next person.  I’ll be throwing away well more than 4.43 pounds of waste on Christmas morning.  Excuse me while I throw up.

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Congratulations to the City of San Francisco for having just hit the 2 billion pounds (1 million tons) mark for the amount of waste they’ve composted since 1996.  The city took the optional program to mandatory in 2009 and provided residents with green bins at the time.

What’s particularly remarkable is the rate of growth the program.  It took 15 years to collect this amount, but they are on track to collect another million tons within the next 5 years.  To me, that shows that people and businesses are learning quickly and complying with the regulations.

What’s also interesting is that the amount of organic waste they’ve kept out of landfills offsets the city’s carbon emissions by 354,000 metric tons – the equivalent of offsetting emissions from all the vehicles traveling across the city’s Bay Bridge for just over two years.

From a vendor’s perspective, San Francisco has been a very easy city to do business with on this program and has been very collaborate in building the program that works for all parties.   Recology manages the composting facility.

Congrats to the City and to everyone involved.  You’ve set a great example for the rest of us.

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It was formally announced yesterday that Eco-Products is a founding member of a new industry-wide initiative to create solutions for the recovery and processing of used paper foodservice packaging.  The initiative is building off of Starbucks’ Cup Summits that need broader industry involvement.  The Foodservice Packaging Institute (FPI) has stepped up to form the Paper Recovery Alliance (PRA) to build bigger, more coordinated recovery efforts and markets for used packaging.

Specifically, the group plans to:

• Develop the necessary collection infrastructure;
• Expand the end use markets for recovered fiber;
• Educate consumers to increase recovery; and
• Collaborate with government officials

The PRA will set up pilot projects that include all parts of the value chain to understand, then overcome, the existing challenges to paper foodservice packaging recovery.  Eco-Products is excited to help drive this much needed industry-effort.

The full roster of Founding Members of the Paper Recovery Alliance include the following:

• Eco-Products, Inc.
• Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products LP
• HAVI Global Solutions
• International Paper
• MeadWestvaco Corporation
• Pactiv Foodservice/Food Packaging
• RockTenn (Recycling and Waste Solutions)
• Solo Cup Company
• Starbucks Coffee Company
• Tim Hortons
• YUM! Brands Inc.

I’ll post updates as we make progress.

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The NY Times recently had an interesting article about a new project launched by the Clinton Global Initiative to help reduce the amount of plastic waste in the world.  The project is called the Plastic Disclosure Project and is a really novel concept.

There thousands of companies around the world (Eco-Products included) that measure their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint.  With over 300 million tons of plastic produced every year and only 10% of that getting recycled (with a staggering 7 million tons littering the oceans every year!), the Plastic Disclosure Project measures companies’ “plastic footprint” just like they would their carbon footprint.  The goal is to get companies to take more accountability for their plastic use and ultimately cut down.

If being a good corporate environmental citizen isn’t enough of a reason to reduce plastic usage, companies can save significant amounts of money by cutting out plastic waste.  Think about it – a plastic product comes from a finite resource (oil) that is constantly rising in price over the long run.

If they hitch their company’s supply chain to plastic, their costs will always increase over the long term.  Why not find a better alternative?  The alternatives are:

1. Reduce the amount of plastic used
2. Find alternative materials (could be bioplastics or could be other sustainable materials)
3. Use recycled plastics

Choose one.  It really doesn’t matter.  All roads lead to less oil-based plastic use (and more cost savings).

I attended a plastics recycling conference about a year ago in which a speaker (who ran a recycling company) got on stage and was complaining about the light-weighting of plastics now occurring.  He made a joke about how plastic water bottles should now be called water bags because they are so thin that they barely hold their shape.  His complaint was that the light-weighting of plastic bottles results in him getting less revenue per bale of recycled plastic that he sells.

Although I am a fan of water companies light-weighting bottles, I hear his complaint about diminishing returns on the same bale of plastics.  That’s totally valid.  It’s a problem that the recycled plastics market needs to pay attention to since we need recyclers like him to stay in business in order to drive more availability of recycled materials.  This leads to a key issue of why all plastics aren’t recycled.  A market has to exist to drive the demand for investment in recycling technology so all types of plastic can be recycled.

A couple companies have made investments to be leaders in recycling technology and help solve this recycling/market-existence-dilemma.  One company is called MBA Polymers.  They take plastic waste from all types of sources – landfills, developing countries, and other places where plastics are commonly disposed of – and have developed a sorting method to sort and segregate plastic.  They offer a compelling proposition with a much needed solution.  Their founder’s TED talk is definitely worth watching (10 min long) if you’re interested in how they do it.

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