As a frequent salad eater, I am always wracked with guilt when I go to my favorite supermarket for salads – Draegers Market in San Mateo – because their salad containers are the clear plastic variety. But man, their croutons are great.
So today, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Whole Foods now offers EATware decomposable containers for their salads! According to the site, EATware containers, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes, decompose in soil in 180 days, and disperse in water in 2 weeks! They also don’t have any laminates or coatings, and yet are oil, water and heat resistant. Pretty awesome.
I’m going to take the container I got with my salad today and stick it in my compost bin, just to see how long it takes before it decomposes. I’m also going to write an email to Dragers, and tell them that until they switch over to something like EATware, my salad business is going to Whole Foods.
The Onion reports that Al Gore has taken drastic action to save his infant son from our burning planet. All hope is lost!Â
With the recent decline in oil prices and the break in rising pump prices, will consumers go back to their old ways? Personally, I think it is too little too late. Even if we see a decline in pump prices (we’re still at $4 per gallon!), my belief is that consumers have already changed their habits, and they are now more accustomed to conserving and reducing their gasoline usage. We now take public transportation more often, we carpool more often, we drive less, we combine trips, and we’re ditching our monstrous SUVs and trucks for smaller, more fuel efficient cars.
Unless we see a huge decrease in gas prices (I’m talking about a nearly impossible sustained decrease of 50 percent or more), I don’t see consumers changing their new habits any time soon. Unfortunately for the oil industry and fortunately for the environment, consumers have picked up some good habits they’re likely unwilling to change.
Remember my posts on palm oil awhile back? (here and here) Well, it turns out that deforestation due to the ever-expanding palm oil industry is causing the remaining 30,000 or so orangutans in Malaysia and Indonesia to lose their habitats…and die.
It’s estimated that orangutans will go extinct in 3 to 20 years. THREE YEARS? Come on people! Give me a f-ing break. Are we seriously going to let this happen?
From Plenty Magazine, here’s a really sad quote to put some perspective into what’s happening:
Hardi Baktiantoro from the the Centre for Orangutan Protection in Indonesia says,
“I find dead orangutans, they have starved to death. There is no food, no water,†he said. He tells me that on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo), more than ten orangutans are starving to death each day because of palm-oil driven deforestation. “The situation for orangutans today is very, very critical. The experts say the orangutans will be extinct in 2015. The orangutans will be extinct in next three years unless the government takes extreme action to save them. But instead they are planning convert 455,000 hectares of forest [in Kalimantan] into new plantations, mostly palm oil,†he said.
The workers on those plantations see orangutans as nuisances that trample and eat their crops. “The plantation workers have to protect the oil-palms. That is their job. To them the orangutan who is hunting for food is only a pest,†said Baktiantoro, clicking through slides on his laptop of orangutans whose fingers and hands have been mutilated by plantation workers, and others chained to workers’ dormitories.
This is just really, really sad. And totally shameful and egregious that we are letting this happen.
We’ve written about plastic bag bans before such as Seattle’s proposed ban as well as the evils of plastic bags. It now appears the L.A. City Council is also jumping on the plastic “ban wagon”.
Last week, L.A. City Council voted to ban disposable plastic bags by 2010. However, L.A. put a new twist to this ban. The ban would only take effect if California failed to implement a 25 cent bag fee on shoppers who request them. In essence, L.A. is really hoping to effect wider change, not just a ban within its own city limits.
As you can imagine, this is a controversial subject. The plastic bag industry, represented by the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, filed a lawsuit against L.A. County’s plan to reduce plastic bag usage 30 percent by 2010. They argue factories will be closed and jobs will be lost. I don’t disagree with their arguments completely, but there must be a way to use plastic bag fees to help these workers get new training or find new jobs. Sticking to our old ways because it’s comfortable isn’t a great reason to me.
I won’t reiterate the all the various evils of plastic bags, but I think we’re starting to see more support for bans. In fact, I think all disposable bags should have a fee, including paper bags. I don’t see a reason why we aren’t all carrying and utilizing reusable shopping bags. I’m sure a fees and bans will get us there much more quickly.