Growers and Grocers

These days, most disposable eating utensils are made out of plastic, a material made from petroleum and with a lifetime of thousands of years. Excellent Packaging & Supply, a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area (Richmond), is trying to banish petroleum-based plastics from dining hall, restaurants, picnic, and elsewhere with their line of “Spudware” and other plant-based eating utensils. Spudware is a type of “bioplastic”, a durable material that is biodegradable under certain conditions. It is made from potato starch and soy oil, hence the name.

Bioplastics are a good start on the path to “closing the loop” for eating utensils, but unless the nutrients contained in the utensil can be returned to the earth it’s still an extractive use — especially if the products are made far away and shipped across the world in petroleum-fueled ships, trains and trucks. Of course, not all extractive uses are equivalent, and using recently harvested plants as the raw material instead of plants grown millions of years ago is an important improvement.

Returning the nutrients to the earth is not as easy as one would hope. If the item goes into the trash can, it may never decompose because modern landfills are essentially preservation areas: much of what goes into the landfill never degrades. William Rathje, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona and author of Rubbish!, performed archaeological digs into landfills across the U.S. and found newspapers — which are biodegradable, of course — from decades ago that were still legible. He also found pristine-looking foods, like hot dogs that appeared to have been cooked that week.

If the landfill is too “sterile”, we can just throw the utensils into a backyard compost pile, right? That might not work either. According to an SF Chronicle article on the product: “One complicating factor is that NatureWorks and Spudware don’t break down quickly in a typical backyard compost pile.”

The ideal end place for these bioplastic materials is a commercial composting facility, which has far higher temperatures than a backyard pile, thus enabling the utensils to break down. Some cities, like Berkeley and San Francisco allow bioplastics to go into their green waste stream. In that case, the bioplastics — along with other food scraps and yard waste — are converted into compost at a central facility, then sold or given away to home gardeners, landscapers, or farmers. Thus, a closed loop of sorts is created: plants make the utensils, the utensils are turned into compost, and the compost nourishes a new generation of plants (which could theoretically make new bioplastics, but for practical reasons probably won’t).

Unfortunately, many municipalities don’t have green waste collection services. But don’t worry, there is still a way — albeit one that is quite monotonous — to recycle the Spudware: you could eat it. The Chronicle:

There is also the question they hear every so often — if not from their food service customers, then from those customers’ patrons: “Can you eat those Spudware forks?”

The answer is yes, in theory. But it would take an awful lot of chewing, and wouldn’t taste particularly good. Most of the curious (including this reporter and her editor) gnaw on a fork for a minute and then set it aside.

“When my twin daughters turned 16, one of their friends ate a knife,” Levine said. “She started chewing on the knife, and the next thing I knew, it was gone. But she’s doing OK.”

Other compostable materials have been in the news recently. Treehugger wrote about compostable water bottles. The SF Chronicle has been covering the battle between the SF Board of Supervisors and grocery stores over problems related to plastic shopping bags (litter, waste of resources, etc.). One of the latest twists is a proposal to require compostable bags. Compostable bottles or bags is a good idea, but could cause contamination problems for plastic recycling programs or for the green waste programs.

Compostable utensils are a great idea, and I hope someone is working on compostable yogurt containers, because consumers go through a lot of those every year, and few, if any, recycling programs accept them.

Image credit: potato photo from the USDA Image Gallery.