The biggest theme I took from the readings and movie was that, basically, all of our current approaches to handling waste and the waste problem are, at least, ineffective and inadequate, and, at worst, detrimental to our health, our environment, and sometimes even our efforts to fix the problem. Leonard certainly drove the point home that we need to be finding better ways to produce Stuff and reduce the amount of it before it becomes waste that we have to handle. She provided ample examples and explanations to reject the seemingly obviously detrimental methods of waste management we have in place (landfills and incinerators). At the end of the chapter on Disposal, she also talked about the problems with recycling and bio-plastics, both physically, in that these processes often simply don’t work as well as believed, or conceptually, in that they can perpetuate the waste problem because they appear to contribute more greatly to the solution than they do.

            I actually noticed new packaging for food at the Den just prior to reading the end of this chapter. At some point over break, the old plastic cups were replaced with new ones labeled “Made from corn in industrial facilities” and “Certified compostable.” I was pretty excited for the change, and then I read Leonard’s skepticism. She listed a host of reasons for this skepticism of bio-plastics: the plastic is much more difficult to compost than most composting matter, the process of producing bio-plastic still involves many toxics and fossil fuels, the ‘eco-friendly’ containers still support the wastefulness that a part of the heart of the problem. And as I thought about it, while the idea seems lovely, I don’t actually see it affecting the way we manage even just the proportion of our waste on campus that these plastic containers make up. There isn’t a readily accessible method of composting these new cups, so they will probably continue to go straight into the trash or recycling bins; and recycling this material, as Leonard notes, is itself a problem because of how the properties of this plastic differ so much from other kinds.

            After reading about Leonard’s experiment with composting bio-plastic at home, I also wanted to know how compostable this plastic really is; should there be some asterisk at the end of the “certified compostable” label? So I went to the website of the company that provides this new packaging, World Centric. At the top of the page, the company itself admitted some drawbacks of this kind of compostable plastic. One of these was indeed the problem that Leonard faced, these materials take at least four times as long to compost at home than at composting facilities, where they can still take months to decompose. The site did not describe the actual process of creating this plastic, but did boast that the process takes half the energy and emits just over half the carbon dioxide as the production of petroleum-based plastics.

The company also made a statement at the end of the page that reminded me of one of the big ideas in our readings: “Increasingly, instead of choosing petroleum-based plastics that create toxicity and environmental pollution, consumers can choose products made from compostable, renewable bio-plastics.” This statement is problematic for a couple of reasons. It implies that the bio-plastic doesn’t product toxicity and pollution, while in reality it just attempts to reduce these things. Additionally, it seems to be saying that choosing compostable plastic is an end to the problems we are facing, when in reality, even if perfected this could only serve as a minor reduction in a huge and growing problem.