Day: February 11, 2007

Northern Voice Almost Sold Out

As the title says, the North­ern­Voice con­fer­ence, to be held Feb­ru­ary 23 and 24 at the Forestry Sci­ences Centre at UBC, is almost sold out. As of Fri­day, there were only 50 spots left, and I’m sure at least some of those are now gone. So if you want to be there, now’s the time to fire up your browser and point it at the regis­tra­tion page.

Compostable Plastic

The oth­er day Tim brought home some food in a con­tain­er that claimed to be made of corn and there­fore com­postable. I was intrigued by this, since I remem­ber going to street parties and Christ­mas mar­kets in Ger­many where the dis­pos­able plates were grain-based and even edible (not that people usu­ally did eat them) but haven’t seen them here. So I looked into it a bit more.

The con­tain­er was made out of some­thing called PLA, which is made from starch. The label said not to microwave it, which had me puzzled — isn’t corn safe to microwave? What would hap­pen? Would it melt? I tried microwav­ing some water in the con­tain­er and noth­ing unto­ward happened, so I poked around on the web­site for the com­pany (Nature­Works LLC, a sub­si­di­ary of Car­gill) to find out more.

The web­site did­n’t give any details that I could find as to why not to microwave the con­tain­er, so I emailed them. And got back a rather mixed reply. Some breath­less mar­ket­ing prose (new, revolu­tion­ary, bridges the gap between nat­ur­al and syn­thet­ic products), the actu­al answer in the middle, a some­what odd para­graph about how all the tech­nic­al info they’re pre­pared to dis­close is on the web­site (if the answer to the microwave ques­tion had been there, I would­n’t have emailed them). Any­way, the answer is sup­posedly that PLA has a low melt­ing point, so the con­tain­ers might leak in the microwave. 

Next Step

So if this con­tain­er is com­postable, where can one com­post it? The store has a big bin to take them back, but what about the Van­couver com­post facil­ity? Or indeed my com­post bin? The cash­ier said “oh, just throw it in your com­post bin.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, abso­lutely”. Accord­ing to the PLA bro­chure, you need 140ºF and humid­ity between 80% and 90% for exten­ded peri­ods of time. So that rules out my com­post bin. And the Van­couver City com­post facil­ity as well, unfor­tu­nately, since they use an open win­drow pro­cess. I emailed the rel­ev­ant people in the Van­couver City engin­eer­ing depart­ment, and they poin­ted out not only would it not com­post, if I put the plastic in the yard waste bin, it might encour­age oth­er people to put unsuit­able plastic con­tain­ers in there. So it’s back to the store with the con­tain­ers; for­tu­nately it’s not a big deal since it’s one of the loc­al stores we shop at anyway.