Thursday, October 11, 2007
What to do with plastic?
Ivylanedesigns has a great use for empty food cartons: notebook covers. This one is only $7.
Brown Cow is concerned about their plastic packaging. According to their website:
We use plastic containers for our yogurt, because glass containers, with their heavier weight, use more energy and produce more global warming gases than plastic. And the manufacturing of paper containers creates dioxins, which are some of the most toxic chemicals known to man and are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to have no safe level of exposure. Paper containers must also be plastic-lined, which makes them non-recyclable in a mixed-paper recycling stream.They also suggest mailing the cups to them directly for recyling if your local recycling facility is unable to handle them.We used to package our yogurt in high-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 cups, because we thought this was the most recyclable material. But we learned that many recycling centers that generally accept HDPE #2 plastic for recycling, don’t recycle wide-mouthed #2 yogurt cups, because the wide-mouthed cups have a melting point that’s different from other #2 packaging. Our #2 yogurt cups were ending up in landfills.
The manufacturing of our polypropylene (PP) # 5 cups requires less resin than that of #2 cups. So less energy (electricity and gas) and fewer resources are used to produce our PP #5 cups. And because they have thinner walls, our #5 cups make less waste than #2 cups.
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