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The Zen of packaging

Keeping the scariest bits out of the landfill
food_glenda1

Confused about the best container for that take-out stir fry or the best packaging for that cereal? Me, too! You almost need a PhD in waste management to get it right.

Then once we choose, how about getting it into the right bin — recyclables or otherwise — when we're done?

In the name of setting these things straight, may I present my personal collection of garbage rescued through my own unique binning efforts — an assortment of containers and packaging I've gathered over time, each item professing to be Earth-friendly, human-friendly, something-friendly or at least not as sinister as carbon-based Styrofoam.

Here's a Greenware compostable cup I dragged home from some music festival or other after I slurped up the smoothie inside. It's made by NatureWorks.

Greenware is made by fermenting dextrose extracted from corn that's been grown within a 480-kilometre radius of NatureWorks' Nebraska factory. Fermenting dextrose turns it into lactic acid. This, in turn, is used to make a kind of biodegradable polymer, sometimes referred to as PLA (for polylactic acid or Polylactide) or the trade name, Ingeo. One hundred per cent of a Greenware cup — or any pure PLA product — will turn into compost in months in a commercial composter, although some composters resist it because it dilutes the nutritional value of the compost.

Now here's a big, flat beige TaterWare clamshell, which came home bearing some equally beige pasta leftovers. The imprint says it's GMO-free and bio-based, which is all very nice, but relatively meaningless. By contrast to the Greenware cup, the TaterWare clamshell is not compostable. And even though it says it's 100 per cent biodegradable, that's pretty much a misuse of the term.

I can't find deep details on the composition of a TaterWare clamshell, at least not in the public domain, but it's made in part from potato starch (ergo the name). At one point, Whole Foods in San Francisco stopped using TaterWare cutlery because it couldn't be composted. To top it off, the Biodegradable Products Institute, a U.S.-based professional association aimed at promoting biodegradable polymers — polymers, or mixtures, like the Greenware cup, that really do biodegrade or break down into organic components once you're done with them — has not given its seal of approval to TaterWare. One research group reports it as being 70+ per cent polypropylene, or plastic.

Over here is a white so-called "biodegradable" plastic bag, or at least the remains of it, for it's slowly disintegrating into weird little chippy bits like filmy pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Don't try to recycle one of these guys — it can wreck an entire batch of genuinely recyclable plastics.

As with TaterWare, this again is a pretty loose and fast use of the term "biodegradable" because this bag is basically plastic with some kind of starch holding it together.

With time the starch breaks down, letting loose little pieces of plastic, which will eventually break down over some geologic time period — like 10,000 years. You've heard of the Anthropocene, well, here comes the Plasticene (and I don't mean modelling clay), starting with that Great Pacific Garbage Patch of floating plastics and other litter, measured by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography to be at least some 2,700 km in diameter.

Those little bits of plastic bags could well end up there, or bounce around our own local water systems and ecosystems in ways that might be even more egregious than a full-on plastic bag, which you can at least pick up and recycle. By the way, I've also got one of those in my binning collection — a nice, white, fairly normal plastic bag, which is made from a minimum of 50 per cent recycled materials and sports the little triangle of arrows indicating it's 100 per cent recyclable.

I've also got an empty popcorn bag made from EcoSelect brown paper that's unbleached and chlorine-free, as well as an empty brown paper bag from Source Salba's Healthy Halloween treats that's 100 per cent compostable and made from 40 per cent recycled materials.

The Source Salba people have also stuck a little tagline on the side of the treats bag admonishing, "What we are doing to our environment is scary. Please do your part..."

We're trying, we're trying.

But with all these options, some more genuine than others, it's tough to know if we consumers, along with all the food and beverage suppliers, grocery retailers and even the farmers' market vendors who provide us with our sustenance and the myriad containers to put it in, really are doing our part.

Yes, we're making inroads. Check out the RMOW's latest figures: for 2012, out of 25,090 tonnes of solid waste in Whistler, 12,870 tonnes was sent to landfill (51 per cent); 5,810 tonnes of biosolids, food waste, and yard waste was composted (23 per cent); 4,580 tonnes was recycled (18 per cent); and 1,830 tonnes were reused or recycled by the Bottle Depot, Re-Use-It and Re-Build-It centres (eight per cent).

And certainly it helps to have eco-aware suppliers like David Krasny's and Tony Horn's Slope Side Supply in Function Junction, where, in terms of straight volume for take-out containers they're seeing about 65 per cent of their sales as compostable products and 35 per cent as not. ("David and I, growing up, we were always pretty environmentally minded," says Tony. "That's why we moved to Whistler and that's why we try to run our business that way.")

But we can and should do more.

Cheeying Ho has some good ideas. She runs the Centre for Sustainability at Whistler and has a nice little stainless steel espresso cup she bought at the Galileo Coffee Company in Britannia Beach. She takes that in to her favourite coffee bar and gets a discount for using it (just ask your caffeine supplier if they'll do the same).

For lunch, she also gets a 10 per cent discount for take-out by bringing in her own container. (Try using one of those stainless steel tiffin carriers that are everywhere in India, now making inroads here.)

Then there's the idea of slowing right down and going Euro-style: eat a lovely lunch in your favourite resto or bistro with real dishes and real knives and forks, and kiss take-out good-bye!

In the meantime, if you're curious, check out the BPI's very understandable website for your best, genuinely biodegradable containers www.bpiworld.org/Certified-Bioedgradable-Foodservice-Items-Plates-Cups-Utinsels.

And it doesn't take a PhD to at least keep your biodegradable bags or containers out of plastic recycling bins, and to drop those compostables and recyclables in the right container, too.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who likes to read labels.