April 14th, 2010

strong>From Green Right Now Reports

Plant-based plastic has been finding more and more places in the marketplace, as cups, bottles and plates.

But while PLA, or Polylactic acid plastic, meets the environmental test at the front end, being made of eco-friendly and biodegradable ingredients, it has faced an end-of-life issue: It can’t be recycled with the bulk of petroleum-based plastics in the waste stream, the PETE and HDPE plastics that major recyclers collect and sell.

The PLA industry has been trying to solve that issue. It has looked at technology that would help recyclers separate PLA plastic from conventional plastics at processing plants.

Another solution is to recycle PLA plastic, melt it down, at its own special facilities. It’s already being done on a major scale in Europe. This week the industry announced that a new U.S. PLA recycling company, Plarco Inc., will become a major collector of post-consumer PLA waste, helping to close the recycling loop for PLA.

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December 30th, 2008

By Kelly Rondeau
Green Right Now

It’s the holiday season, and along with the many joys that are associated with this fun time of year – cooking, baking, parties with friends and family – comes a lurking environmental problem: Toxic chemicals in everyday plastics. Plastics that seem to be everywhere in our holiday midst — in the packaging of toys, the toys themselves, our food packaging, in our holiday leftover storage containers, in plastic wrap, in water bottles — and the list goes on.

Many valid health concerns have been raised about poisonous chemicals present in our everyday plastics, and the headlines about these toxins leaching into our food are frightening. A recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found, for instance, that food containers labeled as “microwave safe” leached BPA when heated. (See our report, “BPA turns up in ‘microwave safe’ products“.)

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