By Becky Striepe •
May 6, 2009
American Trade Products’ (ATP) new Earth Plastic is recyclable, biodegradable, and made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic.
At the moment, it looks like they’re focusing on painting supplies, like paint tray liners and buckets, but they’re planning expand into home storage and pet supply products. I have to admit, their claims make this stuff sound almost too good to be true. ATP has been using rPET, or recycled plastic bottles, in their products since they launched in 1990 and say that they’ve diverted over 60 million plastic bottles per year from landfills. It almost sounds too good to be true! Is it?
By Ross Kendall •
June 21, 2008
Adventures in the development of truly biodegradable plastics are showing that technology can help us with our environmental challenges, but make no mistake technology on its own will not be able to deliver us from our environmental quagmire. This will only happen when we are mature enough and motivated enough to make positive and voluntary behavioral change.
Some members of the Australian community went into paroxysm when our muddle-headed environment minister toyed with the idea of charging a modest fee for plastic disposable shopping bags that are ordinarily handed out free.
The plastic charge
Being and free and plastic is of course a lethal cocktail as far as nature is concerned. There are roughly 6 billion plastic bags used each year in Australia and this end up clogging up land fill sites or stuck in the throats of hapless aquatic life form, normally the very endangered.
Those against the move argued that people would struggle to get their shopping home, and that a large percentage of the replacement bags that customers used would be made of plastic anyway. It was also argued that the old free shopping bags were great as garbage bin liners and if they were not available then alternative bags, again plastic, would have to be purchased for the purpose.
