Tag Archives: compostable plastic

Waste of the Week #13: Single Use Floss

“Hi Performance” single use floss… wow!  How wasteful is this?  I don’t remember where I discovered this gem of an item, but it made me laugh hysterically.  With every use you save 10″ of floss while throwing away an amount of plastic equivalent to 25% of the standard packaging.

What happened to the usual floss, the little box with the spool containing up to 300 feet of the stuff?  Maybe this person was a dentist and took a pack home from work, but I doubt it.  I could imagine dentists using something like this if they don’t reuse their instruments for some reason.  Why would these be available at a convenience store?  I guess for…convenience.

Floss is usually made of nylon or teflon coated with wax…which means we’re all throwing away strands of plastic everyday and tangling up pipes.  Is there something other than plastic to use?

I found compostable single use floss picks…although it wasn’t clear if the floss itself was something other than plastic.  I’ve read of silk being used as a substitute, and as I expected this really annoys the animal rights people.  Apparently, Gandhi promoted the use of wild silk that didn’t involve killing the silkworms.

How about a compostable plastic (or paperboard?) standard box of non-plastic floss?  Anything but this single use stuff…making life easier is fine, but this is just one of those products that doesn’t need to be out there.  I took a walk after writing this, and of course I found a handful of them scattered on the sidewalk…perfect.

What’s the Point of Biodegradable Plastics?

If you’re checking out this website, chances are good you’ve heard of bioplastics: “biodegradable”, “compostable”, and the worst of all, “degradable”.

Every time I get a product marketing itself as any of these terms, I feel obligated to hold onto it.  I have a few garbage bags, some cups, and utensils all claiming this other form of degradation.

I need to ask, how much do you trust these products to be non-toxic and actually doing what they say?  What’s tough about this is that the average (and expert) composter at home isn’t going to have an easy time composting any of these bioplastic products…remember the Sun Chips bag?

If I tried to compost these items in the largest compost heap, I couldn’t get temperatures to stay high enough for long enough to take care of these…how do I know?  Commercial composting facilities don’t like receiving this stuff, either.  It definitely takes more than one full cycle to get them reduced.

I find it strange that this product exists, as landfills aren’t designed to have air flowing through them, but actually the opposite.  Therefore these products shouldn’t show any real results, right?  Let’s not forget about cost.

I never understand how bioplastic cups are still around in the marketplace.  They cost a lot more than the standard cup, and most of them are still plastic underneath.  If they’re something better than oxo-biodegradable (plastic + heavy metals), they still biodegrade at a high cost in comparison to paper cups.  This exact comparison is why styrofoam cups still fly off the shelves- they’re cheaper than paper cups (although they will never degrade and don’t infuse oxygen into landfills…ha!).

Therefore, if you’re trying to start a composting program where you work, remember that you don’t need to buy all the compostable products out there.  Paper cups are definitely compostable, way cheaper than compostable cups (which are often a sham anyway), and are often cheaper than plastic cups.  Did I mention they don’t leach?

While paper production isn’t a perfect process, I’d still choose it over any bioplastic product whenever possible.