Category Archives: Latest News

Henkel builds Bioplastic Additive Plant

Oh bioplastics, how you confuse consumers. I am all for finding renewable sources for plastics but I also believe that product claims should speak very clearly about the capabilities of the product. Consumers often misinterpret “bioplastics” as being biodegradable, mainly because the lack of education in labeling. Check out the article below and leave me a comment letting me know what you think!

Bioplastics, additives top this week’s Material Insights video

By Frank Eposito | PLASTICS NEWS STAFF
Posted September 6, 2011

Plastics News senior reporter Frank Esposito

AKRON, OHIO (2:10 p.m. ET) — New capacity for recycled resins at a plant in Indiana is featured in this week’s Material Insights video.

Petoskey Plastics is spending $3 million on the project, which will add 12 million pounds of capacity to its plant in Hartford City, Ind. Some of the resin will be used at Petoskey film and bag plants in Petoskey, Mich., where the firm is based, and in Morristown, Tenn. Petoskey also is spending about $6 million to add new fim and bag lines at those two plants.

Henkel AG’s plans to build the world’s largest plastic additives plant in Shanghai also is featured in this week’s video. The 150,000-square-foot plant will have annual capacity of more than 900 million pounds for a variety of plastic additives. It represents an investment of more than $70 million for Henkel, which is based in Düsseldorf, Germany.

This week’s video wraps up with a pair of bioplastics items. Renewable chemicals maker BioAmber Inc. of Minneapolis is building a 35 million-pound-capacity plant in Sarnia, Ontario, to make succinic acid, which can be converted into bioplastics for auto parts and plastic cutlery. In Barcelona, Spain, Iris Research & Development has devised a way to produce a bioplastic based on whey protein, which is a byproduct of cheese production. The new bioplastic is expected to be used in food and cosmetics packaging.

Bioplastic made from Mad Cow Disease?

First is was plastic made from cheese, now its plastic made from mad cow infested eye sockets? Talk about innovation. It’s amazing how much research and development is being done to find better plastic solutions. Would you feel comfortable using plastics made from mad cow tissue? Let me know in the comment box below!

Mad Cow Bioplastics

Written by Green Plastics
Tuesday, 06 September 2011 20:45

The Car Scoop Blog has an entertaining article about a new possible source for bioplastic being innovated in Canada: tissue infected with Mad Cow disease.

You may remember that several years ago they had an outbreak of the disease (“bovine spongiform encephalopathy”) that caused an incredible scare. In response to the outbreak, the government banned the use of any tissue that might by infected with the disease in byproducts. Of course, this lead to the inevitable problem of what to do with the masses of skulls, brains, eye-sockets, kneecaps, and whatever other miscellaneous body-parts were laying around after the epidemic.

This spurred an innovative idea: use it to make bioplastic! David Bressler, an associate professor at University of Alberta Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, is working on finding a way to break down the proteins into smaller pieces and polymerizing them into rigid plastic. His vision is that this plastic could be used in the manufacture of car parts.

So far, it’s still in the early research stages. But it definitely looks like it could be promising. The bioplastics that comes out as the end result is strong and has good properties, and this solves one of the big problems that is often raised as a complain against bioplastic: if the bioplastic comes from polymers that could also be used as food, doesn’t it compete with our food supply and potentially raise food prices? That’s the argument against corn plastic, at any rate.

And in the case of bioplastic made from infected cow eye-sockets… well, let’s just say that isn’t an issue.

Coco-Colas plant bottle business plan

This isn’t the most recent use for those up to date with cokes plant bottle. This article however goes into a more detailed business view of Cokes decision and long term goals. Definitely worth the read, comment and let me know what you think!

http://www.greenwashingindex.com/ad_single.php?id=7083

Coca-Cola in green bottles

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/coca-cola-green-plant-bottles

The software drinks giant has come up with a technology to use plant material in plastic bottles. But it is not an easy task

Coca-Cola has come up with a formula that will reduce the use of plastic in making bottles. Photograph: George Frey/Rueters

You could forgive Scott Vitters the occasional spate of Monday morning blues. As global head of sustainable packaging at The Coca-Cola Company, he has an unenviable job. Some might even call it impossible. Every day, consumers around the world slurp their way through 1.5 billion Coca-Cola products. Packaging those servings accounts for the most sizeable chunk of the company’s environmental footprint. Now Vitters’ bosses back at Coca-Cola’s Atlanta HQ are saying they want to double sales over the next decade.

Yet today finds him surprisingly upbeat. Hitting UK shelves today is PlantBottle, what Vitters calls a “breakthrough technology” destined to green not just Coca-Cola but the entire packaging industry.

“We know that we need to do more with less and we know that we can do that through technological innovations like PlantBottle”, he says.

So how does it work? The theory is simple. Plastic bottles are currently made out of a variety of petroleum-based materials. What the chemistry wonks in Coca-Cola’s labs have done is replace some of those with plant materials.

The result is to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions by 8-10% in the process. Furthermore, the plant-based solution is an identical match with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a recyclable plastic already widely used by Coca-Cola.

“This isn’t about an innovation that’s just a little green widget or flavour of the day … We’re taking the next step of the journey to decouple our plastic from fossil fuels”, Vitters insists.

The numbers seem to back him. Coca-Cola expects to shift over 200 million packs in the UK this year as it switches 500ml bottles of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero to the greener formula.

The UK is no guinea pig. PlantBottle has already been around for a couple of years, rolled out first in Denmark to coincide with the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. Coca-Cola currently produces around five billion packs in twenty markets.

Vitters is adamant that the new bottle makes long-term financial as well as environmental sense. Although the plant alternative currently costs more than petroleum, he expects that to drop to parity or below by 2020 – due to predicted oil price increases and efficiencies in the PlantBottle supply chain.

Recyclability is another big win. As one of the toughest, most efficient polymers around, PET can be reused many times. That way, the plant material stays within a “continuous loop” – one up on biodegradable plastics that go to landfill and “then sit like a petroleum bottle”.

The impacts across industry could also be profound. Coca-Cola is working with Heinz to help it produce a PlantBottle-packaged ketchup. Toyota is also said to be interested to use the technology for the seats in its cars.

“Across all commodity plastics, this same pathway could be followed. For HDPE [High Density Polyethylene] plastic, polyethenes, films and even PVC”, says Vitters.

Although Coca-Cola is in the process of patenting the application of the plant-based technology (known as Bio-MEG) to containers, Vitters insists that Coca-Cola ultimately intends for the technology to be open. “This is bigger than Coke”, he says magnanimously. Vitters isn’t even again arch rivals Pepsi getting a look in too. “We believe that our competition will need to be part of this journey.” Coca Cola’s sustainable packaging chief may have skipped to work this morning, but his job is still far from complete.

Work to do

PlantBottle is a step in the right direction, but it’s far from the final destination. The plant-based alternative only covers ethyleneglycol – around 22.5% of PET by weight. Coca-Cola has yet to develop a commercially viable plant solution for the other 77.5%, comprising the petroleum-based compound terephthalic acid.

Vitters admits that his marketing team would have been “much happier” if the ratios were the other way around. As it is, the US beverage giant hopes to have a market-ready, plant-based alternative to terephthalic acid by 2015. A date for its integration into brand packaging is yet to be set.

His problems don’t stop there. ‘Plant-based materials’ all sounds very wholesome and green, but not if their production requires excessive water use, pushes up food prices (by using arable land for non-food purposes) or relies on genetically-modified technologies.

As the Coca-Cola packaging head admits: “We knew inherently that just because it’s a plant, it isn’t better for the environment by any stretch of the imagination…this programe fundamentally rests on the ability to demonstrate proven social and environmental sustainability.”.”

For the moment, the company has turned to Brazil and the bio-ethanol extracted from the country’s vast sugar cane plantations. As a major buyer of Brazilian sugar already, Vitters says Coca-Cola has a “comfort for getting the programme started” there.. Not that the social and environmental record of Brazillian sugar is perfect. Far from it. Vitters admits there is still “a lot of growth room to meet [Coca Cola’s] sustainability criteria”. As a result, the company is working with WWF towards a sugar certification scheme in Brazil.

In the future, Vitters conceded that it’s not sustainable to “source only from Brazillian sugar cane. If PlantBottle takes off in the way he predicts, Coca-Cola will have to look elsewhere, as well as to other plants. Excessive demand could present supply problems as well as pushing sugar prices up – something, Vitters jokes, that “wouldn’t be a good career choice” for him.

Wisely wary

The clever polymer chemists in Coca-Cola’s labs have identified other potential feedstocks, but the company is wary about jumping in too fast.

“We need to be very careful about expanding use of land at a time when we think agricultural environments for feeding a growing population are going to be essential”, says Vitters, who acknowledges the need to proceed “responsibly”..

The US drinks giant is therefore looking to second-generation technologies focused on agricultural waste, such as switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and fruit peel.

Even then, challenges still exist. Supply is one. Finding such agricultural bi-products in commercial volumes is no easy task. Land productivity represents another issue. In many parts of the world, agricultural waste is typically returned to the soil as a natural fertiliser.

“Disruptive” though PlantBottle may be, it falls far from enabling Vitters to fulfil his sustainable packaging brief completely. Commercialising a plant-based solution for the terephthalic acid portion of PET would help considerably. But we still have to wait for 2020 until Coca-Cola bottles of all sizes boast the 22.5% plant content.

Nagging at his mind as well must be the fact that Coca-Cola was recently thrown out of the prestigious Dow Jones Sustainability Index. More galling still, the Index praised Pepsi as a “supersector leader”.

There’s a silver lining, though as Dow Jones did award Coca-Cola an “uptick” for its packaging and material sourcing – another reason Vitters’ Monday shouldn’t be too blue.

Battling the bottle- from the Inside

Aspen native battles the bottle — from the inside

Max Ben-Hamoo fights bottled water — with better bottlesStewart Oksenhorn
The Aspen Times
Aspen, CO, Colorado

Aspen native Max Ben-Hamoo is the president of WorldLife Water, which has introduced water in a biodegradable bottle.Stewart Oksenhorn / The Aspen Times

ASPEN — As a kid growing up in Aspen, Max Ben-Hamoo was intensely interested in science; he went on to major in environmental science at the University of Denver. But as he got older Ben-Hamoo became more practical-minded, and after getting his bachelor’s degree, he changed directions and earned an MBA, also from the University of Denver.

“Once I realized how much more powerful business is than science, I wanted to combine my passion for the environment with some knowledge of business, and grow that,” the 25-year-old said.

Ben-Hamoo’s current career is a near-perfect reflection of the development of that sort of thinking. Where in his childhood, Ben-Hamoo disdained single-use bottles of water — “I gave my parents trouble when they got bottled water: ‘Get something you can refill,’” he said — he has adjusted his perspective and has joined the bottled-water business. But with a twist. WorldLife Water, the company which he serves as president, has introduced what Ben-Hamoo says is the first single-use water bottle to use completely biodegradable plastic. The bottles are manufactured by an Arizona company that treats the PET plastic with an additive that attracts microbes, thus speeding the decomposition of the material. (The bottles are also made without BPA, a plastic which Canada has banned as a toxic substance.)

WorldLife Water arrived on shelves two weeks ago at the Highlands Pizza Co., at Aspen Highlands. “I asked the guy there if he wanted it, and he said, ‘Yeah, looks great. I think people will love it,’” Ben-Hamoo said. “I think he understands people will want it.”

For the moment, Highlands Pizza is the only place to find WorldLife Water, but Ben-Hamoo believes retailers, especially in Colorado, will see things the way Highlands Pizza did: Customers who are attached to the convenience of bottled water will happily switch to a product that is relatively easy on the environment.

“It’s the conscious consumer we’re after, someone who will notice that biodegradable plastic is important for the future of our environment,” Ben-Hamoo said, adding that he is working on adding accounts in Aspen, where he visits frequently to see family, and Denver, where he now lives. “And Colorado is the best place for that — most people have a good understanding of that connection. We’re optimistic because we’ve gotten a great response from everyone we’ve shown it to. It’s like people were waiting for it. They feel bad about their bottled water habit, and this helps them do something about it.”

Ben-Hamoo said making a bottle biodegradable costs 70-80 percent more than a regular plastic bottle, but the added manufacturing expense results in only a slight increase in price for the customer. A 500-milliliter bottle of WorldLife, he said, will sell for between $1 and $2. The trick will be to get the big retailers who emphasize low prices to stock it.

WorldLife was founded two years ago by Kris Kalnow, a Cincinnati resident who has a house in Snowmass, and whose son, Chip, was a friend of Ben-Hamoo’s in college: “She founded the company, then quickly realized, while she wanted to keep it going, she didn’t want to be the one running it,” Ben-Hamoo said. “She knew my background and thought I’d be a good one to run it.”

Taking over the business has required some readjustment of his perspective. Now, instead of shouting out against bottled water — and seeing its use more than quadruple in his lifetime — Ben-Hamoo is on the inside, trying to make the product more environmentally palatable.

“I understand how much bottled water is out there; people are going to buy it,” he said. “If we can replace the standard market with this product, that’s better. It’s better for the earth.” (Ben-Hamoo added that the best thing that can be done with plastic bottles is to recycle them, but that, in practice, some 70 percent of bottles end up in landfills.)

Ben-Hamoo is currently the only employee of WorldLife. While he looks to line up some interns, he is handling sales, marketing, manufacturing, warehousing and accounting. And while he gains broad business experience, his curiosity about science hasn’t died. In the yard at his father’s house are buried several WorldLife bottles, so Ben-Hamoo can monitor for himself how quickly his product biodegrades.

stewart@aspentimes.com

How the Green Trend has Affected Product Design

Sustainable Future: How The Green Trend Has Affected Product Design

By LX Group on 12 September 2011

Sustainable Future: How The Green Trend Has Affected Product Design

It’s difficult to determine when the green trend started – whether it was back in the 90s when we all decided to save the whales and ban aerosol sprays or whether it was much recently when Al Gore won an Oscar and Nobel Prize for his travelling PowerPoint-documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” But, no matter when it began, there’s no denying that people these days have become more environmentally conscious, and the green trend is here to stay. Product designers have realized that everyone is going eco-crazy, whether that means going on green vacations, using green electronic products, and even having green weddings. And today, when designing any product, whether it’s a computer, a couch or the latest smart phone, being environmentally-friendly is almost a requirement. Of course, this goes without saying that green product demand has also increased and environmentally friendly products not only save money, but get profits flowing in.

Let’s look at the ways that this green trend has influenced product design.

‘Green’ Product Design Criteria
To design a truly green product, it must meet some or all of these criteria:
• Be non-toxic so as not to harm the environment, people and pets; In electronics products for example, must contain lead-free pcb boards.
• It can be recycled or recyclable, to reduce the amount of trash in the landfills;
• It must use energy responsibly, whether that means that products use only renewable energy sources such as wind, solar or geothermal power or will reduce energy use, such as electronic products that go into ‘sleep mode’ to conserve energy.
• To a certain extent, it must support environmental responsibility, such as eco-friendly practices, creating more green or local jobs, and even use fair and truthful marketing when selling their products

‘Green’ Materials
Understanding the materials used for any process is essential for any project and one of the first things many designers must master is the use of materials. Unlike 20 years ago, eco-friendly materials are now more available than ever. Eco-friendly plastics for example, which can be recycled or biodegradable, are now more widely available, but are also as tough and durable as their regular counterparts. Take the ubiquitous plastic water bottle, for example – simple to design but the material takes hundreds of years to decompose, and is quite toxic to the environment. Arizona-based Enso Bottles has developed a truly biodegradable plastic, by using an additive that helps the bottle degrade in as little as 250 days, without releasing any harmful gasses. Electronic manufacturers also use green materials for their own products. For example, LCD TVs which use carbon neutral biopaint, smart phones with bioplastic enclosures and electronic products which feature lead-free electronics pcb boards.

Product Manufacture
It’s not enough that your materials are eco-friendly, but the way you create your product should be as well. Consumers truly care about how a product is made, and so the construction of a product must also fit within green standards. For example, Kyocera, a Japanese firm, creates their own energy from solar power generating systems for their manufacturing plants and offices around the world. One of the problems of any manufacturing plant is not just the energy they use, but the amount of waste produced. Canada-based OKI Printing solutions, which produces printers and printing accessories, have reduced the wastes and harmful materials from their process, including the total removal of hexavalent chromium from their screws and implementing a waste segregation policy which has reduced their waste by 70%.

Electronic waste or e-waste is another prevalent problem, this time on the side of electronic product designers. In many cases, such as in with the CEH (Center for Environmental Health) in the United States, electronic design houses are encouraged to, design products that are eco-friendly and safe for the environment, whether that means creating non-toxic programs, or creating products which can easily be recycled.

Product Disposal
Aside from just waste disposal, the end-of-life disposal is just as important – what happens when a product is no longer useful and must be replaced? Previously, manufacturers just let their old products linger in the landfills, but for today’s environmentally-conscious consumer, that simply won’t do. Many manufacturers recycle their products, or donate their waste to other companies or organizations who can reuse their old materials. Electronics designers and manufacturers should, from the very beginning of the design process, should create “Take-back” campaigns wherein consumers are encouraged to bring their used electronics back to the manufacturer for proper disposal or better yet, recycling. Apple Computers in 2009, for example, figured out that they were emitting 9.6 million metric tons of greenhouses gases every year. So, within the next year, they re-evaluated their entire process – from designing, to manufacturing, transportation, product use, recycling and even how they their facilities (office, stores etc.) and made numerous changes that drastically reduced their carbon emissions. Their biggest expenditure when it came to carbon emissions was the manufacturing process itself (45%) and so they drastically reduced this by redesigning their products to be smaller, thinner and lighter, thus dramatically lowering their over-all carbon footprint.

The green trend, it seems, is here to stay. Electronic product designers and manufacturers must comply or be left behind. By keeping their products and processes eco-friendly, everyone – the designers, manufacturers and even the retailers are not just protecting their bottom-line, but the environment as well, ensuring that we all preserve the planet one product at a time.

image http://moralcoral.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/sustainability-for-dummies/

Plastic Bags get Recovered

I think that it is wonderful that stores will be reclaiming plastic bags from consumers. In this particular case I wonder if the bags will be recycled or what action will be taken. If single use bags must be biodegradable, depending on whether they can biodegrade in a landfill or biodegrade in a industrial compost consumers must be informed so the proper disposal method will be taken. Too often do consumers see the word biodegradable on a label and assume that if the product is thrown in the trash it will biodegrade. Products made with ENSO will definitely biodegrade in a landfill however PLA products must be taken to an industrial composting facility, if not they will just sit in a landfill like traditional plastic. As a consumer do you desire for more accurate labeling/claims on products? Have you ever been misinformed about a green product because of their marketing claims/labeling? If you have any examples please share them with me! If a store offered a program where you could return your bags would you take advantage of it? Check out the article, and let me know what you think in the comment box below!

Measure boosts plastic bag ban

By CHARISSA M. LUCI
August 27, 2011, 3:31pm

MANILA, Philippines — The campaign to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags got a big boost after the House of Representatives approved on third and final reading a bill requiring the store owners to provide biodegradable plastic bags to customers.

To be known as the Plastic Bag Regulation Act of 2011, House Bill 4840 is an initiative to address the impact of climate change.

Under the bill, stores are mandated to implement an in-store recovery program in which the customers can return the plastic bags they had used.

“The recovery system will lead citizens to exert effort and give their due share in protecting the environment by bringing used plastic bags to stores and commercial establishments which in turn shall provide the logistics for recovery of these plastic shopping bags,” Caloocan City Rep. Oscar Malapitan, the bill’s principal author, said

HB 4840 also provides that the bags must have a logo showing that they are biodegradable, with a printed note saying “lease return to any store for recycling.”

Under the measure, all business establishments shall have their own plastic bag recovery bins, which shall be visible and accessible to the customers.

For their part, the local government units (LGUs) shall be tasked to collect, recycle and dispose of all plastic bags recovered by the stores.

“The State must ensure that contaminants to the environment, such as plastic and plastic bags, be prevented from being introduced into the ecosystem,” Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, who co-authored the bill, said.

It is expected that after the implementation of the HB 4840, there will be a phase out of non-biodegradable plastic bags within three years.

How to Market & Sell a Green Product

Its about that time for our Free Monthly Webinar

Sept 7th, 9-10am PDT

Sign up here

In the competitive industry of earth friendly plastics the available information can become overwhelming. Our ENSO sales & marketing webinar will bring you back down to earth. We will explain the alternatives to traditional plastics, analyzing the pros and cons of the leading products on the market.

Ever wonder just how your supposed to market a green product? We have got that covered too! Don’t hesitate, you don’t want to miss out on this one of a kind webinar!

If you have not attended a previous ENSO webinar, you are in for a exciting experience. Not only will you be learning from the leading experts in the industry, but you will know that the information you are receiving is accurate & applicable. As you absorb the information throughout the webinar, you will probably experience a feeling of enlightenment and a urge to know more. This is natural and we have planned for this! At the end of every webinar you are encouraged to ask any questions on your mind!

We look forward to your virtual attendance at our free webinar!

Apples top Green Efforts with Steve as CEO

I came across this article on treehugger today and it definitely grabbed my attention. The impact Apple has had on modern society has been something that will probably never be duplicated, in the same way at least..so it is sort of a celebration in some sense. This article highlights the top 5 “green” moments in Steve Jobs time as Apples CEO. What do you think about Apples “green” moments, could they have been better…worse…Let me know in the comment box below!

5 Noteworthy Green Moments in Steve Jobs’ Time as Apple CEO

by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 08.25.11
Science & Technology

steve jobs photo
photo: Ben Stanfield/CC BY-SA

Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO understandably has everyone buzzing, talking about the impact that Jobs and Apple has had on modern society. Indeed it would be hard to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on creating what we expect our computers and devices to do, how they look, and how we interact with them.

So let’s do our part and take a look at some of the genuine green strides Apple has made in the past few years:

An Off-Grid Corporate Headquarters

Back in June Jobs pitched the virtues of Apple’s planned new corporate HQ in Cupertino to the city council. At the time Lloyd wrote that in addition to being “really elegant and beautiful” even if “isolated behind a wall of parking garages”, there’s a lot of interesting green aspects to it:

It’ll reduce the amount of asphalt on the property by 90%, increase the number of trees by 60% and the amount of landscape by 350%, and all of this while reducing the actual building footprint by 30%. It’s also going to be off-grid, generating it’s own power and using the grid as a backup, but that electricity will be produced with natural gas, according to what Steve said in the presentation.

The lack of renewable energy at the site does knock the green cred down a bit, but all told it’s a remarkable effort at reducing eco-impact–even if being isolated from the surrounding community.

Leaving Chamber of Commerce Over Climate Change

It may not seem significant compared to making its products more eco-friendly, but Apple really needs to be commended for taking a stand and leaving the climate change-denying Chamber of Commerce.

Back in 2009, just prior to the COP15 climate talks, Apple was one of the first of a number of high profile companies, including several large energy companies, which decided that the Chamber did not represent their corporate values.

At the time Apple wrote:

Apple is committed to protecting the environment and the communities in which we operate around the world. We strongly object to the Chamber’s recent comments opposing the EPA’s effort to limit greenhouse gases. As a company, we are working hard to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions by relying on renewable energy at our facilities and designing more energy-efficient products for our customers. We have undertaken this unilaterally and without government mandate, because we believe it is the right thing to do.

Needless to say, the Chamber wasn’t too happy. Since then, the Chamber has continued its efforts to stymie the EPA doing anything to regulate greenhouse gases, while Apple continues to make improvements in greening its products.

Energy Efficiency Improvements All Around

Back in 2009 Apple launched new batteries for the 17″ MacBook Pro, which upped the ante in terms of thrifty energy consumption and lasted three times longer than the industry average. At the time, Jaymi wrote:

[The new technology] lays claim to a battery life improvement of 60%. The new battery can last up to 8 hours on a charge, and can be charged 1,000 times, equivalent to about 5 years. It’s also recyclable at the end of it’s life. But there are even more green features to this new technology.

Apple made a block of batteries, rather than the usual cylindrical cells that end up wasting space. The newly utilized space allows the notebook to have a 40% bigger battery, without making the notebook bigger.

Since then battery technology has improved further, but in many cases at the expense of user-repairability and user-replaceability.

The Snow Leopard OS has been replaced by Lion, but when Snow Leopard was launched it offered a 10% energy efficiency improvement over OS 10.5.6–which translated into a savings of a mere $1 per person annually on the electric bill.

Not a lot, right? Perhaps on the personal basis that’s true, but when you extrapolate that energy savings across Apple’s (at the time) annual sales of 10 million computers it could add up to a savings of 80 million kilowatt-hours annually.

That’s the power of even small energy efficiency gains when they occur on a product or a company with tremendous reach.

But What’s Powering iCloud?

Sticking with energy usage for a moment, when Apple recently announced its iCloud service, Mike raised some important questions about how green will this really be. Though Jobs said the data centers which are the backbone of iCloud were “as green as we could make them” there as still a good deal of unanswered questions about that.

Topping the list is electricity usage. Mike wrote:

While the building and equipment itself has an impact on the planet via the materials, embedded energy, and eventual disposal, a data-center is first and foremost a creature that is very hungry for energy. We’re talking many megawatts… So it truly matters where the electricity is coming from. Is it hydro power? Coal? Wind? Solar? Did Apple build any on-site production capability? Are they buying straight from the local grid or are they buying renewable energy credits?

This is crucial. Should it come out that the primary energy source for the iCloud data centers is coal it really calls into question any statements about making them as green as possible. And could open up Apple to the sort of activism campaign waged against Facebook when it came out that it’s new data center was coal-powered and therefore a greenhouse gas emissions spewing environmental nightmare.

macbook air material breakdown image

image: Apple

Greener Materials, Less Packaging

There are a number of milestones that Apple has passed recently in terms of green its products and in how they are packaged. The new MacBook Air is exemplary of this:

The packaging uses “corrugated cardboard made from over 30 percent recycled content and molded fiber made entirely from recycled content. In addition, the packaging is extremely material efficient, allowing at least 15 percent more units to fit per shipping container than the original MacBook Air.”

As Lloyd writes:

After years of complaints about Apple lagging on the green front, they are getting pretty aggressive, touting their carbon footprint and their material choices: Mercury-free display, Arsenic-free display glass, BFR (brominated flame retardants) free; PVC-free internal cables and power adapter DC cables.

Of course the new MacBook Air is manufactured in the same process of milling it out of a solid piece of aluminum that it introduced in the MacBook Pro line back at the end of 2008.

As Jaymi wrote at the time, the unibody enclosure allows the MacBook Pro to use 50% fewer parts, not to mention the recyclability of the aluminum enclosure–which takes some 13 steps to produce.

All of that is quite energy intensive, no doubt, but Jaymi’s conclusion was that, “this process, despite flaws, has some real improvements for the notebook in the big picture of its lifetime and total footprint.”

Let’s remember in all this that there is still much that could be done to reduce the environmental impact of Apple’s products, which is frankly true for all electronics companies.

After all, Apple still ranks 9th in Greenpeace’s latest tally, dropping from 5th place in 2009. Greenpeace lauded Apple’s reductions in toxic chemicals in its products, a good number questions remain regarding transparency and future plans to phase-out other toxics.

With a score of 4.9 out of 10 (with the top company, Nokia, receiving a 7.5), even with genuine improvements over the past few years, Apple still ranks decidedly in the middle of the pack.

Which, again, is probably indicative less of Apple’s corporate attitudes towards the environment–the company certainly says all the right things and is heading in the right direction, despite ranking drops–and more a sign of how much more work needs to be done and can be done across the manufacturing, design, and energy sectors as a whole.

macbook air greenhouse gas breakdown image
image: Apple

As for the bigger questions of our use of electronics, like planned obsolescence, rapid upgrade cycles, better user-repairability, let’s leave those aside for the moment. To a large degree those are questions of the industry as a whole and not just Apple, even if Apple is a conveniently bold example of the trend.

As for what we’d like incoming CEO Tim Cook to do to further green Apple, that’ll have to wait for another time as well.

Coke bottle Recycling Plant reopens

Embattled Coke Bottle Recycling Plant Reopens

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2011/08/22/embattled-coke-bottle-recycling-plant-reopens/

The troubled Coca-Cola joint-venture recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C., is set to reopen today after being shuttered by the company in March.

But Coke is considering selling its 49 percent stake in the plant, according to the Wall Street Journal

Coke and its partner in the factory, United Resource Recovery Corp. LLC, closed the factory down earlier this year to restructure the plant and improve the quality of the plastic being produced. All 50 factory workers and most of the plant’s office staff were laid off when the factory closed.

“We are restarting the plant,” said Carlos Gutierrez, president and CEO of URRC, PlasticsNews.com reports. “We feel pretty good on the results from our retooling efforts.”

Over the last half-year the Spartanburg team has been trying to more efficiently recycle old bottles into food-grade resin and correct certain operational problems. Prior to the fix, certain lightweight bottles had a habit of flying off the production line, Plasticsnews reports.

On reopening, the plant is likely to process half the amount of bottles it was originally designed to handle, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The plant, once described as the world’s largest plastic bottle-to-bottle recycling complex, opened in 2009. It was supposed to produce 100 million pounds of recycled plastic when fully operational, or about two billion 20-ounce Coke bottles.

Heinz Ketchup joins team plant bottle?

So I saw an official Heinz ketchup plant bottle yesterday and I felt good and bad about it. Using renewable sources is awesome don’t get me wrong, but it still does not solve the problem of plastic waste in landfills and in nature! Only 5% of plastics get recycled and the rest end up as waste. While going renewable with the Heinz bottle is a great step forward, many consumers are completely oblivious to what the “plant” bottle is. A grad student from Florida conducted a survey asking random consumers questions regarding the plant bottle. 50% of the participants believed that plant bottles are biodegradable. 68% of the participants believe that PET plant based beverage bottles are better than traditional PET plastic bottles because they are biodegradable. From the results of the survey it is clear that these average consumers are confused of the capabilities of plant based bottles. Let me know what you think of the new bottles in the comment box below!

Heinz to Use Plant-Based Bottles Made by Coca-Cola

by Jessica Dailey, 02/24/11

Starting this summer, Heinz will be bottling its famous ketchup in more earth-friendly packaging. Yesterday, the company announced that it plans to use plant-based bottles developed by Coke — aptly named “PlantBottles” — for all of its 20 oz. ketchup bottles. The plastic bottles consist of 30 percent plant material, and are made with a Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, which results in a lower reliance on unsustainable resources as compared with traditional PET bottles.The switch is the biggest change that Heinz has introduced to their ketchup bottle since first using plastic containers in 1983. There will be no difference in shelf life, weight, or appearance, except talking labels asking, “Guess what my bottle is made of?” Heinz says that the switch to more eco-friendly bottles is a vital step in reducing the company’s greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste, water consumption and energy usage by at least 20 percent by 2015.

When Coke first introduced PlantBottles in 2009, an initial life-cycle analysis by the Imperial College London showed that the bottle had a 12 to 19 percent reduction in carbon impact. Coca-Cola said that last year, PlantBottles eliminated the equivalent of 30,000 metric tons of CO2.

Both Coca-Cola and Heinz are working to reduce their carbon footprints. Coca-Cola recently released an updated sustainability plan, and the company plans to replace all regular plastic packaging with PlantBottles by 2020. Last October, Heinz reported that the company cut CO2 emissions by 17,000 tons since 2006 at three of its UK factories. Heinz also received an “A” grade from Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow for using BPA-free linings from some of its canned products, and creating a timeline to completely eliminate the chemical from all packaging.

Here’s hoping Heinz will create a similar timeline for replacing all plastic packaging with PlantBottles!

WHY THIS MATTERS

The negative environmental impact of plastics are widely known and understood, so here at Inhabitat, we applaud any step away from them. While PlantBottles are not a perfect solution, they still help eliminate CO2 emissions and mitigate global warming.

Via Environmental Leader