Title: [GreenYes] Re: Biodegradable utensils compromised with standard plastics.
On the surface, it does not sound very plausible to me that people
would go to the trouble of bringing their own utensils to the fair,
only to throw them away after use. I would think that if someone is
bringing their own utensils, they are planning for reuse and would
either bring more durable items, or keep their plastic utensils after
using them at the fair. Probably too late for this now, but it would
have been interesting in your sorting activities to try and discern if
the plastic utensils were discarded alongside materials from any
specific, identifiable vendors - there may have been one or two rogues
in the mix that provided the plastic, or perhaps ran out of bio-based
materials at some point and made do with plastic.
Unless you are thinking they bought takeout food elsewhere and brought
it into the fair?
Justin Lehrer
StopWaste.Org
On Sep 2, 9:46 pm, arthur boone <arboo...@no.address> wrote:
> Today was my second day sorting discards at an urban street festival in Oakland, CA. It's an admission fee-based, fenced-in, enclosed streets area with all food vendors pledged to use biodegradable cutlery. The recycling manager is pretty sure all the food vendors in the enclosed area are doing the right thing but probably 10%, in some loads as high as 50%, of the eating utensils coming into our sort tables are plain old plastic knives, forks, and spoons. They look enough different that they're easy to pick out from the biodegradable units but the idea of ignoring all utensils in "cleaning-up" pre-compostables is not correct, or so it seems to me. We think people are bringing these utensils with them into the enclosed area. (We're not planning any Homeland Security-type inspections at the ticket gates.) Your experience?
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