Photo from pr-squared.com
"This cup grew up in Blair, Nebraska. It's made entirely of corn. It's 100% compostable. It will disappear no matter what you do with it."
If you go into one of Boloco's several locations in the Boston area and order a drink, that's what your cup will say.
Formerly known as The Wrap, Boloco is a beacon of sustainability in a city full of fast food that's bad for you and the environment. The chain is certified by the Green Restaurant Association, and has completed 8 of the association's environmental steps: recycling and composting cardboard, glass, metal, and plastic, offering sustainable meat options, preventing pollution by not using polystyrene foam, using biodegradable cups, and outfitting its employees in organic cotton uniforms.
Because of their labeling, the corn cups are the restaurant's most obvious green effort, but are they too good to be true?
Most plastic is made from petroleum, but Boloco's cups are made from polylactic acid, or PLA. (This is done by a company called NatureWorks, a joint venture between Teijin Limited of Japan and the oft-vilified Cargill. Kudos to them for exploring environmentally low-impact technologies.) Lactic acid is made from dextrose by fermentation. Dextrose is made from starch, which in the case of these cups comes from corn. In places where corn is less common, the starch could come from crops including rice, sugar beets, sugarcane, wheat, or sweet potatoes.
All of these starch sources are also human food sources, and using them to create plastics instead of as a way to fill hungry bellies presents a problem. But in the U.S., we have more corn than we know what to do with, making the technique harder to argue with. And unlike petroleum, corn and other starchy crops are renewable resources, so making PLA uses far less fossil fuels than making regular plastic. You can see some comparisons of regular (PET) plastic and PLA plastic (marketed under the name IngeoTM) here.
But is PLA really 100% compostable? Probably not in your backyard compost bin, but in the closely regulated conditions of an industrial composter, it does compost within 45 days. And if your cup winds up in a landfill instead of a composter, it still biodegrades better than regular plastic, reacting like other food waste. Perhaps best of all, PLA products can be recycled and turned into more PLA products, which cost roughly the same amount as their plastic equivalents and work just as well.
What can you do to encourage the use of "corn cups" over traditional petroleum plastics? Patronize stores like Boloco that already use them, and be sure to say thanks for the cup. Ask what the cups are made of at other fast food restaurants, and tell the manager that you prefer to spend your money at places that use biodegradable ones.
Of course, if you really want to make a difference, the best thing you can do is bring your own re-usable cup.
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Comments
I like the sound of the tech behind these cups, but doesn't the propaganda on the side seem to encourage conspicuous consumption? Go ahead use all the plastic cups you want they'll just "disappear" when you're done with them.
Too many new ideas for energy consumption and waste disposal seem to center around finding new ways to do the same thing that we've been doing. Real environmental change is cultural as well as technological. By replacing one disposable plastic product with another, I think we're doing more to assuage our guilt than to solve the problem. So we can go on doing the same things we've been doing secure in the illusion that we're being environmentally responsible now.
Leah,
Really appreciated your including us in this post. The truth is that we would prefer to find a way to give customers incentive to go to a reusable cup... problem is that the convenience of disposable still trumps the "good" of reusable. Any ideas you have on how we might meaningfully swing people in the direction of reusable (without swinging them away from boloco...) would be welcome!
John Pepper
CEO & Co-Founder
Boloco
buzz@boloco.com
John: Thanks for your comment, and I'll take you up on offering some suggestions of how to swing encourage your customers to make the move to reusable cups:
For starters, advertise that when a customer buys a drink, you will fill any reusable cup he or she brings in. If you are able, offer a discount on drinks for customers who bring reusable cups.
You could also consider selling reusable Boloco cups, or even, because some of your stores are so close to college campuses, giving them away to students. I'd bet that Tufts and other schools would work with you to get freebies into student hands. Again, if you were able, you could offer a discount to anyone who brings in one of those cups. If you can't afford to discount every drink served in a reusable cup, consider an "every 10th drink" discount or something similar.
"Going green" is a big deal right now, and if you were able to offer customers an(other) economical way to do something good for the environment, I think it would be great for your brand and your business.
Corn is not a renewable resource when it requires so much petroleum to produce it. I have seen studies indicating that corn cups use more oil than plastic cups.
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