Posted by kansas
on March 18, 2008, 19:53:00
Something just occurred to me. The plant next to my work makes biodegradable plastic bags. You might have heard of them, they are called NatureWorks.
Anyway, they're process is mostly evironmentally friendly from what I know of it. The problem seems to be the by-products and I haven't really heard anybody talk about that.
A by-product of this "corn plastic" is gypsum, the same stuff they make dry-wall out of, except this stuff isn't good enough for that. It isn't really good enough for anything and they make huge piles of it! I saw an ad in the local paper the other day offering it for free to local farmers to land apply as fertilizer so I guess it's good for that but I don't think that takes much of it. So really, they can't even give it away and they end up landfilling it.
I wonder, is it worth it? What does that gypsum do to the ground? Does it change the pH or anything? Or seep into groundwater? Or even if it doesn't, it does take up room. Are we really accomplishing anything?
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