© Stock.Adobe.com/au/Comugnero Silvana
life-cycle assessment
Let it go, let it go… in the right bin, please When considering the likelihood of recycling versus waste going to landfill, is plastic, paper or compostable food packaging better for the environment? Taronga Zoo recently posed this question to Edge Environment and the resulting life-cycle assessment (LCA) yielded surprising results.
E
arlier this year, Australian news outlets burst
become more aware and involved in detecting and preventing
a bubble: our fondness for takeaway coffee has
environmental damage.
become an environmental burden. Imagine the collective whine across the nation: “Not the coffee, too!”
But back to coffee It is estimated that Australians use 1 billion disposable coffee
It seems like everything these days is bad for the environ-
cups each year. 1 billion cups are used once and then become
ment, right? Plastics kill fish, pesticides kill bees, cosmetics and
waste. The same problem extends to all kinds of food and bev-
cookies kill orangutans, cars, planes and trucks are stinking up
erage containers: it’s not only about coffee, but also tacos, fish
the environment and our health… even our sporty fleece jackets,
and chips, sandwiches, sushi, ice-cream… Hence, the magnitude
when washed, shed tonnes and tonnes of tiny particles that are
of the problem is much bigger than 1 billion cups. It isn’t known
ending up in the oceans doing goodness knows what.
for sure what happens to that waste, but it’s estimated that 90%
Some people might say that no matter what we do, we’re
ends up in landfill. This statistic has led entire countries to ban
always going to be in the wrong, so we might as well do whatever
plastic food containers, and some cities and communities want
we want and blissfully wash our hands of caring.
to ban bottled water, too.
The other way to look at it is that the reason why everything
What’s the alternative, then? One proposed alternative is
these days seems to be a problem is because we care and be-
compostable packaging, such as biopolymers and bamboo. The
cause we bother. Since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened
premise is convenient: they’re made from plants, which sequester
a collective environmental consciousness in the 1960s, we’ve
CO2, and after using them we can throw them in a worm farm continued over >>
www.SustainabilityMatters.net.au
Feb/Mar 2017 - Sustainability Matters 39