Among his many other duties, Jeremy has been dilligently working on a project to introduce a reusable, widely-available cup in Portland--something on a scale large enough to make the paper cup obsolete. Ambitious? Yes. Should you help? Yes.

Here's an exerpt from the first post of the Portland Cup blog Jeremy has started, you can find much, much more info on that page:

Compost Wars and Questions to Be Answered


About a year ago I remember a rep from a producer of compostable corn plastic service ware came to visit me at the shop. I told him that our business participated in the Portland compost program and that I was having a hard time figuring out if his company's products were acceptable to the compost facility, Cedar Grove. I'd used some of his products at a previous job and his were the only compostable/biodegradable trash bags my paper distributor carried. He assured me that their products were completely compostable, but that Cedar Grove just wanted to them to pay an outrageous fee for certification of each of their products. Since they produced everything from forks to clam shells to trash bags, the thousands and thousands of dollars for all of this testing effectively excluded them from participation. Sounded like a classic David and Goliath. To circumvent this injustice, his company planned their own composting facilities on the outskirts of Portland. Sure all of the corn to make their products came from China, but ocean shipping is the most efficient form of transport, he said. The guy at the paper company assured me that even though the bags weren't technically certified, they composted just fine and were far cheaper than the "approved" ones. Seemed like confirmation that you had to grease the right palms to play in this hot "green" market.


I felt a little better about using his trash bags until one day I got a memo from the composting facility stating that if I continued using the same bags, my compostables would be diverted to landfill because the bags didn't break down fast enough and thus compost made with them in the mix had lots of ripped up plastic included. Not the sort of thing you want when you're trying to sell the finished product as a premium soil amendment. So what was the deal! I'm paying extra for compost service and don't want my coffee grounds and veggie scraps sent to landfill. I forwarded the memo to my paper company and started poking around.

It turned out that the standard laid out in ASTM D6400 was what set the bar for "compostable" products of the kind my composter wanted. 6400 was an industry standard and not some arbitrary rule set up to exclude the little guys. It however did exlude many of the products that the maker of my bags produced. I recently went to their website to check out their current claims. Now they only say that their main line consists of "biodegradable" products instead of "compostable" ones. They even have a few disclaimers that their main products don't meet the ASTM D6400 standard (they have a couple of other small lines under different names that do, it seems). Still, they also advertise how they helped out a NW restaurant chain to "go green" by replacing 16 pieces of service ware with their "biodegradable" products. They claim that food on their plates will be wholesome while food served on petroleum-based ware will be tainted with poisons, and that their biodegradable products will make a difference by breaking down to benign components in the landfills. Thing is, I would think that what you get from anaerobic landfill breakdown is the potent greenhouse gas methane! Of course I'd guess most of the 6400-compliant compostable cups end up making methane in the landfill too. Especially since compost cans are basically non-existent on the streets.

If you're interested in working with us on this, feel free to drop us an email or comment, and we'll keep you posted as things progress and we try to get down to work.