Mesa man makes eco-friendly plastic bottles, runs into opposition

[The Straight Story]

Mesa man makes eco-friendly plastic bottles

All Danny Clark wanted was to leave an eco-friendly footprint for his children.

That and to ride the new wave of "green business" startups by coming up with a way to make money and help the environment at the same time.

His idea was simple: If he could make plastic water bottles biodegradable, it would reduce the impact on landfills, curb roadside litter and reduce the amount of plastic garbage that eventually washes into the oceans.

Everybody wins. Well, not everybody.

The Mesa man's small-business venture has run into opposition from a large and unexpected source: the $400 billion recycling industry, which fears that by making plastic bottles biodegradable, it will reduce the stream of plastic refuse used to make everything from carpet to clothing to new bottles. In addition, changing the makeup of plastic bottles could make it more difficult to recycle them, the industry fears.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/2011/01/28/20110128mesa-man-makes-eco-friendly-bottles.html#ixzz1CQpgwcCu

[daggahead]

1. Oh geez.

There's a whirlpool of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean ... a recycling "mine," if you will.

This guy's idea will solve a problem, and the recycling industry will still have plenty of our crap to recycle.

[snappyturtle]

2. I can remember a time when anything made of plastic was considered

cheap...of lesser quality. AGAIN, we have companies like Monsanto and DuPont to thank for the vast array of plastic materials.

Enso is trying to make an already bad situation better. Better still, imho, would be to use glass...I remember in the seventies of going to a store to buy milk in glass bottles. Each week we'd return glass bottles toted in a wire basket made for the purpose and given freely to milk customers. We had to return to the store anyway to buy more milk and toting the empty bottles back was a no brainer.

I read in the comments of the linked article that a statistics class at Indiana University calculated that the U.S. annually uses 1.6 billion barrels of oil to produce plastic shopping bags! I'll bet the plastic bottle industry rivals or exceeds that. Plastics are nasty chemicals and putting food and water in them is insanity in the first place but at least the Mesa man is trying.

[jtrockville]

4. I buy milk, and for that matter, practically all liquids, in glass.

The milk I buy comes in returnable glass bottles: $2 deposit, refundable upon return. We don't get a wire basket. I just tuck them into my shopping bag before I head to the market. I've stopped buying soda for a variety of reasons, but do occasionally pick up a six-pack of non-returnable glass bottles. I can still find some juice in non-returnable glass bottles, but if not I go for oranges. I've learned to do without anything else that now only comes in plastic bottles.

I wish we'd never shifted from returnable glass bottles.

[formercia]

3. Plastic is made from Oil

Most of our trash is plastic or contains plastic. It's all about Oil.