Updates on previous topics

My thanks to Max at ENSO Bottles who posted a comment about their biodegradable plastic bottles I mentioned last post (23rd February). They are now marketing a bottles that uses 25% recycled PET as well as continuing to develop new products. Good to hear that R & D is alive and working in these difficult financial times.

In the same vein, I heard today of another US-based company, Green Planet Bottling, who are developing recyclable/compostable plastic water bottles. The bottles are returned to 100% virgin polymer when ground to flakes and immersed in water at 170 degrees. The controversy seems to be that these are made from plants rather than petroleum and that if they are dumped in the standard recycling plastic system, they do not behave as ordinary PET plastic does and the yield of reusable PET is reduced. To give them their due, Green Planet Bottling aim to buy back their own bottles to put them into their own recycling system that is designed to deal with this plant-based plastic. The answer to all this, if plant-based plastics are going to have increased distribution, recycling systems will have to sort them from the standard petroleum PET plastics. Simple enough if the plant plastics are clearly labelled - recyclers need to sort for different plastics already, so why not add one more? It's down to consumers to change their preferences to help drive the expansion of recycling procedures.

On a different note and going back to an earlier post (17th November 2009) regarding the availability of water on the moon, it seems there is more up there. It has been announced by NASA that around 500,000kg of water ice has been found at the lunar north pole. That's a bit better than the 100kg or so down at the south pole. I won't be packing my bag yet though...


4th March: I've just heard about the Plastiki - a catamaran made of 12,500 plastic bottles filled with carbon dioxide that 4 lunatics (sorry - brave adventurers) will sail the Pacific Ocean in, from San Francisco to Sydney. The idea is to highlight the plastic waste issue I've been touching on. The journey of Plastiki will include the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is situtated between California and Hawaii and is said to contain so much detritus that it could weigh 100 million tons and be five times the size of the UK (that's twice the size of Texas, for our American cousins who may be reading). Wow! I like adventures, but I think I'll stay on dry land away from plastic bottles.

Good luck to David De Rothschild and his crew