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A Better SunChips Bag? (article)

Consumer Reports Magazine: January 2012 Frito-Lay scrapped its SunChips Original bag last year (too noisy) but says that the newer bag, like the old, is “100% compostable.” We decided that a retest was in order. On the bag’s back are the words “designed to compost in about 14 weeks in a hot, active home or industrial compost pile.” In tiny type on the bag’s base: “This package is suitable for industrial composting.” Most people don’t have access to an industrial compost pile, so we put a SunChips bag in a typical home pile of grass clippings, wood chips, leaves, and starter dirt, and kept it there for 14 weeks, adding compost and watering as needed. We also measured noise while crinkling the newer bag, the older bag, and a Tostitos bag.…

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Why Compost When I Can Landfill It?

Obviously I'm joking about the title, but people often forget that one of the main benefits of composting relates to greenhouse gas reduction.  How?  You may have wondered about this before...I know I did.  Why would throwing food scraps in my backyard pile be any different than in a landfill? It all started today when I was reading a document about waste treatment methods (my other favorite topic) and I noticed a parallel with composting.  It was comparing the global warming potential of carbon dioxide alongside methane. When waste is incinerated, it creates carbon dioxide amongst many other toxins that are conveniently ignored, although they include lead, mercury, dioxin, furans, and hydrochloric acid amongst others.  Carbon dioxide (CO2) has a global warming potential of 1.0. On the other hand, landfilling…

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