The Inspiration

Recently I read a book called Cradle to Cradle from William McDonough and Michael Braungart which really moved me to start think about life-cycles of the products we consume and of the waste these products leave behind. So I started to take a closer look at trash that I was producing from my home and found that most of it was plastics from food containers. These plastics are not recyclable meaning that after the few minutes that the food took to consume the plastics were obsolete and would soon start on their way to a landfill somewhere. Mcdonough and Braungart have a great passage from their book addressing this issue, they speak of styrofoam but plastics are in the same category.

"....Imagine designing such packaging to safely biodegrade after use. It could be made from the empty rice stalks that are left in the fields after harvest, which are now usually burned. They are readily available and cheap. The packaging could be enriched with a small amount of nitrogen (potentially retrieved from automotive systems). Instead of feeling guilty and burdened when they are finished eating, people could enjoy throwing their safe, nutripackage out the train window onto the ground, where it would quickly decompose and provide nitrogen to the soil. It could even contain seeds of indigenous plants that would take root as the packaging decomposes....We could even plant signs that say "Please litter." (Cradle to Cradle,pg 140)

To me that sounds like really smart design, it makes no sense in using such a durable material for something (especially for fruit cups) that is consumed and rendered useless after such a short period of time.