Earlier this Spring, just to see what would happen, I put a Stonyfield Farms yogurt cup in the ground next to my compost pile. The reason being that the company had recently switched their packaging from a recyclable plastic to a natural plastic made from plants. This new packaging, while reducing the amount of petroleum based plastic the company is using, is not recyclable outside of Belgium and some towns in Wisconsin. Since I can no longer recycle their packaging, I wondered what would happen if I put this plant based plastic in the ground in my backyard since it was just going to sit in the dump anyway.
I checked on it back in April , and there wasn’t much degradation. So for the A-Z photo challenge on Flickr Comments by FrizzText site we’re up to “Y”, so it seemed like a good time to check out how the yogurt cup was doing. The label is gone, but besides that it’s just wrinkled and dirty.
And no I’m not a fanatical recycler, even though someone apparently ended up on my blog by using “fanatical recycler” as a search term.
Yogurt Cup – Stage 3
plastic lives for ever – even on the ocean – there actually is a big Fukushima trash cloud swimming between Japan and the USA; a Canadian recently found a container from Japan with a Harley Davidson motorbike on the beach …
There was a story on National Public Radio just today about the Fukushima trash on its way to the Pacific coast, and the possibility of a great deal of toxic waste and invasive species as well as plastics.
In the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago there was a review of ‘Visit Sunny Chernobyl’ by Andrew Blackwell. He visited some of the worlds big man made catastrophe sites. One is the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, a Texas sized floating mound of plastic in the North Pacific. Here’s a link to the review.
Have you tried punching holes in it to speed up the process?
I was thinking of doing something like that, but decided to see what would happen if nature just took its course. I also just recently realized that my son has been playing with a yogurt cup in his sandbox for about the same amount of time that this one has been in the ground – from all the abuse that it gets from him it still looks about the same as the one that was underground – no label, and just a little wrinkled.