Greenwashing and Pretending to Care

 

A standard wholesome looking burrito bowl with supposed earth friendly bowl. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons License

Usually, about every two weeks, my wife and I purchase burrito bowls at Qdoba. They and other burrito chains advertise their bowls as "compostable". This, similar to a plastic bottle being "recyclable" is not as simple as it sounds. In recent years, we have discovered how much of a greenwashed boondoggle plastic and electronics recycling is and how what we thought was happening is not. Now, we even need to question things touted as friendly to the environment. That so called biodegradable thing you are buying may harbor nasty toxins, only removed by the companies greenwashed advertising.

Recently, after digging a little further following putting some of these bowls in our compost, I discovered that these friendly looking brown bowls may contain the nasty forever chemicals PFAS, which technically makes them toxic to any composting system. The PFAS are used to allow the bowls to hold together when wet, but basically subtract any environmental benefit of a compostable bowl. The fact that it would literally be better environmentally if the bowls were made of actual plastic is ironic. Also, A few weeks ago, when I looked into purchasing compostable paper products for a party we were hosting, I discovered the same may be true of so called "compostable" paper products in the stores. Though my research wasn't extensive in either case, the fact that it is hard to find out definitively whether or not a given product is safe even when the company advertises it as such is concerning. How can we know for sure, when the companies "greenwash" them as safe while others are saying that they may not? In the end in another irony, (I love irony) it was actually cheaper to buy low cost ceramic plates which are reusable than to purchase compostable cardboard plates.

 I used to get all bound up worrying about this or that toxin, but now we live in a world where the toxins we have emitted into the environment, in just the past century: lead, PFAS, radioactive contamination, just to name a few, are everywhere and will be with us forever. 

 Like so many things in our modern world, we are told one thing by industry and discover that another is true.It makes me question just about everything I put into our composting system that comes out of our industrial system.