Bio-Pint!

April, 5th 2011. I am sorry for the little delay in posts recently but I have been working 24/7 on a project for a design competition! Wish me good luck! I will go back to florence for few days for some wedding preparations and I am already tasting the drinks with my old friends and the toasts with the family! So, just to get in the mood, here is a news that is quite interesting, above all for those countries around the Mediterranean Sea where you can go out of a bar with your drink, but rigorously in a plastic cup. 

Plastic and Styrofoam are not environmentally friendly and paper cups and glasses are usually too flimsy. 

To fill in the gap, Biopac came up with its biodegradable range of tumblers with different capacities.

These are made of polylactic acid which comes from cornstarch. The best part is that they are fully compostable, so you don’t have to worry about polluting the environment or toxic landfills.

Available in small and big sizes, the smaller ones can be used for cold drinks and other beverages and the larger ones can be used for beer. In UK they are the first to carry the CE mark. They meet the high European standards for environmentally friendly products. If you want them branded, and you are buying them in bulk, the company will do it for you.

So, if every pub/bar would use these material, there would be so much less plastic around the street and in our landfills.

Cheers!

Pepsi goes ecofriendly?

March, 23rd 2011. If you think of the number of beverage bottles which people buy and then throw (or sometimes give for recycling) the quantities are huge. PET is not at all eco-friendly because it is a form of plastic and polyester. Though it can be recycled it is still not biodegradable. For the first time a biodegradable PET bottle is now available thanks to PepsiCo.

This bottle is made from natural and renewable sources like switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. In the future, it may be sourced from potato and orange peels, oat hulls and other agricultural waste products. It not only looks and feels like PET, but its molecular structure is also similar.

“PepsiCo is in a unique position, as one of the world’s largest food and beverage businesses, to ultimately source agricultural byproducts from our foods business to manufacture a more environmentally-preferable bottle for our beverages business,” said PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi.

As PET bottles account for 30 percent of the total PET production goes into the manufacture of bottles, this new development could have a significant environmental impact. Earlier PepsiCo was responsible for packaging its Frito-Lay snacks in fully compostable bags. These bottles should be in the market sometime next year. Meanwhile Pepsi’s rival, Coca Cola has also announced that is testing plant based PET bottles.

Read the original article.