Styrofoam and other junk
Hey! Do you know the date that McDonalds got rid of its styrofoam crap?
Maybe… On August 1, 1990, McDonald’s and Environmental Defense joined forces in a groundbreaking partnership to find ways to reduce McDonald’s solid waste. The project team examined McDonald’s materials use and solid waste issues in its U.S. operations, including restaurants, distribution centers and suppliers. […]
As a result of the partnership, in April 1991 McDonald’s announced that it had made many changes to their packaging and waste management systems, including:
Switched from polystyrene foam “clamshells” to paper-based wraps for its sandwich packaging, providing a 70-90% reduction in sandwich packaging volume, reducing landfill space consumed, energy used and pollutant releases over the lifecycle of the package.
I was wondering about this when I saw the news about the Republican Congress’s new environmental decisions.
Congress switched to biodegradable packaging, along with a number of other green initiatives like composting, as part of its Green the Capital program. But the program was lead by Nancy Pelosi, whom, you may have heard, is unliked in certain conservative circles. So John Boehner — the new Speaker of the House — and company dismantled her program, largely as a political jab.
At first this strikes me as a move of Political Spite: going out of the way to be anti-environmental. But there might be a further reason — this is too damned easy.
By the way — and this is the really fun part — guess who’s selling the cups. The Koch brothers, that’s who. OK, I’m exaggerating a little. But it’s the former executive of Koch Industries who owns WinCup, which is the new supplier to the Capitol of Styrofoam and the like.
Actually, even if you can’t stick Koch in as producers, they’d still have a vested interest in squashing or advancing these symbolic acts.
The other news, suggesting why a lame Democatic Congress is better than a Republican one — Peter King’s probe into the “Radicalization of Muslims”, at this moment when the Middle East is exploding and demonstrating the limits of the appeal of an Osama Bin Laden — which is definite, but in the “fork in the road” metaphor — I’d think we wouldn’t want to confuse the fork sprongs.
But we’re in a world where Sunday Morning Political talk shows are booking the Phelpses — to inform us that Obama is the Beast in the Book of Revelations, so ?