Kudos: Stonyfield Farm (kinda sorta)

Due to my rapidly deepening anti-plastics obsession and my recycling OCD, I check the bottom of every plastic container I need to dispose. While #1 and #2 bottles are the only plastics collected by New York City's municipal recycling program, #5 plastics can be dropped off at Whole Foods customer service desk to be recycled by Preserve's Gimme 5 program.

So yesterday I bought some organic Stonyfield yogurt for my daughter who needs some probiotics after running a high fever for a couple of days.

I turn over the cup and see the welcome news that it is not #anything plastic, it is "Made from plants":

My initial reaction was, I am thrilled, thinking that someone finally invented an enviro-friendly degradable bio-plastic food container that can hold liquids. I guess that was a bit illogical, huh, since liquids ought to degrade anything that is truly degradable ...

I headed off to Stonyfield's site and read their PR about these containers. The plant-based plastic they are using is called PLA (Polylactic Acid). Turns out that ...

• PLA is used only for their small multi-pack cups. Their larger containers use #5 polypropylene plastic (see link at top of post for how to recycle these)
• While Stonyfield claims to have examined various options for yogurt packaging including glass, poly-coated paper, they then go on to explain why they decided against glass and in favor of lightweight #5 or plant-based plastics. They do not explain why they do not just use coated paper. For so many years all yogurt or sourcream etc. containers were made from waxed or otherwise coated paper and there was no problem I ever noticed with this material!
• Their PLA is not really compostable. Further, there is some kind of double-speak going on about why composting is not a good idea:
  

  While PLA itself can be composted, the particular blend used in our multipack cups is too thick to be considered compostable under American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) international standards. And, surprisingly, the independent review of PLA’s environmental impact found that composting is not the best option for disposing of the cups. Why? Because composting would release the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the plant-based plastic (CO₂ absorbed by the corn when it was growing) back into the atmosphere where it would contribute to global warming.

• The PLA is "recyclable" but only in our dreams:

  The good news is that PLA is recyclable. The bad news is that, right now, the recycling infrastructure for PLA is in its infancy, so this technology is available in only two places, Wisconsin and Belgium, and these facilities aren’t equipped to separate paper labels, adhesives or lidding from our PLA multipack cups to enable recycling.

• The PLA can contain GMO corn! Actually, they sort of get a pass on this. Cargill, the container manufactuer, is working via an offset program to ensure that -- while their procured corn may include GMO kernels -- an equivalent amount of non-GMO corn is grown (somewhere, by somebody, if we trust this).

Still, all in all, kudos to Stonyfield Farm for reducing their carbon footprint, "by 1,875 metric tons of CO₂ a year. That’s equal to the CO₂ emissions from 4,360 barrels of oil, or the greenhouse gases from the energy used in 160 homes for an entire year." And, of course, the elimination of toxins leaching into ground water when the containers end up in landfills is huge, too.