School Nutrition, and thinking makes it so
Please read this article regarding a school nutrition program. It seems to say that just by participating in a study you reap the benefits whether you implement the health increasing efforts or not. This agrees with the view that when you focus on something you change it just by looking at it.
http://food-management.com/news/study-supports-school-nutrition-0710/
SpudWare®, the biobased utensil that doesn’t melt
Have you ever used a bio-based fork that melted in the spaghetti? How about a PLA spoon that becomes one with the hot coffee or chili?
There are products in the market that look solid and sturdy, but when they get to the application can not stand the heat. Now probably most of the time you can get by, the food you eat isn’t really that hot. The product works at least 80% of the time. That is good enough for government work.
I have to point out that no matter how environmentally sound a product is, if it fails in the application it is a failure. I will not accept that 2 out of 10 times the spoon will melt in the soup. That way lies a future none of us want. The brakes worked 8 out of 10 times. When entering the elevator there is a sign posted, “Your odds are good, the Elevator works 80% of the time. It is not that failure is unacceptable. Learning from failure is the key to all success. So the one time out of a thousand that the coffee cup bursts open on your white shirt is a message coming in. The message is NO!! Unacceptable, unusable a total failure. One out of ten thousand is probably acceptable.
As your Brand X spoon drips into your hot chili think of SpudWare®.
75 Million sold, no melting in your soup.
Now more than ever SpudWare®
We do live in interesting times. Seems like everywhere we look there is something bad happening. The government is either trying to take over my life or it is ignoring me when I want assistance. The environment blows me away with the natural beauty and life exploding and sickens me when I think of the plastic in the ocean. If you are looking for a positive thing to focus on for a moment it can be SpudWare®. Plastic is evolving in front of our eyes. It won’t happen today or tomorrow but it will happen and we get to watch and play. It’s like remember the first cell phones that looked like shoes. Big and heavy and really expensive. Now you can call Italy on your computer and have video for free, nothing , no cents. That is where SpudWare® is going. There will be a time when it will be normal to have a compostable waste stream. Biobased, compostable foodservice packaging used everywhere, not like now. I am sorry to tell you that biopolymers make up one quarter of one percent of our plastic production. But don’t worry, it will quadruple by 2013 to one whole percent.
Today is the day to fix it with SpudWare®.
Plastic Forks that never go away must stop being.
The SpudWare® state of mind
The day we invented SpudWare® utensils was a typical mid-summer warm. The X-games called because they wanted to know what our new starch based utensil was called. It took us two hours to determine that despite my belief that it should be called potatoware, SpudWare® was the name. That is the moment we moved into the SpudWare® state of mind. When you live at ssom all things are possible. The vision needed appears so movement towards long term results occurs. Understanding that vegetable starch is somehow equal to natural gas liberates the imagination. All things are exactly equal because they are different. Individual effort equalizes and exceeds massive effort. One person solving a problem results in a solution for all. Though each SpudWare® fork is similar, they are all unique. The moment of clarity, seeing the micro and the macro, you have now entered the ssom. If you are lucky, you may never leave.
(do I need to explain that ssom means SpudWare® State of Mind?)
Agricultural Waste Feedstock
What do you think about agricultural waste. Maybe you haven’t thought much because you live in the city. Get out of central humanity and you are bound to run into Ag Waste. Like Rice Straw in the Central Valley or Wheat Straw in Eastern Washington. All farming creates a feedstock of leftovers. After the corn there is the stalk. The stalk can become the cup or the fuel. All over the world ag waste is valued at differing levels depending on the needs of the local economy. We are pushing the process of changing our waste stream. The compostable waste stream is the future. The efficiencies of utilizing materials in the area they occur, and dispensing value each step usually results in innovation. Exuberant growth is the natural state of much of our planet.
Out of the exuberance of your life what is the value of your waste feedstock .
My own waste feedstock has things like SpudWare®, spring boxes,car wrecks and cabbage in the garden.
And then there are the relationships.
The BioMass Packaging® story
SpudWare® is one part of a larger biobased foodservice packaging program.
The program is known as BioMass Packaging®.
We picked the name because we felt that biomass would become known widely as a feedstock used for both packaging and green power generation. Our goal is to achieve a compostable waste stream. It is logical to consider utilizing unvalued agricultural waste feedstocks like corn stalks, wheat stalks or sugarcane bagasse. Other biomass materials would be forest trimmings, seaweed , crabshells and potato starch. The list of potential feedstock is extensive and really only limited by the innovation needed to add the value and create a product.
BioMass Packaging® is now 5 years old and will soon have its own website. Our goal is to create a knowledge center about all things biomass. An educated consumer is very powerful. We rely on that.
Ten years from now, the compostable waste stream will be a reality.
That means we have time to be ready.
That would be stimulating.
Islands of Plastic
I have just returned from a couple of weeks in the Bahamas on a very good vacation.
As we walked along the beach we observed bits of clear plastic and styrofoam pieces that were mixed in with the seaweed and shells along the water lapping edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Seeing the impact of plastic in the ocean is a wake up call. It was only about 60 years ago that we started using plastic for packaging. We now are finding vast areas of the ocean full of plastic. We need to start to change away from non-degradable fossil based plastic to biobased compostable feedstocks.
To me this is a much more important problem then the theory of global warming. Here is an article about plastic in the ocean.
http://www.plasticsnews.com/blog/2009/12/committed_to_cleaning_the_garb.html
The challenge is to become aware of the true cost of non-degradable plastic.
As the consumer becomes educated, she will make a good choice for the future.
Plastic is changing our lives right now.
Here is an example
BPA could make girls more aggressive: Study
SpudWare® has no BPA or any plasticizers added.
You can stay mellow by using SpudWare®
The potatote dilemma
I had an interesting conversation with Christine Sayre Goldstein regarding her company Potatote.
She is intent on bringing potato based plastic tshirt bags into the market. It is very difficult to make something really new like a potatote. But I do like the name. It is the effort of individuals that is the innovation driver. Doesn’t she know that since it doesn’t exist now, efforts to make it real are just tooo hard. Creativity and freedom. And the passion to see it through to the end result.
The Mission of SpudWare®
SpudWare®, it makes a connection. When you realize that plastic can be made of vegetable that is one thing. But the potato is everyday news, ordinary like plastic. Why is it that a material so involved in our day to day lives has no part in public education. I am talking about ordinary plastic. It is everywhere, yet we remain uneducated. The mission of SpudWare® is to educate and connect. The mundane with the magic. Knowing that you always have a choice and make a choice. Now we bring SpudWare.com to life. I know a lot about foodservice packaging made from bio-based materials and will answer questions now. Maybe we can have a conversation.