Polyethene plastic  - numbers 2 and 4

Last time I wrote about the problems surrounding the use of plastic number 1 - PET, and how it's fairly easy to substitute plastic drink bottles with other alternatives.  

Plastic number 2 is high density polyethene, also known as polyethylene.  HDPE is a really useful plastic, and you probably have lots of it in your home, especially in bottled grocery items. 

Milk, juice, shampoo and cleaning products are usually packaged in bottles made from HDPE.  There are eco-advantages to this, as it takes a lot less fuel to transport a pallet of products packed in such lightweight bottles, compared to glass or metal. Once they are finished with, these bottles are easily recycled and in Australia our collection rates are quite high. 

Often the HDPE is used to make products with a long life, such as buckets.  These items can still be recycled once their useful life is over.  So far so good.

The sibling of HDPE, however, is low density polyethylene.  Made from the same raw material, but with a different structural arrangement, LDPE is thinner, more flexible and, because it is used in food packaging and plastic bags, much more of an environmental problem.

So many of the applications of LDPE are designed to be single use, from cling film to frozen food bags.  People love plastic bags and often tell me that they are OK because they reuse them a few times.  But they are still in landfill forever, so much so that they actually help to stabilise landfill.  We create new mountains out of all our garbage, with the contents safely sealed away from effective decomposition. 

I never use or accept plastic bags, and yet I seem to end up with huge collections at home, so ubiquitous are they. It is possible to recycle them outside Coles or Woolies.  We recycle all the LDPE packaging from ZURI this way.  Of course lots of places have banned the use of plastic shopping bags, or charged for them in order to encourage people to shift away from using them.  South Australia leads the way for Australians, as they do with deposits on drink bottles and cans. People seem to survive!

A word of warning though.  Don't be conned by the many plastic bags that proudly boast that they are 'degradable'. All that means is that they have fillers in them that allow the bags to break into small pieces once in landfill.  This creates a secondary environmental problem as tiny scraps of plastic are scattered far and wide. The plastic doesn't go away, it just gets dispersed more efficiently into the environment.  

That's another worry, as plastic out in the environment is ending up inside wildlife.  A floating plastic bag can look like a sea jelly, be ingested by and animal who then dies and decays, releasing the bag to kill again.  Tiny scraps of plastic are a real threat to fish and birds.

What's the alternative?  You can use newspaper to wrap your scraps in, as our parents and grandparents did, or use cornstarch plastic bags for your rubbish.  They perform just as well and LDPE bags and because they are made from a corn-based polymer, they are not only sustainable but will biodegrade in landfill.  

At Katoomba ZURI we stock a range of fully compostable kitchen bags to suit every purpose.  They are certified to the European standard EN13432 for home composting and Australian Standard AS4736-2006. 

We have bags to line your kitchen compost collection - the full bag can then be tossed into the compost bin. We have rubbish bags in various sizes, small all purpose bags for lunches and fruit & vegie storage, bags for dog waste, and even a clingfilm.

There's nothing stylish about carrying your shopping in a plastic bag, but our ever popular envirosaxs have that problem solved.  They roll up neatly to carry in your handbag, meaning you are never caught short without a bag when shopping.  they are strong too, and can take up to 20kg.

To buy your fruit and vegies, we have several fabric options, which are reusable and double for storage in the fridge.

I can remember when plastic shopping bags were new and exciting.  We took to them with gusto, though Americans stuck with the paper sacks. The first bags were thick and glossy and plastered with cigarette advertising.  Times have changed!  Can you imagine that now?  Shows that change is possible.