The biodegradable laptop
You've seen picnic ware and household items made out of biodegradable plastic. Now, here's a notebook with a biodegradable chassis.
This Fujitsu LifeBook sports a chassis made from a plastic made from cornstarch rather than petroleum. It costs more, but it's green. Put the chassis in a landfill and it will go away over the course of months. Real plastic will take decades.
It's made of plastic from cornstarch.
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)Producing the cornstarch-based plastic, which comes from a supplier, also results in 15 percent less carbon emissions. Those vials (pictured at left) to the side, by the way, show the progress from corn kernels to plastic.
Fujitsu has also used the plastic on cell phones and point-of-sale terminals. The products right now are only available in Japan. Following pollution problems and the oil shock of the '70s, Japan embarked on a somewhat aggressive environmental program. Although environmentalism rises and dips, energy efficiency programs have remained somewhat strong. As a result, Japan remains one of the largest markets and producers of solar power.
You will start to see more stuff like this in the U.S. and Europe, though. The cost of bio-plastic will also decline as companies like Cereplast and agricultural bigwigs like Archer Daniels Midland expand production.
The state of California has passed a law, assembly bill number 2417, stating that the words biodegradeable, oxo-biodegradable, degradable, and every possible synonym for those words, in effect, belong to the corn-based plastics (PLA) industry. No biodegradable plastic made out of naphtha, an otherwise useless industrial byproduct, may be labeled biodegradable, nor any synonym thereof, may, given current technlogy, be called biodegradable, even if they do, in fact, biodegrade in one day longer than 120 days. This is true even if the biodegradable plastic alternatives are far more likely to biodegrade in a landfill that the corn based plastic alternative. The net effect of this is to increase the demand for corn based plastics. The result of making non-food items out of corn has driven a price spike in the world grain supply that threatens hundreds of millions of impoverished third world citizens with starvation.
A further effect of this is to deny the citizens of California the benefits of new technology that makes inexpensive, recyclable, disposable plastic products-garbage bags, shopping bags, plastic cutlery, straws, styrofoam cups and containers, deli containers, soda bottles, etc. etc. The corn based plastics cannot be recycled under in any existing system in place in California, whereas the naphtha based biodegradable plastic alternatives can. In fact, the recycling lobby is trying to ban corn based plastic bottles, because it gets confused with PET, and wrecks their recycled PET plastic batches.
Who is behind this? I can't prove it, but I strongly believe that Cargill Inc. and Dow Inc. have been working behind the scenes to create this spike in corn prices, with no concern whatsoever for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who struggle to find food every day. Cargill has acquired the 50 percent interest in Cargill Dow LLC previously 100% owned by Dow Chemical Co. and has renamed the company NatureWorks LLC. That's right, that friendly neighbor Dow that brought you napalm and Agent Orange. Cargill is a huge company that has a great interest in making things besides food out of corn-no matter how many millions of children in the third world starve to death as a result. Campaign contribution laws in this country are so lax that I don't think they even had to break the law to get away with this appalling tactic.
Our plastic products biodegrade in the ground in 9 months to 5 years, but we cannot label them biodegradable in the State of California. The ASTM standard that California law refers to is a standard that requires high temperatures and frequent mixing-none of which happens in landfills. IMHO the California standard is in fact likely to mislead the public into believing that their corn based plastic products will degrade under circumstances that do not describe an ordinary landfill. Tim Dunn, http://biogreenproducts.biz