Bamboo a big tool for greenwashing, says noted designer
Bamboo buyer beware, says Kelly LaPlante.
"This is one of the biggest areas for greenwashing," she told me during a tour of a suite she redesigned on behalf of Lexus at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. (As part of a marketing campaign, Lexus is sprucing up hotel suites in San Francisco and Washington, D.C, The Fairmont one costs $869 a night, but you get to use a Lexus hybrid V8 while you're there.)
A coffee table from Lexus
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)A lot of companies offer bamboo flooring and panel so they can sell a green product, but many of them also use toxic adhesives and other chemicals that take away the advantages of using bamboo. Bamboo grows fast and needs little fertilizer, making it a relatively green building product.
Some also grow it in distant places and truck it in, eliminating further environmental advantages. You've got to dig into the suppliers to figure out if you're buying green. Later this year, she will set up a site that rates various building suppliers on how green they really are. It should be good reading.
Other remodeling tips from LaPlante:
• Recycle as much as possible. She recently remodeled three cottages in Venice, Calif. They reused drywall and so much material that they didn't even need a dumpster out front. The less stuff that ends up in the land fill, the better.
"When you demolish something, are you demolishing or carefully removing," she said.
That footstool/table you see in the picture is an example of recycling. It's made out of leather found in old Lexuses.
• Green is not necessarily a statement. You can consciously pick green materials, but it doesn't have to be a theme. In fact, self-conscious green will likely look dated in the future.
"We try to make things that don't look like green design," she said.
http://www.greenwashingspy.com/?page_id=384
The PLA industry (corn based plastic) is composed primarily of Cargill, Inc., disguised as NatureWorks, and ADM.
See: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/responsibleshopper/company.cfm?id=200
And: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/responsibleshopper/company.cfm?id=187
Interestingly, in order to disguise the real money behind the BPI, none of the above companies appear in the membership list published at:
http://www.bpiworld.org/BPI-Public/Members/Directory.html
This lobby is clearly behind the California law that equates compostability with biodegradablility, thus giving a boost to the PLA industry. The problem with putting PLA in landfills, I have been informed by a landfill operator, is that it biodegrades so quickly that the methane produced by anaerobic biodegradation in the landfills will escape before the landfills are 'capped and tapped.'
The problem with making all plastic disposable items out of corn, which is the usual source of PLA, is that something like 150,000,000 tons of plastic would be made out of corn, driving up prices for corn and leading to a devastating increase in the world hunger problem.
Full disclosure: I represent a company that competes with the PLA industry--by choice. We could have become a PLA company just as easily.
-Tim Dunn, BioGreen Products Co.
http://biogreenproducts.biz
A source for biodegradable and oxo-biodegradable plastic disposable items