{"id":7689,"date":"2011-03-08T13:22:32","date_gmt":"2011-03-08T20:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=7689"},"modified":"2011-03-08T13:22:32","modified_gmt":"2011-03-08T20:22:32","slug":"styrofoam-and-other-junk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2011\/03\/08\/styrofoam-and-other-junk\/","title":{"rendered":"Styrofoam and other junk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey!\u00c2\u00a0 Do you know the date that McDonalds got rid of its styrofoam crap<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Maybe<\/a>… On August 1, 1990, McDonald’s and Environmental Defense joined forces in a groundbreaking partnership to find ways to reduce McDonald’s solid waste. The project team examined McDonald’s materials use and solid waste issues in its U.S. operations, including restaurants, distribution centers and suppliers. […]<\/em><\/p>\n

As a result of the partnership, in April 1991 McDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s announced that it had made many changes to their packaging and waste management systems, including:<\/em><\/p>\n

Switched from polystyrene foam “clamshells” to paper-based wraps for its sandwich packaging, providing a 70-90% reduction in sandwich packaging volume, reducing landfill space consumed, energy used and pollutant releases over the lifecycle of the package.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was wondering about this when I saw the news about the Republican Congress’s new environmental decisions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Congress switched to biodegradable packaging, along with a number of other green initiatives like composting, as part of its Green the Capital program. But the program was lead by Nancy Pelosi, whom, you may have heard, is unliked in certain conservative circles. So John Boehner — the new Speaker of the House — and company dismantled her program, largely as a political jab.<\/em><\/p>\n

At first this strikes me as a move of Political Spite:\u00c2\u00a0 going out of the way to be anti-environmental.\u00c2\u00a0 But there might be a further reason — this is too damned easy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the way \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and this is the really fun part \u00e2\u20ac\u201d guess who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s selling the cups. The Koch brothers, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s who. OK, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m exaggerating a little. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the former executive of Koch Industries who owns WinCup, which is the new supplier to the Capitol of Styrofoam and the like.<\/em><\/p>\n

Actually, even if you can’t stick Koch in as producers, they’d still have a vested interest in squashing or advancing these symbolic acts.<\/p>\n

The other news, suggesting why a lame Democatic Congress is better than a Republican one — Peter King’s probe into the “Radicalization of Muslims”,\u00c2\u00a0 at this moment\u00c2\u00a0when the Middle East is exploding and demonstrating\u00c2\u00a0the limits of the appeal of an Osama Bin Laden — which is definite<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0but in the “fork in the road”\u00c2\u00a0metaphor — I’d think we wouldn’t want to confuse the fork sprongs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But we’re in a world where Sunday Morning Political talk shows are booking the Phelpses<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0— to inform us that Obama is the Beast in the Book of Revelations, so ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey!\u00c2\u00a0 Do you know the date that McDonalds got rid of its styrofoam crap? Maybe… On August 1, 1990, McDonald’s and Environmental Defense joined forces in a groundbreaking partnership to find ways to reduce McDonald’s solid waste. The project team examined McDonald’s materials use and solid waste issues in its U.S. operations, including restaurants, distribution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7689"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7717,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7689\/revisions\/7717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}