Call me jaded, but I'm getting hacked off at hotels' fake efforts at looking green when they're really just cheap. First it was the notes about "we care about the environment, please don't make us wash your towels", despite the fact that housekeeping replaces the towels regardless of what you do.
I'm at a Marriott now that has plastic glasses in the bathroom, with a nice note saying that they're "made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Let's look at each of those claims.
- First, keep in mind that a real GLASS would have required no environmental cost after the initial manufacture, besides being run in a dishwasher with 100 other glasses. And there are no transportation costs after the first shipment of glasses, as opposed to the trucking cost of an unending supply of disposable cups.
- Making a plastic cup from corn creates artificially high costs for corn. At a time when we're having food riots around the world, we're using corn to make disposable cups. Our generation will live in infamy.
- It's not environmentally sustainable when compared to a glass. And corn is, in fact, NOT an environmentally sustainable crop. It requires more fertilizer, pesticides and energy to produce than other crops. And, um, it's food, folks, at a time when many countries are losing their ability to feed themselves due to climate change.
- It's compostABLE, which is not to be confused with compostED. This cup will go into the general trash flow, which means it will wind up with all the other garbage, and will in all likelihood NOT compost but, rather, will be there for archeologists to discover.
Oh yeah. Instead of a regular coffee maker, with those little paper packets of coffee, this one uses PLASTIC cartridges of coffee, thus generating more material that will never break down. How green can you get here, Marriott?
Thank you. I feel much better now. And yes, I flew to Baltimore from Denver, so my carbon footprint to get here is 1,013 pounds of CO2. The irony is not lost on me.
