
What is it about the connotation of fossil fuels anyway ? Are we supposed to just accept the premise that fossil fuels are bad a priori ? I know when I’m winning an argument with a green when they say “you’re still usin’ fossil fuels, man.”
Plastics bashing is a popular indoor sport with proponents of green building materials. Has any one of them led by example and founded a plastic company which scores 100 ?
Breakfast TV emphasized that a burning railcar of chemicals in Tennessee contained a chemical used to make plastics. The chemical was acrylonitrile, a building block of acrylonitirile / butadiene / styrene, or ABS for short. Ironically, the equipment used to film, edit and broadcast this news contains many parts made from ABS.
There is a definite trend with large corporations to avoid Chemicals of High Concern ( CoHC’s ) by avoiding the controversy if at all possible. We have to spend a lot of time documenting what our plastics do not contain. Anymore, marketers emphasize what their product or packaging does not contain even though manufacturing has changed nothing. Call it greenwashing, eco-labels or the Culture of Alarmism.
We could get with the trend and unabashedly emphasize so many things starting with our feedstocks. We could say our plastic is derived from free-range, cage free, fair trade natural gas for starters. We have to certify that our plastic made in St. Louis is not made with slave labor, so we got that going for us too.
Natural gas is naturally non-GMO, BPA free, phthalate free and gluten-free too.