{"id":138,"date":"2007-04-29T12:10:01","date_gmt":"2007-04-29T16:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/2007\/04\/29\/biodegradable-plastic\/"},"modified":"2007-04-29T12:10:01","modified_gmt":"2007-04-29T16:10:01","slug":"biodegradable-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/2007\/04\/29\/biodegradable-plastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Biodegradable plastic?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, Archer Daniels Midland, an agriculture company, and biotech firm Metabolix announced plans to sell a biodegradable plastic made from corn (it will be called Mirel).\u00a0 The two companies will launch Mirel in a number of consumer based products ranging from gift cards to razor holders.\u00a0 The main problem with traditional plastics, as many\u00a0know,\u00a0is that they remain in our environment for a long period of time versus a few months with Mirel.\u00a0 Interestingly, according to an article by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/news.com.com\/Plastic%20goods%20for%20your%20compost%20heap\/2100-1008_3-6178533.html?tag=item\">CNET<\/a>, &#8220;the <em>petroleum to make these plastics accounts for 10% of the oil the US consumes<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>While this new &#8216;green&#8217; plastic is better for the environment than the traditional source, the issue of using corn certainly has its social issues, similar to that of corn-based ethanol.\u00a0 In recent times, we have seen the price of corn rise dramatically &#8211; and while this might be good news for the corn market, this will impact those individuals that depend on corn for food.\u00a0 This again illustrates that when we look at all our responsibilities [economic, environmental, and social], finding a truly sustainable solution is very difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, Archer Daniels Midland, an agriculture company, and biotech firm Metabolix announced plans to sell a biodegradable plastic made from corn (it will be called Mirel).\u00a0 The two companies will launch Mirel in a number of consumer based products ranging from gift cards to razor holders.\u00a0 The main problem with traditional plastics, as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}