Biodegradable Pressed Sugar Cane Trays: School Makes Greener Choice; Local Paper Plays it for Laughs

As reported in The Brooklyn Paper last week, a Windsor Terrace elementary school became the first in the city to replace Styrofoam lunch trays with ones made from 100% biodegradable pressed sugarcane. Despite the Department of Education's refusal to underwrite the cost of the green trays, the forward-thinking school administration and students made a commitment to phase out the Styrofoam ones.

Although pressed-cane (or "bagasse", as the material is called) trays are certainly less noxious than the Styrofoam they are replacing, there is an even more responsible choice— elegantly described in a comment to the Brooklyn Paper article posted by Parents for Climate Protection's Claudia Friedetzky:

... Based on my research, it is much, much more energy-efficient and produces less waste to use re-usable products rather than disposable or recycled materials. The energy consumption involved in making non-reusable trays available is massive, from production, packaging, transportation, and disposing the trays, whether bio-degradable or not ... Why not purchase re-usable trays made from recycled materials, get dishwashers into school, and hire someone to run them? ... Let's show our kids that we don't just use something once and then throw it out. Let's teach them about the environmental cost involved in producing and using disposables.

The Brooklyn Paper made it's own commentary on the subject in the form of an accompanying "field test" article that purports to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Styrofoam and bagasse trays. Sadly, the trial is utterly biased and seemingly serves only one purpose: to mock the attempt to create and use environmentally better alternatives to "superior" Styrofoam. I personally found this to be utterly irresponsible as journalism, as well as insulting to the parents, students and staff of PS 154 that believe we CAN do better than Styrofoam. The Brooklyn Paper may not choose to print my response as a letter to the editor, but I will include it here:

To the editor: I was dismayed to read your front-page article comparing pressed-sugar-cane trays with Styrofoam trays ("Field test: It's a tale of two trays", in the Mar. 29, 2008 issue.) Rather than attempting an unbiased analysis of the costs and benefits of the two food trays, you chose to toss objectivity and any pretense of scientific method out the window and instead play it for laughs— or so I have to assume after reading of your fundamentally flawed "battery of experiments". Rather than testing the trays with a normal student lunch in a school cafeteria (in the manner they are intended to be used) you instead had a local restauranteur pile an obscene amount of food on them, smothering each tray with a mass of carbohydrates that (as your own photo proves) would be more than enough to feed several children. Unless your goal is to prove that sugar cane trays won't assist in making our kids fatter than they already are, it's baffling why you would choose to test school trays this way. The article almost audibly snickers as the grossly overloaded tray becomes flimsy "after a few minutes", but then immediately moves on to even grosser distortions. You admit that studies show toxins can leach from Styrofoam into hot foods, but apparently that must not be the case here because "you didn't see any." Consult any study on the subject: the toxins in question are real, have serious consequences if ingested (look up "endocrine disruptors" on Google, or the proven cancer-causer benzene), and they are MOLECULAR in size. When was the last time you saw molecules of anything with unaided vision? (What you could see— particles that flaked off the cane tray— are a plant material that should pose no health risks if ingested.) You go on to support your claim for Styrofoam's superiority by noting that it "[lasts] years longer". You didn't include actual numbers, but I'll do you the favor: a Styrofoam tray lives in our landfills for at least 10,000 years, steadily adding to the dump site's toxin leakage until it finally decomposes. Ten thousand years. The cane tray safely biodegrades after 45 days.

Flawed methodology makes your article's observations a self-fulfilling exercise. But hey, why bother doing a real comparison when your apparent goal is to simply laugh at the idea (and by extension dismiss the forward-thinking efforts of a school, a local public leader, and hundreds of Brooklyn schoolchildren?) While you amuse yourself in this manner, the rest of us will continue to seek alternatives to plastic waste and toxins that are poisoning us, our children, and our planet.