Talk:Cradle-to-cradle design/Archives/2017

Organically made food packaging

I'm wondering whether we shouldn't mention something about organically made food packaging (by which I mean packaging made mostly by plants). In Africa, the calabash is used to hold water, so its water-resistant. It could as such replace say plastic yoghurt pots (it can be filled in a factory with yoghurt, and then sealed with say bees wax or resin). This way, the whole thing can be discarded in nature (no seperation of plastic and yoghurt for recyling is needed, if say the yoghurt in the pot wasn't eaten and was disposed off. An added advantage is that the containers can be grown at the factory, so this job doesn't need to be outsourced, and then transported between the plastic factory and the yoghurt factory (it can all be done in-situ). Depending on the calabash cultivar used, several container shapes could be made. If the adding of a company logo is also needed, it can be added to the calabash peel by removing pigment in a zone on the peel. See http://hoholok.com/stamp-makes-plastic-around-organic-fruit-and-vegetables-unnecessary/

It's probably also important to mention bioplastics (that can be composted at ambient temperature) used as packaging. They too would offer the same benefits as the organic packaging method mentioned above. As such, this type of packaging + the food would thus still have a commercial value (as being directly useful as fertilizer). By comparison, foods with artificial packaging (that hence doesn't compost at all) would not have a positive commercial value, and rather represent a cost for companies (as it would require prior seperation of food + packaging to allow the food being used as compost, and the package be discarded or recycled). KVDP (talk) 09:19, 7 January 2017 (UTC)