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Cornstrach peanuts:
A Public Radio Commentary
by Bill Hammack
Listen using RealAudio
My wife and I got a package in the mail that fascinated me. I
don't even recall its contents, because I was taken with the the
green packing peanuts used to protect whatever it was from
damage. As I scooped up the pellets to toss them in the trash, my
wife said, with a very knowing voice, "Just toss them on the
compost pile." What! Plastic in the compost? No. She showed me a
slip of paper that explained: There was no "plastic or polluting
gases" used to make these peanuts; they were made of cornstarch.
Toss them on your compost pile or spread them on your lawn and
with a bit of water they'll dissolve in minutes. These cornstarch
packing peanuts are part of a movement called "green
engineering."
It's a design philosophy where the environment is explicitly
considered from the beginning: A goal is to find processes and
products which are feasible and economical while minimizing
pollution at the very beginning. These cornstarch packing peanuts
are the work of food engineer Bill Stoll.
He grew up in a small Iowa farming town and attributes his
creativity to this upbringing. "Farmers," he recalls, "could fix
anything." Watching them do this gave Stoll a love for
entrepreneurial ventures. He claims it's "The most exciting thing
a person could do -- and the scariest. You challenge every
creative bone in your body -- like jumping off a ledge with a
bungee cord."
So he devoted his career to consulting with entrepreneurs in the
food industry. In 1992, near the end of his career, Bill Stoll
had lunch in a St. Paul restaurant with a client whose company
used popcorn for packaging. The owner was looking for a way to
pop bigger batches and he wanted to pick Stoll's mind. This
question made Stoll recall sounds he'd heard as a kid.
In a factory he'd seen cereal being prepared in huge pressure
cookers. When the clamp holding the top was knocked away by a
sledge hammer, the lid flew open and the grain exploded as if
from a cannon. Stoll knew that a similar method is used to make
puffed snack food. So he came up with the idea of making
something like corn curls for packaging. The result:
biodegradable packing peanuts.
Now that I've seen these I see cornstarch everywhere. I've heard
of biodegradable cornstarch cutlery, it dissolves in a day. Not a
bad deal considering a plastic fork is typically used for three
minutes, and then sits at least a hundred years in a landfill.
And I've heard rumors that a company is developing a way to use
cornstarch to make upholstery. Who knows where this green
engineering revolution will end.
Copyright 2001 William S. Hammack Enterprises
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