Wow, hard to believe it’s already June. Where has 2021 gone? This past week we celebrated World Oceans Day, a day dedicated to appreciating the beauty of our oceans, as well as encouraging everyone to do their part in ocean conservation and protection. At UrthPact, we have a goal: to prevent 25 billion pieces of plastic from reaching oceans and landfills by 2028. How exactly are we planning on doing that? By providing customers with a compostable alternative. All of our product lines are certified compostable (industrial or home compostable, or both in some cases), meaning they are guaranteed to break down when disposed of properly, and contribute back to the Earth they came from.
Not only are many of our products certified compostable, but our drinking straws are also made from a material that is certified marine biodegradable and has been successfully tested as landfill biodegradable. Essentially, no matter where on Earth they end up, these straws are guaranteed to break down to harmless elements and compounds. In contrast, petroleum-based products, and even industrially compostable products take hundreds of years to break down, leaving wildlife vulnerable. Our straws pose a much smaller problem for marine life and won’t break down to harmful microplastics.
In 2020, straws were the 5th most collected beach trash item, behind food wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic bottles and plastic bottle caps. While straws may seem like a small drop in the bucket in terms of plastic pollution, it’s somewhere to start. Our goal is to start a revolution: to encourage businesses and consumers to find creative ways to enjoy the convenience they expect while still being sustainable and lessening the volume of plastic waste produced yearly. And it’s not just about landfill waste. It’s about litter in our terrestrial environments, dumping into our oceans, and every ecosystem in between. It’s our responsibility to clean up after ourselves, and to make better choices for our planet, as both consumers and business owners. Implementing UrthPact’s compostable foodservice ware and encouraging composting in your local community or business is a great place to start. Composting allows for the convenience and functionality of disposables, but with none of the environmental guilt.
Besides home compostable drinking straws, UrthPact also manufactures industrial compostable wrapped cutlery, both individually wrapped articles and dining kits. We also work with our coffee roaster/retailer partners to produce industrially compostable coffee pods. Along with coffee pods, we manufacture a branded industrially compostable one-way degassing valve called evalv. Finally, we are working with a variety of partners to supply a line of industrially compostable water and juice bottles. What, you didn’t think we’d get to 25 billion pieces with just straws, did you?
