Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Putting the advertising to the test

I am not a tree hugger, nor am I a crazy, obsessed "Save the Planet" person. But I do what I can to conserve and recycle. I've always been interested in different ways to recycle and got my family involved in recycling when I was in 5th grade. I read a book about ways kids could save the Earth, and we started recycling paper, plastics, aluminum and glass. Buddy and I still do this, but we have to take the recycling ourselves. We don't live in the city limits, so we don't get recycling pick-up. (And I have to drive over 20 minutes to the recycling center in my county, despite the fact that I live about 5-10 minutes from the recycling center in the neighboring county....go figure.)



Over the weekend, Buddy bought a bag of SunChips. I noticed that the packaging looked a little different than the last time we bought this kind of snack. We looked over the bag and realized they had changed the packaging because they have a new bag that they claim is biodegradable. If you put the empty bag in a compost pile, it will supposedly disintegrate after 13-14 weeks. After we read this, I looked at Buddy and he looked at me. I could tell we were both thinking the same thing.....


Let's try it!



So here I am with the SunChips bag.




We've got a pile of yard clippings from where we cut the grass, so we decided to use that as our "compost" pile. I'm not sure if it will work exactly, but when we scooped some of the clippings out of the way, I was surprised at how much heat was there.




Then we covered the bag up with the clippings. I'm just dying to see if this will actually work! If it does, then I hope other companies will consider using this material for their packaging as well.





The packaging showed (simulated) pictures of what the bag should look like at 3 weeks, 9 weeks, and 13 weeks. We buried the bag on Sunday night (May 2nd). Week 13 just happens to fall on Buddy's birthday (August 1st). I will post updates at week 3, week 9, and week 13. Let's see what happens when we put the advertising to the test! This will be interesting to see what happens.

5 comments:

Andrea said...

i LOVE sun chips,but they are so expensive! i finally broke down and bought some the other week and i noticed the different packaging too. can't wait to hear the outcome!!!

Pam said...

Did you know that they make all kinds of things compostable? For example, they make compostable utensils that are supposed to break down in a compost pile. I think they are made of corn products. Anyway, I have seen bloggers do a similar experiment as you are doing, and the utensils did not break down very much. Hopefully, your Sun Chips will hold up...er, I mean BREAK DOWN...better!

Beth Cotell said...

I can't wait to see what happens!!!

Ashley Beth said...

What a fun project!

Kim said...

Interesting! It will neat to see your updates.