In my effort to understand why the city of San Diego doesn’t accept bags marketed as compostable or biodegradable in its food waste recycling program, I uncovered another inconsistency in advertising by the California-based plastics company, Crown Poly.
Its HippoSak is advertised to breakdown in a home compost bin, a certification obtained from a European company called TÜV AUSTRIA that verifies whether products break down in the slower, more natural environment as opposed to say, an industrial composter that employs a lot more heat to speed-up the decomposition process. TÜV AUSTRIA got back to me last week informing me that Crown Poly doesn’t have any valid certificates from their company at the moment.
“We’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to get in contact with them since February of this year to remove the incorrect claims for their products and website,” wrote Mike Saddler, a member of TÜV AUSTRIA’s product certification team, in an email Thursday.
I contacted Crown Poly but the company didn’t respond in time for my newsletter.
Crown Poly markets this product as something that is good for the Earth and can return to nature without harming it. But, whether intentional or not, some of their advertising appears to be false.
Intentional false marketing goes by another name: Greenwashing. It’s a problem so prolific, the United Nations designated a group of experts to enforce credibility and accountability in this space where seemingly everyone – from utilities to soft drink companies to entire nations – is making commitments to go “net zero” on carbon emissions (in other words, remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as something generates).
I unpacked what it would take for local governments to reach their own net zero commitments in a story a few years ago. Turns out, most of them are banking on yet-to-be-developed technologies that mechanically remove carbon from the atmosphere, called direct air capture, a wildly expensive climate solution that’s years away from widespread deployment to the scale the Earth needs.
In another example, the county of San Diego had to abandon its Climate Action Plan back in 2021 because it relied upon the purchase of largely unverifiable carbon credits to reach its greenhouse gas reduction goals.
The biggest beef for environmentalists that sued the county over their plan was that the offsets could be purchased on an international marketplace, meaning San Diego developers could build anywhere they wanted, creating miles of new commutes from gas-combusting cars, and invest in a reforestation project in the Amazon to make up for it. The emissions were happening in San Diego, but the cuts to offset them were potentially happening far, far away, unverified. A San Diego Superior Court judge agreed with critics and invalidated the plan.
Got a product in mind that’s a greenwashing suspect? Shoot me an email at mackenzie@voiceofsandiego.org.
In Other News
- I luckily did not burn up in the battery fire in Escondido. But I did tour the facility a few hours before it ignited for this story laying out the county’s upcoming decision on whether to ban this key element to the renewable energy transition. (Voice of San Diego)
- In a follow-up on the county’s other big environmental decision, how to reduce driving while still allowing development in San Diego County, here’s how the county’s exemption to arduous permitting and public comment periods was borne. (Voice of San Diego)
- Hot temps, a result of a high-pressure air system hovering over Southern California and hotter-than-normal ocean temps, triggered electrical outages for over 14,000 San Diego Gas and Electric customers over the weekend. As the heat continues, customers are still vulnerable to outages. (Union-Tribune)
- Foes of fireworks in Mission Bay began to materialize as the Mission Bay Parks Committee decided to write a letter stating concerns about pyrotechnics blamed for killing birds over the Fourth of July. (Voice of San Diego)
- Asthma plagued Imperial County for decades but access to respiratory specialists is difficult. Many turn instead to doctors in Mexico. (inewsource)
- Artificial intelligence requires massive amounts of energy to do all that computing. But it’s not clear how supporting all this AI will impact our energy bills yet. (Union-Tribune)