I love stuff that makes sense. And as much as I love trash—I do; throwing it away mostly; it feels like
accomplishment—there is too much of it in the waste stream in my amateur perspective. Diesel garbage trucks choking down the road at 5 MPG to landfill a bazillion tons of garbage at a landfill that—it has “fill” in the name—will fill up just doesn’t make sense.
So what better way to break this cycle than to keep stuff out of the trash in the first place?
We like the idea so much, we have a compost bin. Usually the final repose for coffee grounds and banana peels, when we built it we didn’t think we’d be dumping potato chip bags in there.
Turns out, we will. Some SunChips bags are 100% compostable. It takes about 14 weeks in an active bin to fully break down the bag according to the company.
There’s something else to like about SunChips too—again, it’s in the name—Sun. This also falls into my “I can recycle all the soda cans in the world, but if corporations don’t man-up there’s only so much individual consumers can do” file (Yes, I have a file with that name on it.) The company’s Modesto, CA factory harvests solar power to run it, producing about 145,000 bags of SunChip sunniness per day. Less oil, less coal, less dependence and inefficiency. More free, clean energy.
The chips taste good, I feel good buying them, and the world is a better place. Heck, I bet the earth even likes eating the bag.