When Frito-Lay launched a biodegradable SunChips bag, eco-friendly snack eaters cheered! But, it seems as though those cheers were drowned out by the 100% compostable bag’s noisy packaging material. After about 18 months, declining sales and negative consumer feedback, Frito-Lay is pulling the loud snack bags from shelves and returning to the former, quieter bags which cannot be recycled.

While the new bags are undoubtedly louder and a little annoying, is 10 seconds of noise while you open the bag really that big of a deal? It is according to over 44,000 Facebook fans of the “Sorry But I Can’t Hear You Over This SunChips Bag” page. I guess the bags weren’t as loud as they thought if Frito-Lay heard their complaints.

The SunChips brand centers around health and nature. Their website promotes a “healthier you” and a “healthier planet.” SunChips boasts that it is committed to environmental sustainability and changing the world. While removing the bags seems like a step in the opposite direction, USA Today reports that the company is working on creating a new, quieter eco-friendly bag.

Though I’m all for compromise, I think consumers should consider that the sounds of garbage trucks taking the old bags to the dump, or the sounds of children running into the kitchen for a snack are far louder than new bags themselves.

We’ve talked a lot about how brands are trying to add “Green” to their corporate color palette, sometimes with real, valuable initiatives and sometimes with just words. (Green: Who Can Claim It? and Greenwashing) So in honor of this Earth Day, the 40th Anniversary actually, we’d like put some of those brands to the test to “verdify” how green they really are.

Last month, SunChips introduced the world’s first fully-compostable chip bag. The new bags, made of plant-based materials, should fully decompose in 14 weeks (under typical hot composting conditions). A few weeks later, Snyder’s of Hanover announced it too would be using sustainable packaging (on its organic line of pretzels).

I don’t have a compost pile, much less the perfectly mixed 1-2-2-2-1 “hot” compost that SunChips recommends, but I do find the random scrap of trash in my yard after trash day. Would the bags eventually decompose in my yard or on the side of the road? We plan to find out.

For our Earth Day experiment, we have staked one of these composting bags to the ground to simulate errant trash. We will photograph our progress and share the results on the blog.

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This week, green dye and food coloring fly off the shelf to “vertify” everything from frosting to the Chicago River itself. Green beer is a popular St. Patrick’s Day libation, but some brewers are taking a different turn and working to be green all year long. This time we mean eco-friendly green.

Breweries are going green by recycling spent grains, reducing packaging, or boosting the energy efficiency of the brew house.

Adnams, a UK brewery, has gone so far with one beer that it has received the endorsement of The Continue Reading »

Here’s the scene: It’s an unseasonably cold day. You have just completed a freezing run through the parking lot and have caught the elevator going up. The stranger next to you, visibly chilly, remarks, “so much for global warming, eh?”

I can’t tell you how many times this exact scenario has happened to me, which leads me to believe one of two things: 1. Strangers like to talk to me, or 2. The name Global Warming is fundamentally misleading. (Let’s just assume it’s the latter.)

Apparently the same events seem to happen to Al Gore, as urban dictionary has added “The Gore Effect” to its lexicon, meaning “the phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming.”

So what’s the deal? Continue Reading »