After checking out Fertil's and MasterTag's exhibits, I ended my green (what about using lime or emerald?) walking tour at the A-ROO booth. A-ROO has a line of floral packaging from NatureWorks PLA. I'm holding a purple piece of this plastic...I mean corn...yes corn...in this picture here.
I have to admit, this was pretty neat, and it even earned an impressed "No way" from Today's Garden Center's Associate Editor Ann-Marie Conroy. It feels like cellophane, sounds like cellophane, and it's just as durable. But there's a catch. Unlike it's earth-unfriendly partner, this NatureWorks PLA packaging is compostable in about 45 days. Again, pretty neat.
More specific than just telling you it's corn, this packaging is made from harvested field corn that is broken down into dextrose (corn sugar.) Then it's fermented and distilled into a lactic acid, which is eventually formed into the plastic PLA, which stands for Polylactic Acid. This pseudo-plastic is marketing friendly, making it available for labels, barcodes, etc. I also saw it in a ton of colors and patterns.
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