100% Compostable Food Packaging: An important update to our tagline
Our tagline sums up what we do in 4 words. It’s GREEN HOME in a nutshell. And that makes it a powerful tool.
And now, at the start of 2023, we’re making an important tagline tweak. Officially, that is. (Unofficially, this shift has been happening for some time already.)
We’re switching from 100% biodegradable food packaging to 100% compostable food packaging.
Why?
Well, you might be surprised how much there is to it. First up, we need to explain why we went with biodegradable in the first place.
Have you seen this image from Life magazine in 1955?
Sigh. This celebration of throwaway living clearly had no idea what was coming. No idea that this emerging throwaway culture combined with the proliferation of plastics would lead to our current plastic pollution nightmare.
And even though scientists began noticing plastic pollution in our oceans in the 60s and 70s, widespread mainstream awareness of the crisis would only be sparked many decades later.
Even in 2007, the year GREEN HOME was founded, the crisis had not yet been broadcast globally by the media and awareness remained limited.
Many people didn’t even know what the word ‘biodegradable’ meant, or why we might need biodegradable products. Which meant that in the early days, a big part of what we did at GREEN HOME was make the case for biodegradable products and build awareness.
Our tagline trumpeted this central aim – letting people know we supply products that can break down. That our products aren’t at odds with nature’s cyclical systems.
The next step
Today, not everyone knows about the importance of biodegradability. But, awareness has grown massively. This means it’s time for the conversation to evolve.
Biodegradability speaks to the capacity of something to breakdown. Compostability speaks to how it breaks down, and the system it breaks down in.
In many ways, it’s the next step in the conversation. An opportunity to get both more granular, while also zooming out to look at the whole system.
Of course, we’ve been speaking about the compostability of our products and composting systems since day 1. And our products have always been both biodegradable and compostable. So this is not a new conversation. It’s just that now that so many people really get the biodegradable concept, it’s time to put compostable front and centre.
Building a better system always starts with building awareness – to change systems we need to change minds.
So, watch this space. And join the conversation!