Shops large and small all over the world are advising usabout how green they are and how many rainforests they are saving buy flogging their new "Green" products to us. Whole companies have sprung up dedicated solely to supplying us with green merchandise, telling us on how to live our lives, and by chance selling the eco products we must have in order to avoid Armageddon.

It is astonishing just how many firms are singularly saving us from destruction from our nasty consumerism, boo, hiss.

Trading on ones green concepts, particularly when there are none is pretty unashamed behaviour in my book and I feel companies are simply not thinking about the consequences of their actions when moving from one product to another, only caring about portraying themselves as a green, eco company.

One of the popular "eco" products to be marketed in this way are PLA paper coffee cupsold by catering disposables firms, coffee shops and supermarkets.

Polylactide is a thermoplastic derived from natural resources, such as corn starch (in the USA) or sugarcanes (rest of world). Although Poly Lactic Acid has been around for donkeys years, it has only been of commercial interest recently, in light of its biodegradability.

As well as being used to line the inside of paper coffee cups instead of the plastic lining more commonly used Poly Lactic Acid is in use in plastic glasses, plastic cutlery, carrier bags, food packaging, all manner of catering disposables and even diapers.

These new "biodegradable" paper coffee cups are now very much in vogue as we all attempt in our own way to stop global warming.

One of the major problems with this new Poly Lactic Acid lined paper coffee cup being used at numerous stores and coffee chains all over the planet is that customers are expecting them to biodegrade in their bins when they must be sent to composting facilities or put in your compost at home, individually plantedand covered by nice warm compost. If these paper cups are simply put in the bin with normal waste they break down at the same rate as normal paper cups, that is years and years

Unless customers compost their PLA lined disposable coffee cups at home (should they are aware they have one) there will inevitably be two types of paper cups requiring sorting at waste reclamation sites whereas before all waste disposable paper cups could be simply sent for recycling without having to separate them.

Moreover once these new paper cups find their way into normal recycling channels (and you cannot visibly tell the difference) it will contaminate the whole recycling batch as oil based plastic lining on normal disposable paper cups and the starch based natural lining on the PLA cups does not mix. You get the oil on water scenario.

Most companies manufacturing, marketing or using these products also seem not to have considered what was removed from the land in order to create crops to make this natural product. Like bio fuels land once used for production of foodstuffs is now being used for fields to grow alternatives to plastics and fuels. There are even reports of forests being removed in order to make space to grow the PLA plants. This contributes to increases in food prices, the result of which everybody will have noticed over the last 12 months. There could never be enough available space to fully change over from our dependence on plastics to enable us to move to farming this natural alternative, everyone would starve.

On the subject of starving people one other point to think about regarding these new PLA plastic products is that we have spent a long time giving farm subsidies to farmers in parts of Africa to help them create crops and stand on their own two feet. Many of the crops these farmers are harvesting are sugarcane and corn.

Now we are growing on mass those same crops for Bio Fuel and alternatives to plastics, lowering the price as a result, plunging these people back into poverty.

There are alternatives that given a little more thought could do many of the jobs these companies aspire to achieve through their use of PLA lined or produced cups. Oxo-biodegradable Plastic (OBP's) for example are normal plastics such as polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyethylene (PE) to which is added a mixture (d2w additive) that accelerates the decomposition of the structure of the plastic.

OBP'swill degrade, then biodegrade, on land or at sea, in the light or the dark, in heat or cold, at a pre determined rate, leaving no fragments, no methane and leaving no harmful fragments.

The residue is then amenable to conversion by micro-organisms, for which these products are food and also into carbon dioxide and water; thereby returning otherwise intractable plastics to the earth.

These Oxo-biodegradable Plastics can now have a shelf life, pre-determined when manufactured Using oxo-biodegradable plastics does not prevent them from being recycled.

Unfortunately plenty of other short sighted green ideas are out there, such as the major fast food restaurant that dropped its plastic drink stirrers and moved to wooden stirrers in an attempt at greening their company. Out of fear of lawsuits from customers for splintering customers mouths with their wooden stirrers they had the stirrers covered with gelatin (like your prescription capsules). Adding this extra process to the manufacturing process of the stirrers costs considerable energy, to the point where the natural product becomes more energy intensive than simply using plastic. One other classic example of short sighted greening was the banks saving acres of rainforest by switching paperless bank statements, an idea I learned about from a paper flyer and saw advertised on paper billboards.

Plastic is not "evil" as some would have you think, reducing our use of it is a good idea however we cannot just replace all plastics with a seemingly natural alternative without considering all the consequences, and certainly not just to be seen to be greening your firm