With Palm Oyl foam and PET recycled polyester fabric the Peak Oyl series of sleeping pads continues our design revolution/evolution and further utilizes sustainable materials and helps to foster emerging markets and technologies.
From the President of POE -- Greg Garrigues Why…
-Renewable source for plastics
-Palm is a plant source, and therefore be renewed in a relatively low period of time.
-Not a food replacement crop like soy or corn (corn/PLA is the worst).
-As price for petroleum oil increases, so does the value of substitutes. As such, farmers are getting more money for crops that can be made into fuel that burns in cars and/or made into plastics. There are a handful of crops that can be burned in cars, but only a few that currently can be made into plastics: most notable is corn, soy, and palm. Corn and soy grow on land that normally would be used for food crops. This pressure on the crop lands is driving food prices up, as it reduces the food supply. Other places that can grow corn, like Mexico and Africa, are experiencing the same thing. There is also a huge issue with water – growing corn and soy are hugely irrigation intensive, and take water out of circulation for growing food crops and drinking.
Not a GMO crop....
-Where to start with GMO?!? Once Genetic Modified strains of crops get introduced, they mix with food crops. GMO strains make other strains sterile, an typically hard for the body to digest. So in a place like Mexico, where you have a small corn farm next to a big corporate corn farm, the little farmer may have his whole seed crop go sterile when the bumble bees cross pollinate. It really comes down to the fact that GMO can’t be controlled effectively, and that we are creating new species through tinkering rather than evolution, and we don’t know if this will lead to resistant insects, disease or other issues of nightmarish proportion in the future.
Not an irrigation intensive crop.....
-Palm grows in places that don’t need to be irrigated. Water should be used for drinking and food crops.
Market transformation and new technology development. CO2 output is roughly equal to Oil for material extraction....
-Markets work on supply and demand. By us providing demand, more suppliers shift to fill it. As this happens, they look for opportunities to increase efficiency and meet the market demand at lower cost (opportunity and direct).
-Market participation gets you a vote. This may be one of the most important aspects of buying palm. By being a part of the system, we can be a more effective voice for how the market should develop.
-Extracting Oil requires pumps, transportation, drilling equipment etc. and they all require petroleum to operate. Palm currently requires about the same amount of petroleum to grow and harvest it as the equivalent oil. This is in the form of tractors, and other harvesting equipment. This is important because most folks use this as an argument to stay with Petroleum. I think it is important to acknowledge this as a net even, and focus on the other positives.
Palm resources proximity to manufacturing.....
-The palm-oyl can be processed without highly specialized equipment and can be done near the growing areas. This keeps the transportation distances minimal, and since the Palm comes from Malaysia, it does not have as far to travel to our foam factory as Petroleum, Corn or Soy. This means a lower CO2 output for transportation.
A solid step in the right direction.....
-While the process is not perfect, the material is close to it. We can wait for perfect forever, or we can follow the adage that you get to the top of the hill through many small steps.
No one is fighting a war over palm – war creates huge collateral waste, and has a significant environmental impact.....
-There is over a million pounds of batteries going into the landfill every month in Iraq right now. That could be more environmental damage in one month than our entire year of production. Also, when you concentrate importance on a single material, like petroleum, you also focus power. Power leads to many things – power, corruption, good – but is not always predictable. In the case of petroleum, it is a contributor the current war in Iraq. I don’t want people dying so that I can have a new plastic widget, or drive my car. Even more so, I don’t want my friends and friends kids dying in a conflict over oil. While we can’t distinguish the source of our petroleum based plastics, it has to be assumed that some of it comes from bad places. There is a huge push to not buy conflict based diamonds, why wouldn’t that same logic be applied to oil? Probably because we have all become so dependent on it for daily convenience. This is the root of why it is important to take steps to change the supply chain, and help build momentum for alternatives like Palm.
Building it right, the materials create no compromise in performance or durability, and fits solidly into our motto, “Good gear = Less waste”....
-We have used the embodied energy discussion to describe good gear = less waste. We could take that well beyond to: good gear = less planetary destruction, good gear = less death of soldiers, good gear=less mailing crappy product back to manufacturers, good gear=less of Shawn’s time on the phone, good gear=...
It is a technology that has problems that are not inherent to the material, but to the process, and can be overcome with education.....
-As a consumer of the material, you get a voice when speaking to the supplier.
Why not…
-Petroleum inputs…will reduce during market transformation.
-As land is being converted to Palm Plantations, it requires heavy equipment and the related petroleum to run the equipment. Later this input will not be necessary, and we can amortize the petroleum spent over many years of palm crops.
Hardwood and peat land deforestation…which will stabilize through education and outreach.....
-We talked about the two ways land is cleared for palm: heavy equipment or a match. Governments and NGOs both are working on this issue now. We need our trading partners to voice the issues with the match as well and it is our obligation to vocalize this with them.
-The wildlife impact is not insignificant. Birds and animals are both displaced. The arboreal species are the ones that have an impossible time of adapting when the farmer uses the match method for clearing – e.g. orangutan and birds. Palm can be grown between hardwoods, much like shade grown coffee.
Supply chain currently is has both good and poor practices and are hard to distinguish. Even the worst offender is not as bad as the best practices of corn and soy, and the relative practices of the petroleum companies.....
-Not much to add to this statement.
Challenges ahead....
-Competing with Europeans for Palm.
-Because Europe doesn’t have good land for growing corn or soy, they are turning to palm as their oyl supplier for both plastics and auto fuel. Because Europe is already heavily invested in diesel autos they have a healthy appetite for palm.
Educating farmers, and governments.....
-NGOs are the most direct path to delivering the education.
-Developing more responsible farming while demand skyrockets. It is hard to get a suppliers attention while they are struggling to keep up with demand. This is where the consistency and the level of the message needs to be maintained.
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