Howard Brody's blog on ethics and medicine has more information on how this unfolded, and it looks fairly embarrassing for JAMA, whose editors are apparently now being investigated for their behavior by the American Medical Association:
Hi, I found a link to the Greenpeace website on http://greenwashspy.com . They seem to be using the link to Greenpeace to promote themselves as a legitimate third party seeking to 'out' greenwashing. This website is actually a front for the PLA lobby. They confess it, if you look deeply enough into the site:
http://www.greenwashingspy.com/?page_id=384
The PLA industry (corn based plastic) is composed primarily of Cargill, Inc., disguised as NatureWorks, and ADM.
See: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/responsibleshopper/company.cfm?id=200
And: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/responsibleshopper/company.cfm?id=187
Interestingly, in order to disguise the real money behind the BPI, none of the above companies appear in the membership list published at:
http://www.bpiworld.org/BPI-Public/Members/Directory.html
This lobby is clearly behind the California law that equates compostability with biodegradablility, thus giving a boost to the PLA industry. The problem with putting PLA in landfills, I have been informed by a landfill operator, is that it biodegrades so quickly that the methane produced by anaerobic biodegradation in the landfills will escape before the landfills are 'capped and tapped.'
The problem with making all plastic disposable items out of corn, which is the usual source of PLA, is that something like 150,000,000 tons of plastic would be made out of corn, driving up prices for corn and leading to a devastating increase in the world hunger problem.
Full disclosure: I represent a company that competes with the PLA industry--by choice. We could have become a PLA company just as easily.
-Tim Dunn, BioGreen Products Co.
http://biogreenproducts.biz
A source for biodegradable and oxo-biodegradable plastic disposable items
A comment was submitted to this page under my name. I did not submit a comment to this piece and did not authorize anyone else to submit a comment to this piece on my behalf.
The factual content of the statement is an accurate recitation of a quote I gave unrelated to the New York Times article in response to a request about Senator Gillibrand's voting record since coming to Congress.
Matthew L. Myers
The article says that Gillibrand "helped" PM and then it talks about legal matters and studying the affects of inhaling secondhand smoke and the like. I am not sure wha the big objection to all of this is. She was an attorney at the time, not a legislator. If an attorney takes on ANY case that the public deems "wrong", does that mean they can NEVER be a legislator?
Compare and contrast: Gillibrand's past association with corporate law and tobacco, Hillary Clinton's past association with Walmart (almost an identical deal, and Walmart also sells a lot of tobacco), and Orrin Hatch's deals with drug companies - he's among their biggest lifetime recipients of drug funds, and he was just caught getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies via his charity - far worse than Gillibrand, but dead silence on the media - probably because Hatch played a key role on the Senate Finance Committee in the Daschle affair, which had health care and pharma cheering.
Howard Brody's blog on ethics and medicine has more information on how this unfolded, and it looks fairly embarrassing for JAMA, whose editors are apparently now being investigated for their behavior by the American Medical Association:
[http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2009/03/jama-editors-need-to-come-down-off.html http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2009/03/jama-editors-need-to-come-down-off.html]
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819137827260883.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819137827260883.html]
[http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents]
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