Green Picnics

We have added Environmentally and Biodegradable food service materials that is both safe for the environment and landfills. By keeping our earth free from harmful materials that fill our landfills with non-degradable materials year after year we will help by doing our part with our Biodegradable system. We use disposable Earth-friendly products for your picnic and food service needs. We started Green Smart Picnics to help all individuals, businesses, and organizations become Green Consumers. Our food service products are important because it allows us to:

Reduce or replace the use of products made from petroleum based materials such as Styrofoam and Plastic. Explore opportunities to reduce their waste via composting Dispose of products into a landfill that will break down into safe, Earth-friendly elements Our mission is to encourage all consumers to use food service supplies made from petroleum-free, tree-free, and chemical-free materials.

Most of the products that we use are made from sugar cane bagasse or PLA. This page provides a brief overview about these materials

This material is like a thick paper with high performance qualities. For example, one might compare the thickness of our plates to the high quality Chinet branded plates made from trees.

Sugar Cane Bagasse:

Bagasse (sometimes spelled bagass) is the biomass remaining after sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract their juice. (Wikipedia) As recently as 1993, Bagasse was essentially a waste product that caused sugar mills to incur additional disposal costs

In tropical regions of the world sugar cane represents a major crop. Because of the increasing demand for sugar in the last century, large areas in the tropical and subtropical countries all around the world were allotted for sugar cane crops. Low level of maintenance and good productivity made sugar cane an attractive crop for farmers in these regions. Most of the high sucrose varieties are fully ripened and ready for harvest when they are 10 to 15 months old. Accordingly, sugar cane bagasse is very much an annually renewable resource.

Once harvested, sugarcane is crushed in a series of mills, each consisting of at least three heavy rollers. Due to the crushing, the cane stalk will break in small pieces, and subsequent milling will squeeze the juice out. The juice is collected and processed for production of sugar. The resulting crushed and squeezed cane stalk, is bagasse.

Further, in some factories around the world, the sludge left over after removing the cellulose fibers in creating bagasse, is used to power the actual paper-mills. The resulting CO2 emissions in burning bagasse are equal to the amount of CO2 that the sugarcane plant used up from the atmosphere during its growing phase. Consequently, the resultant heat from this process appears to be greenhouse gas-neutral.

We can all do our part to keep our earth Green and Beautiful