Stalk Market claims compostable hot lid

The Stalk Market hot cup and lid are fully compostable.

A Portland company is claiming the creation of a fully compostable hot-drink cup lid. According to Stalk Market, its new container and lid have been tested and certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute, which means the bio-plastic coating in the cups and the bio-plastic lids will decompose in an industrial compost facility in 60 days. The cups are made using a polylactic acid (PLA) called Ingeo that is made by Nebraska-based NatureWorks, a partnership between Cargill and Teijin Limited.

There are a variety of compostable cups currently available on the market, including International Paper's (NYSE: IP) Ecotainer which is used at the University of Washington (UW), but hot lids have proven more difficult to manufacture. The problem is that PLA dissolves in high heat, according to Stalk Market's president Buzz Chandler. The company—which offers about 80 compostable food service products and plans to have more than 100 available by the end of the year—spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and about 18 months to develop a hot-drink cup and another year on the lid. Both products will withstand temperatures as high as 200 degrees and decompose within 60 to 90 days, he says.

The new lids “work great,” according to UW food services project manager Michael Meyering, who says he tested a similar lid that also uses Ingeo.

Stalk Market's products cost a bit more than standard plastic foodservice containers, but are competitive with other PLA-based products. As oil prices rise again, Chandler says he believes costs for petroleum-based products will climb also.

“When petroleum prices were sky high last summer, our PLA products were the cheapest thing out there,” he says. “The only price increases we saw were transportation costs. A lot of competitors with petroleum-based stocks were raising prices by 8 percent to 10 percent every few weeks.”

Meyering indicated that International Paper, which supplies UW with compostable cups, plans to introduce a similar lid this summer. Around that time, Chandler plans to release a product made from materials left over during his lid manufacture process.