A café in my neighborhood sells salads in supposedly compostable corn-based containers. Since I live in one of only a handful cities in the US with a curbside composting program, I can just chuck my empty salad container into my curbside green bin. But I always wondered what might become of it in a backyard compost pile. Luckily, MoJo senior editor Dave Gilson answered my question last year in an article on the subject: Ramani Narayan, a Michigan State professor of chemical and biochemical engineering who helped develop biodegradable corn-based plastic, told Gilson that most plant-based plastics need to go to a commercial composting facility, not just your yard.

So if you can't throw bioplastics onto your compost heap, can you at least recycle them? A recent UK study recommended doing so, but I'm skeptical.

Turns out industry groups have been sparring over this very issue. Bioplastics manufacturer NatureWorks LLC recently claimed that commercial recycling facilities are perfectly capable of separating out plant-based materials from conventional plastics—an essential step in part because bioplastic melts at a different temperature from most types of conventional plastic. But the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR), a trade group for manufacturers of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic containers, fired back (PDF) that NatureWorks had only tested one type of sorting machine, called near infrared (NIR). "Other sorting systems were not part of the recent tests, nor were ways to address quality issues such as [bioplastics] getting stuck in the dryers during the PET reclamation process," NAPCOR said in a press release.

The recycling gurus at Earth 911 come down on NAPCOR's side. "Most biodegradable plastic should not go into normal recycling streams—there's not enough research about what will happen to it," says Earth911 spokesperson Jennifer Berry. EPA resource conservation expert Saskia Van Gendt agrees. "It's practically impossible for sorters to differentiate the different plastics," she says. For now the only foolproof way to recycle bioplastics is through their manufacturers. "And in order to do that, you need a large volume of containers," says Van Gendt. "You can’t just send one container back."

Bottom line: If you don't have access to a commercial composting facility, your best bet is to throw bioplastics in the trash. Two notable exceptions: Coke's new bottle, which is made from as much as 30 percent sugarcane-based plastic, has been specially designed to be recycled right alongside regular PET plastics. Then there's Frito-Lay's new compostable SunChips bag. Unlike the corn containers from my neighborhood café, these bags really can go into your backyard compost pile, where they will supposedly degrade in 14 weeks—no super hot commercial composting facility necessary. Cool products both, and a good sign that bioplastics might get better down the road.

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Shorter Wall Street Journal editorial page: Congress should never close corporate tax loopholes because this will result in corporations booking accounting charges for higher taxes.

Jeebus.

Loophole in question is explained here.

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We have two related foreign policy stories today. First up is Peter Baker on Obama's negotiation with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev over a new arms control treaty. After reaching agreement, Medvedev insisted on bringing missile defense back into the treaty:

“Dmitri, we agreed,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Medvedev with a tone of exasperation, according to advisers. “We can’t do this. If it means we’re going to walk away from this treaty and not get it done, so be it. But we’re not going to go down this path.”

....If Mr. Obama overestimated his powers of persuasion in reaching quick agreement with the Russians, they misjudged how far they could get him to bend. In the end, they compromised on nonbinding language. And so, after all the fits and starts, all the miscalculations, the vodka toasts that proved premature and the stare-downs that nearly sank the whole enterprise, Mr. Obama hung up the phone again with Mr. Medvedev on Friday, this time having finally translated aspiration into agreement.

And here's Michael Hirsh on why Obama was so upset at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his government embarrassed Joe Biden by announcing a new housing development in Jerusalem the day Biden arrived for an official visist:

The main reason for Obama's ire, according to a senior administration official, who asked not to be named, was that Biden had gone to Israel specifically to deliver a message to Netanyahu: the main issue is now Iran and its nuclear program, and we can't allow ourselves to be distracted by other issues or to jeopardize the emerging alliance against Tehran in support of tough sanctions — an alliance which includes most of the leading Arab states. In particular, Netanyahu — who campaigned for office himself on the primacy of the Iranian nuclear issue — can't afford to allow Israel's leading defender on this issue, the president of the United States, to look as if he's weak or lacking influence....And that of course is precisely what happened. Netanyahu's government made Obama look bad, undermining the effort against Iran.

Italics mine in both excerpts. It goes without saying that both of these stories are based on sources who have an agenda. And we don't know what that agenda is. So take this all with a few grains of salt.

But the connecting tissue here is Obama's backbone. Domestically, he played hardball to get healthcare reform done this month and he threw down the gauntlet on recess appointments this weekend. Internationally, he played hardball with Medvedev — or convinced him he was playing hardball, anyway — over arms control, and was upset with Netanyahu less over the Jerusalem housing project per se than over the fact that it was a bungle that handicapped his ability to play hardball with Iran.

Conservatives are unhappy over Obama's domestic hardball and liberals are probably uneasy over the international hardball — espcially if Hirsh's report about Iran is true. But they're opposite sides of the same coin. A good president knows when to compromise, and also knows how to beat up his opponents enough to make compromise possible. It's still early days, but Obama seems to be developing a pretty good sense for this stuff.

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As long as I'm making lots of lists this weekend, here's another one: What I like and dislike about the Opera browser. (The PC version, that is, since I don't know anything about how well the Mac version performs.) I'm pretty hooked on it. First, here's the small list of things I don't like:

1. No autocomplete in form fields. This is my only big complaint. I understand why some people might not want this, but it's a pretty standard feature on every other browser in the galaxy. I'm not sure why it isn't an option on Opera.
2. Occasionally a page won't load 100% properly. Not often. Just keep another browser on tap for when it happens.
3. Ad blocking requires a little more effort than just plugging in AdBlock on Firefox. But it works fine once it's configured.
4. You can't right click on sites in the Personal Bar. This is a very minor annoyance.

And now for the things I like:

1. History search! This is awesome. Opera keeps a full text index of every page you browse, so you can search them instantly. I'm always forgetting where I saw something, and this is a feature I've wanted forever.
2. It's faster (and seemingly more reliable) than Firefox.
3. The address bar search feature is very handy. Just type "w obama" to bring up the Wikipedia page for Barack Obama. "t crazy" brings up thesaurus entries for crazy. Etc. You can define whatever search shortcuts you want.
4. There's a "closed tabs" icon on the far right of the tab bar. It's basically a trash can for all the tabs you've closed recently. Very handy when you want to get back to a page that you just know you had opened a couple of hours ago but can't quite remember.
5. You can shift tabs around on the tab bar. This is sort of an anal retentive thing, but I have a specific order I like my tabs to be in, and this lets me keep them that way if they get jumbled.
6. The Notes feature allows me to keep short little text notes within easy reach. I use this for, among other things, keeping some commonly used HTML code handy.
7. Opera Link uploads my settings so that all my PCs can stay synchronized. When I loaded Opera on my new PC it worked about 90%. Obviously 100% would have been better, but it still saved me tons of time re-importing my bookmarks and other settings.
8. "Open in background" is a surprisingly handy option. When I'm proofreading a post, I use it to load all the links in the background while I'm reading. After they've all loaded I check to make sure they're correct.
9. Opera Mail is great. It's nice having mail in a browser tab, and it has a super fast search feature. I have over 100,000 messages in my archive, and Opera can search the whole thing in about a second. (On the downside, Opera Mail is also a little idiosyncratic and takes some getting used to. If you don't care about searching, it might not be worth the trouble.)

This is a fairly miscellaneous list. Opera is the kind of program that has lots of hidden nooks and crannies, and I keep discovering new things about it all the time. Someone else would probably discover different things. In any case, it's pretty cool. I'm a big fan.

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