Neato! Biodegradable hotel key cards

January 5th, 2010

lenoxcard

I was cleaning out my wallet yesterday after my trip to Boston over the holidays (personal disclosure: my brother got married on New Year’s Eve and I was, ahem, the best man), when I noticed the plastic key card from The Lenox Hotel still tucked away in my billfold. Oh, darn it! I know it’s just a tiny piece of plastic, but it still annoyed me that I hadn’t returned it to the hotel before I left so it could be reused — now I had no choice but to throw it away.

That’s when I turned the card over and noticed in small print on the bottom of the card:

In an effort to protect our world’s resources, this key is 100% biodegradable.

Wow, how cool! I’d never seen one of these cards before. Not a surprise though, that it would be from The Lenox, which was recently chosen one of the five greenest luxury hotels in America by U.S. News & World Report. (The hotel was indeed green, from the wicker basket in our room compartmentalized for three different types of recycling, to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Consumers Guide to Effective Environmental Choices next to the Bible in my nightstand drawer. I was not such a fan, however, of the endless supply of bottled water in the hotel gym — sustainably sourced though it may have been.)

There’s an Ingeo stamp on the key card, which is a bioplastic made from field corn–derived dextrose. It’s important to note that while these types of biopolymers lessen our reliance on fossil fuels because the “plastic” is being manufactured from a vegetable source, rather than petroleum, the cards are not truly biodegradable unless they’re composted. In a closed landfill, devoid of oxygen, they will decompose at the same rate as traditional plastic.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. And while a biodegradable key card may seem like a tiny little thing, there are a lot of plastic cards out there beyond the standard hotel key card — stores’ gift cards, membership cards, credit cards. Imagine if they were all made from sustainable materials, and properly composted.

Reminder to myself: Call the Los Angeles Department of Public Works to find out if it accepts bioplastic in its green composting bins.

–Jennifer Grayson