Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Trash pollution? Noise pollution? Take your pick.

Now this one just made me laugh.

SunChips, in an effort to reduce trash pollution, created a biodegradable bag for their product that was released April 2009. Apparently the bag may have reduced trash pollution, but created another problem of noise pollution.

Consumers of the Frito-Lay product complained about the noise of the bag that when measured in decibels is about the same level of busy city traffic.

Apparently the sound of the new bag was too much for the SunChips lovers, so the company switched back to the original product bags made from plastic.

PepsiCo Inc., which owns Frito-Lay spent a long part of last year trying to figure out a solution.

After engineers explored dozens of material options they came up with one that is still biodegradable but gives off the same level of sound as the original plastic bag as well as other chip bags.

The new bag is arriving in stores now, but is only used for the plain flavored chips. The company will wait to hear consumers' responses to know if they should switch all flavors to the newly designed, quieter bag.

This made me laugh because my first thought was that people were being a little too picky. I mean the bag sounds like a great thing for the environment and I applaud the company from coming up with it.

But I found a clip on YouTube illustrating the sound of the bag and lets just say you could never open it in a quite classroom for a midday snack without being noticed.

Please watch this quick clip to see for yourself. The guys face says it all.