[Erin] Paper or plastic, writ large

This WSJ Page One feature on the perils of arranging a green political convention is worth a read:

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: "That just doesn't exist."

Ditto for the baseball caps. "We have a union cap or an organic cap," Mr. DeMasse says. "But we don't have a union-organic offering."

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver's Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to "make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet."

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor's challenge: "That terrifies me!"[...]

Democrats say the point is to build habits that will endure long after the convention. To that end, the city has staged "greening workshops" attended by hundreds of caterers, restaurant owners and hotel managers. "It's the new patriotism," Mayor Hickenlooper says.

Laura Hylton, general manager of Biscuits & Berries catering, agrees in principle. But she has been testing her recipes using local ingredients for weeks and still can't get the green peppercorn sauce right when she uses white Colorado wine. The state's high-altitude wine industry took off in the early 1990s and produces some award-winning labels, but Ms. Hylton says diplomatically, "It's a little...lacking. Our wineries out here aren't what you'd see in California or France."

Joanne Katz, who runs the Denver caterer Three Tomatoes, will take one for the green team by removing her fried goat-cheese won tons with chipotle pepper caramel sauce from the menu. But she questions whether some of the guidelines will have the desired earth-saving effects.

Compostable utensils, she says, are often shipped from Asia on fuel-guzzling cargo ships. As for the plates: "Is it better to drive across town to have china delivered to an event and then use hot water to wash it, or is it better to use petroleum-based disposables?" she asks.

The convention's greening gurus say they're doing the best they can with the most current information available.

Do read the whole thing, if you can. I think the piece highlights one of the most persistent, puzzling and frustrating aspect of the effort to live greener--which efforts are worth making? Which are not? And which ones may have the kind of consequences that aren't an acceptable trade-off for what may be a very small positive environmental impact?

The struggle to make positive environmental choices in the absence of solid data about which choices are best reminds me of the old "paper or plastic" grocery store bag debate. Plastic was supposed to cut down on deforestation and the overuse of our country's wood resources, remember? But now, given the petroleum usage that goes into the manufacture of plastic bags and the fact that they're increasingly viewed as environmentally unfriendly, the old choice isn't so simple. More and more it seems like, from an environmental perspective, the proper answer to "Paper or plastic?" is "Neither."

But a "none of the above" answer won't work in every situation, which means that if we really do want to reduce our impact on the environment, we'd better figure out which measures are worth taking, and which, in the long run, may not be helpful at all.