Tech blog

After years of double-digit growth rates, the global ring tone market appears to have come to the end of its crescendo, according to a variety of measures.

In some parts of the world, ring tone sales are actually declining, and the former ring tone kings, like Jamba of Germany and Musiwave of France, are refocusing their businesses on other ways to personalize cellphones.

A couple of years ago, there seemed to be no upper limit to the sale — for a couple of euros, or $3 to $4 — of snippets of music that blast out of cellphones. Billboard magazine created a “hot ring tones” chart in 2004 to track their popularity, and at one point in 2005, analysts predicted an $11 billion ring tone business by 2010.

But the market changed in unexpected ways. For one, more mobile phones were being made with the ability to create or record their own tunes. For another, record labels promoted so-called master ring tones — excerpts from the original pop recordings — for about the same price as the knockoffs but with higher royalty fees.

And digital music stores like iTunes began packaging and selling ring tones alongside their 99-cent singles.

All three trends lessened the profitability of ring tone aggregators, like Jamba, the Berlin-based marketer behind the popular “Crazy Frog” melody.

Jamba, known as Jamster in the United States, is still selling ring tones, but it has expanded into music, video and information services as well as graphics and games. The company was bought for $273 million in 2004 by VeriSign, which subsequently sold a controlling stake to the News Corporation in 2006.

Similarly, the ring tone provider Musiwave announced last month that it was being purchased by Microsoft for $50 million to help the software company with its “connected entertainment” ambitions. Openwave Systems had bought the company, based in Paris, for $121 million in 2005.

Cheap chirps remain on the ascent in non-Western countries, said Paul Goode, a senior analyst in London with M:Metrics, a market research company based in Seattle. Mobile network providers are pushing “ringback” tones, which play over the phone as you wait for a call to connect, particularly in Asia.

But in most of the countries that M:Metrics tracks — Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy — the percentage of mobile phone subscribers buying a ring tone in an average month has fallen consistently over the last 12 months, to a low of 3.4 percent in Britain in October. In the United States, it was 9.3 percent, higher than the 9 percent of last October but below its January 2007 peak of 10 percent.

Mark Mulligan, vice president at JupiterResearch in London, puts the ring tone share of the overall mobile content market in Europe at about 29 percent this year, down from 33 percent last year.

The value of European ring tone sales is expected to be about $1.1 billion this year, about 10 percent higher than 2006, while the value of mobile games sold will be $550 million, about 33 percent above a year earlier, Mr. Mulligan said.

Ring tones still get the occasional headline, as when the Dave Matthews Band finally authorized digital ring tone sales of its music, or when fans downloaded the “Why don’t you shut up?” retort from the prime minister of Spain to the president of Venezuela last month.

Jonathan Medved, chief executive of Vringo, said he believed his company had the next big thing in the ring tone wave: video ring tones. Vringo, based in Israel, offers sports clips, cartoons, music videos and other shorts so that your call shows the animation of your choice when it rings on your buddy’s phone. That would fit in with the ring tone pattern so far.

“Ring tones are personal, and they are driven by hits,” Mr. Mulligan said. “Although many markets have reached saturation, there are still ring tone buyers who change their tunes once a week.”

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) - There is a reason people still buy CDs more than they do digital albums. Actually there are several, but viruses that come along with music via peer-to-peer sites (P2P) and a concern over digital rights management (DRM) aren’t the only culprits.

Digital music files just don’t provide the same amount of content that a CD package does. That includes liner notes, extended album art and lyrics. Buy a digital album today and all you get are a list of tracks and (maybe) a thumbnail image of the album cover that you can’t even read.

It’s one of the reasons music fans still turn to P2P networks for their music. In addition to providing music free of charge and free of DRM, P2P sites in many cases also include digital copies of such extras typically found in the CD. According to label sources and pirate network tracking firms, fans downloading full albums from BitTorrent sites almost universally choose files that include scans of the CD booklet over those that don’t.

Of course, there is little that can be done with those scans other than view them on a computer. Imagine if the music industry and the digital music services got together and offered an official way to access the same content, but make it available on portable devices as well as make it interactive.

There are two ways to accomplish this. One is working directly with a digital music service and hardware developer to ensure all this new content has an outlet. The other is to go it alone.

For the former, iTunes is the most likely candidate.

Although hardly life-threatening, iTunes is facing new competition from Amazon and a variety of social networking sites. While it has made great advancements with the iPod, iTunes’ innovation has been slow. The service looks and operates much like it always has. The only new features are in video.

In 2008, look for Apple to make nice with its label partners by offering a bit more with each download, such as lyrics and more interactive album art. 

Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He’s written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course.

Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach.

An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free - lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang’s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone.

Strang’s classroom is the world.

In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang’s lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the elite Indian Institute of Technology.

Many “students” are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz ali Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes, and direct students to MIT’s courses for help.

Others are closer to MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all - like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.

“Rather than going through my old, dusty books,” Darcy said, “I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new.”

There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious.

The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they’re arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

And mostly, they are giving it away.

MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.

As with many technology trends, new services and platforms are driving change. Last spring marked the debut of “iTunes U,” a section of Apple’s popular music and video downloading service now publicly hosting free material from 28 colleges. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley recently announced it would be the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. Berkeley was already posting lectures, but YouTube has dramatically expanded their reach.

If there isn’t yet something for everyone, it’s only a matter of time. On iTunes, popular recent downloads include a climate change panel at Stanford, lectures on existentialism by Cal-Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus, and a performance of Mozart’s requiem by the Duke Chapel Choir. Berkeley’s offerings include 48 classes, from “Engineering Thermodynamics” to “Human Emotion.”

“It’s almost as good as being there,” said Whelan, the Massachusetts retiree, of the MIT classes he has sampled. “The only thing that’s lacking is the pressure.” He says he usually doesn’t do the homework assignments, but adds: “Now that I’m not in school I don’t have to do that anymore.”

YouTube, iTunes, OpenCourseWare - none are the full college experience. You can’t raise your hand and ask a question. You can’t get a letter of recommendation.

And most importantly, almost everywhere, you can’t get credit or earn a degree.

That caveat, however, is what has made all this possible.

When the Internet emerged, experts predicted it would revolutionize higher education, cutting its tether to a college campus. Technology could help solve one of the fundamental challenges of the 21st century: providing a mass population with higher education at a time when a college degree was increasingly essential for economic success.

VideoMore video Tech Columnist Jonathan Blum says Nokia’s latest phone is a surprising success. Play video

SEATTLE (AP) — States pressing for continued scrutiny of Microsoft’s business practices failed to support their argument with evidence, the software maker said in a court filing Friday.

Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), which was found to be using its operating system dominance to quash other types of competing software, has operated since 2002 under the terms of an antitrust settlement struck with the federal government and 17 U.S. states.

Most of the consent decree, which said Microsoft must help rivals build software that runs smoothly with Windows, was set to expire in November.

But in October, after requests from several states to add five years to federal oversight of the software company, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly pushed the expiration date to Jan. 31, 2008, to allow time to consider arguments made by both sides.

On Dec. 10, after a first round of court filings, the judge asked the states to give "specific, factual information and legal argument" to support their claim that allowing most of the consent decree to expire would interfere with ongoing enforcement of the remaining portion.

In its filing Friday, Microsoft said the states failed to back up that claim.

The Justice Department has extended the parts of the consent decree that have to do with technical documentation and server-software licensing through 2009. 

StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis - his company is transforming sports business.VideoMore video Shaking up standards leads to innovation at eBay, Intuit and other companies. Play video

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — When the Patriots try to finish off an undefeated season on Saturday, thousands of Pats fans will come out to Giants Stadium and thousands of Giants season ticket holders will be counting the money they collected by selling them the tickets.

To some people, those simple business transactions between football lovers were signs of the apocalypse, or at least proof that fans have become as disloyal as free agent players or owners who move their teams in the middle of the night in pursuit of a sweeter stadium deal from a new set of taxpayers.

And greasing many of those transactions, and catching some of the flack along with the Giants fans dumping their tickets, is StubHub, the leading online ticket resale service that has handled the sale of more than 6 percent of tickets at Giants Stadium for the big game.

But the secondary market - the formal name for the slur known as ticket-scalping - has always been a part of sports. And this weekend’s game shows that the secondary ticket market benefits everyone the more developed it becomes.

Giants fans who have to shell out big bucks for season tickets can make back a bit of that money by reselling their seats for a game that means little to the team, which has already earned an entry to the playoffs.

For the Giants, the secondary market ensures that the stadium will have few empty seats.

Why $75,000 World Series tickets are a good thing

And Patriots fans will have a weekend getaway and the chance to see a game they might be able to tell their grandchildren about.

A lot of these fans found one another online. Ticket resale Web sites have blossomed, growing as much as 50 percent this year to become a $2.5 billion business, according to an Forrester Research.

No company has done more to transform that business, and the business of sports overall, than StubHub - and that’s why I’ve named it my first annual Sports Business of the Year.

It’s been a busy year in the business of sports. Clashes between sports networks and cable giants. Free agent contract dramas that overshadowed the World Series. Industry-changing sponsorship deals.

But nothing has been more significant, or will have as long-lasting effect, as the rise of the market for ticket reselling.

StubHub, which handled more than 5 million ticket sales in 2007, or more than it had done in its six-plus year history leading into 2007, is clearly the leader in that field.

It’s name is on its way to becoming the shorthand for those buying and selling tickets, the way "to Google" has come to mean conducting an Internet search.

More than 5,000 of those ticket sales on StubHub were for this Saturday’s Patriots-Giants game, a bit more than double the number of Giants tickets the site handles in a typical week. About a quarter of the tickets sold went to buyers in New England states, while just over half stayed in the New York-New Jersey area, meaning there’s a good chance more Giants fans than Patriots fans got tickets to the game through StubHub, despite the gnashing of teeth.

The most expensive seats sold to Saturday’s game went for $1,600 a ticket. The average was $222.

StubHub was launched by a couple of Stanford Business School students, Jeff Fluhr and Eric Baker, after the Internet bubble burst in 2000. Fluhr said his parents were upset when he left school to start the company. But he and Baker, along with their investors, saw some business advantages to an online ticket marketplace, including a proven revenue stream and an existing off-line version of a fragmented industry.

"We knew that on every transaction we were making money," said Fluhr. "This was existing consumer behavior. It wasn’t like we were trying to create a new behavior. We were just trying to provide an easier and safer way to do it."

Baseball close to catching NFL as top dollar sport

Baker left the company soon after it started, and eventually founded Viagogo, a European competitor that is moving into the U.S. market. Fluhr left soon after he sold StubHub to eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) for $300 million at start of this year. He remains a consultant to the company.

The new leadership at StubHub comes from eBay, which has allowed it to essentially continue to operate as a stand-alone company, said Chris Tsakalakis, the president of StubHub, who had been with eBay since 2003, most recently running its ticketing business.

Earlier this year, StubHub passed parent eBay for the first time in the total number of tickets sold, according to Tsakalakis.

Tsakalakis said he understands that some fans blame StubHub and other online sites for driving up prices of tickets to hot events. But he believes he’s simply opening up the marketplace. Many tickets end up selling for less than their face price, particularly as demand for the tickets falls.

For example, the average ticket price on StubHub for Sunday’s Jets-Chiefs game - a contest being held in the same stadium as the Patriots-Giants game but with far less at stake - was $74. And tickets for the Seahawks-Falcons game in Atlanta, a game with even less demand, was going for only $49.

Tsakalakis doesn’t apologize for the forces of supply and demand.

"If par value of stock were treated like face value, we wouldn’t have a stock market," he said. "People put a lot of faith in face value. But there’s a big difference between face value and market value. The market value of a product really varies over time. The real demand is highly variable, highly dynamic."

But this was also a year when not just fans embraced the online ticket resale market. Finally, so did the leagues and many teams.

The eBay ownership of StubHub was a key to the company becoming the official ticket reseller of Major League Baseball.

And that sponsorship deal is a sign that many sports teams and leagues have finally figured out that the secondary market is not only something they can’t fight, it’s something they can and should embrace. And that is helping that market to start to reshape the business of sports.

The fewer no-shows means increased concession sales. More important, teams are seeing greater, not reduced, demand for their original ticket sales.

Fans are more willing to buy seats if they know there’s a safe, liquid market to resell tickets. It makes them more willing, and able, to buy season and partial-season ticket packages. Even baseball’s top officials concede the sport’s record attendance this year was helped, not hurt, by the growth of StubHub.

There are still some states, such as Massachusetts, where the resale of tickets at a profit is basically illegal, but those laws are on their way out. Not surprisingly, StubHub led the charge to change the laws governing reselling tickets in many states, including New York.

Of course, some teams are still trying to fight the trend. Most notable in this category are the Patriots, which sued StubHub in November 2006 for violating the team’s policy on ticket resale and Massachusetts law.

A month later StubHub countersued, accusing the the team of monopolization, conspiracy to restrict trade and unfair trade practices. Both suits are pending.

The legal battle probably didn’t help the company in its effort to reach a sponsorship deal with the NFL similar to its MLB deal. Last week, the NFL signed up with IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI, Fortune 500) unit TicketMaster for a sponsorship deal.

But that sponsorship loss is not as serious setback for StubHub. In fact, with TicketMaster making a push in the ticket resale market, it can only serve to grow the overall online ticket resale industry. And that’s a winning ticket for both fans and teams in the long-run. 

The space shuttle Atlantis’ mission to the international space station likely will be pushed back a few more days or weeks as engineers study problems with electrical connectors in the spaceship’s external fuel tank, a top NASA manager said.

Failures of shuttle fuel gauges - part of a critical safety system - forced back-to-back launch delays earlier this month.

NASA had been aiming for a Jan. 10 liftoff of Atlantis with a European lab for the space station. But shuttle program manager Wayne Hale indicated last week that the launch likely would be delayed after a test pointed to a bad connector.

On Thursday, Hale said it would probably take a few days or weeks to pinpoint and solve the problem. But he said it was too soon to announce a new target launch date because so much work still has to be done.

“At this point, schedule is not paramount in my mind,” he said. “It’s going to take as long as it takes … days to perhaps a couple weeks. We have to get our hands around exactly what work needs to be done.”

Last week’s fuel tank test indicated open circuits in the connector that passes through the wall of the fuel tank, linking wiring between the gauges in the tank and Atlantis.

Senior NASA managers decided Thursday to remove a plug and electrical connector from the tank and send it to an Alabama testing facility to be studied and repaired, Hale said.

At this point, it appears all the work can be done while Atlantis is on the launch pad, he added.

The space agency has been struggling with sporadic fuel gauge problems for two years, ever since flights resumed following the 2003 Columbia tragedy. The gauges prevent the shuttle’s main engines from running on an empty tank, which could be catastrophic.

NASA is facing a 2010 deadline for completing the space station and retiring the shuttles.

BERLIN: Online gambling will be banned in Germany starting Jan. 1 as part of an accord with states that preserves the country's state monopoly for lotteries and most forms of betting.

All 16 German state legislatures voted by mid-December to approve the new online-betting laws, which the states negotiated after the Federal Constitutional Court overturned earlier rules.

The new rules ban any form of Web-based gambling or brokering of games over the Internet.

The states may order Internet service providers to block Web sites of illegal betting operations and banks to stop money transfers to them.

The rules' definition of illegal gaming includes placing a bet from German territory over the Web with a company based outside Germany.

Not surprisingly, the new regulations have drawn criticism from Internet betting companies and lottery brokers like Bwin Interactive Entertainment, Fluxx and Tipp24.

Tipp24 said last week that it regarded the regulations “as clearly contrary to law and will sue for its rights if necessary.”

Bwin sued four German states in October seeking to continue offering online bets after the rules come into effect. The cases are pending.

Bwin operates a site under a license originally issued by the communist East German government before unification and another portal under a Gibraltar license.

The company claims that both permits prevail over the new online-betting ban and will continue to operate its sites.

“We think that in the second half of 2008 the European Court of Justice will have stopped this futile effort to keep us out of Germany,” Hartmut Schultz, a spokesman for Bwin, said in an interview this month.

The European Commission, the European Union's regulator, called on Germany to reconsider the total ban on online betting, saying the step was disproportional. In April, Germany rejected that demand, arguing the rules were needed to protect citizens from the dangers of gambling.

“I am pretty sure the commission will escalate the process and send a formal warning the day after” the new law takes effect, Wolfgang Kubicki, leader of the Free Democrats, or FDP, opposition party in the Schleswig-Holstein Parliament, said last week. “Berlin will have something in the mail on Jan. 3.”

The commission can sue EU member states to force them to comply with EU law.

At least 13 of Germany's 16 states had submitted the ratification documents for the ban to take effect by Thursday, said Eric Braum, a spokesman for the Hesse government, which monitors the process.

“That's the required majority and we expect to have all the rest coming in by New Year's Eve,” he said.

The new regulations will also outlaw advertising of gambling over the Internet and on television, stating that advertising in print and other media could no longer “directly invite, incite or prompt” customers to play; it may only “inform” about the possibility to do so.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday slapped down California’s bid for first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas limits on cars, trucks and SUVs, denying a request for a waiver that would have allowed those restrictions to take effect.

“The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution — not a confusing patchwork of state rules,” EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson told reporters on a conference call. “I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone.”

The long-awaited decision amounted to a serious setback for California and 16 other states seeking the new car regulations to achieve their anti-global warming goals.

The tailpipe standards California adopted in 2004 would have forced automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent in new cars and light trucks by 2016, with the cutbacks beginning in the 2009 model year.

Under the Clean Air Act, the state needed a federal waiver to implement the rules.

“It is disappointing that the federal government is standing in our way and ignoring the will of tens of millions of people across the nation. We will continue to fight this battle,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “California sued to compel the agency to act on our waiver, and now we will sue to overturn today’s decision and allow Californians to protect our environment.”

Twelve other states — Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — have adopted the California emissions standards, and the governors of Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Utah have said they also plan to adopt them.

With Wednesday’s denial, those other states are also prevented from moving forward.

In explaining his decision, Johnson cited energy legislation approved by Congress and signed into law Wednesday by President Bush. The law requires automakers to achieve an industrywide average fuel efficiency for cars, SUVs and small trucks of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 — the first increase in the federal requirement in 32 years.

By 2016, California’s law would require passenger cars and some small sport utility vehicles and trucks to reach 43.7 miles per gallon. Most pickups, SUVs and larger vehicles would need to achieve 26.9 mpg by 2016.

Johnson said Congress’ approach of reaching a fleetwide average of 35 mpg would be better than a “partial state-by-state approach” that would achieve 33.8 mpg.

But environmental groups questioned Johnson’s reasoning, noting that California’s standards would be higher a full four years ahead of the congressional action and the federal 35 mpg was minimum requirement that future administrations could exceed.

“Mr. Johnson compared the California standard for 2016 with the new floor for the CAFE standard for 2020. This is fundamentally misleading,” said David Doniger, director of the climate center for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Wednesday’s decision was further confirmation of the Bush administration’s adamant opposition to mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, even after a string of court decisions affirming the right of states and the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

It was the first time the EPA had fully denied California a Clean Air Act waiver since Congress gave California the right to obtain such waivers in 1967.

California had been waiting for the decision for two years but EPA put off a decision while a Supreme Court case was pending on whether the agency could regulate greenhouse gases. In April of this year, the Supreme Court said it could.

This story was written by Tony Azios.
Paper, plastic … or biodegradable? Yes, get ready to add a third option at the grocery store checkout line as biodegradable plastics enter the mainstream consumer market.

It is hard to imagine that the plastic grocery bag made its debut only 30 years ago. But now, even in Antarctica, scientists regularly find them blowing about.

The problem is that, unlike many other overnight sensations, plastics stick around. It can take roughly 1,000 years for some petroleum-based plastics to disintegrate. And when they do disintegrate, traditional plastics leave behind a messy legacy of fragments and chemical residues that get absorbed into streams and soil. In the meantime, they clog landfills and rivers, or kill whales and sea turtles that mistake them for food. With up to 1 trillion plastic bags manufactured annually and 2.7 million tons of plastic used just to bottle water each year, concern is rising worldwide.

Enter bioplastics, designed to degrade into an ecofriendly mix of water, carbon dioxide, and biomass. While biodegradable plastics have been introduced before in the past 20 years, they have failed to achieve widespread use due to their inferior strength and higher cost. But this is changing, says Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) in New York City.

“In the last decade, we’ve seen that through improved production technology these materials have become comparatively durable and affordable, without leaving behind the remnants that petroplastics do,” says Mr. Mojo.
While the cost of producing bioplastics ranges from as little as 10 percent more to many times that of traditional plastics, bioplastics companies have seen an increased demand due to rising environmental concerns among consumers and changing environmental regulations. The improved strength, meanwhile, is great news to any trash collector or conscientious pet owner who knows the hazards of an inferior plastic bag.

But when it comes to disposal, not all bioplastics are created equal, leading to confusion for consumers and waste-management groups alike. Bioplastics are not uniform in their ability to decompose under different conditions. While some brands can biodegrade within a few months in backyard compost piles, others require several months at industrial composting facilities.

NatureWorks, the largest producer of bioplastics (they make about 300 million pounds per year), distributes beverage bottles made from polylactic acid (PLA), a hydrobiodegradable polymer. Its bottles are touted as biodegradable within 100 days - but only if it reaches an industrial composting plant with high humidity and temperatures.

According to the Container Recycling Institute, such bottles are unlikely to end up at such plants; of the estimated 25 billion single-serving, plastic water bottles Americans will buy this year, 8 out of 10 (22 billion) end up in landfills. Many stores do not accept returned PLA plastic for recycling or composting. And given that scarcely more than 100 industrial composting facilities exist nationwide, some question the benefits of bioplastics largely destined to end up as litter or in dumps.

In contrast to NatureWorks, Mirel, a product line of Metabolix Inc., says its products - including bags, gift cards, and razor-blade handles - will decompose in a backyard composter within two months, and within four months in soil, fresh water, or salt water.

Currently, both companies’ products are primarily made of modified corn feedstock, as opposed to petroleum byproducts. Ultimately, the natural polymers biodegrade as microorganisms consume them. While this source of plastic seems earth friendly, some environmentalists say the footprint of corn cultivation should be considered.

“Corn, overall, is very energy intensive, requiring a considerable amount of fertilizer and gasoline to produce and transport each bushel,” says Janet Larsen, research director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. “The nitrogen-rich fertilizer then often becomes runoff in streams, rivers, and oceans, creating algal blooms that kill marine life.”

Using feedstock for plastic further exacerbates record high corn prices, says Ms. Larsen, adding that corn supplies are already stretched thin by demands for food and ethanol. “This should make society ask, ‘Do we really want to be turning food into plastic?’”

The definition of bioplastics has been further clouded by Symphony Environmental, a British bioplastics company that claims to have developed a petroleum-based plastic that biodegrades into a benign mix of water, CO2, and biomass. By adding a small amount of degradant in the manufacturing process, the plastic begins the decomposition process after a preset time that varies from product to product. Because no fragments of petropolymers remain, these products can safely be composted, says the manufacturer.

“There is a widespread confusion that all [bioplastics] are made from renewable resources and that all of them are biodegradable,” says BPI’s Mojo. “Not all plastics made from renewable resources are biodegradable, and not all that are biodegradable are based on natural resources.”

Mojo, who works closely with the American Society for Testing and Materials International to develop specifications for products that biodegrade in various environments, says that “the industry is in its infancy” and work is being done to develop more uniformity in composting and recyclability. “We will see more bioplastics in the next five to 10 years as technology advances, and we will see visible improvements in strength, cost, and degradability,” he adds.

In the meantime, Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute suggests the environmentally conscious choose a fourth option at the checkout line: “We would do better to bring our own canvas bags shopping or buy reusable water bottles and move away from the throwaway mentality that one-time use products afford us.”