Palm to Palm

Shannon Boase

President and Founder, Earthcycle Packaging earthcycle.com

by Larissa Buijs

photo by Jaime Kowal

fter 15 years in Asia, Shannon Boase returned to Vancouver with no idea of what she was going to do, no business network, and little desire to work for someone else. Worse, she was madly in love—with a packaging product derived from palm fibre, a byproduct of palm that is tremendously acrid when burned in mass quantities as waste.

What was a woman to do? Answer: Start a company to create palm-fibre packages that are—drum roll, please—compostable. Turn waste into something useful. Return it to the earth. Challenge a 50-year obsession with plastic. Voila! Earthcycle was born, “not to make money, but to do good.” mere two years later, Boase’s product, which reached the market during a well-timed rising awareness about the effects of climate change, is widely used in North America. Even big retailers like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods lapped it up. Boase’s supply facility in Malaysia produces no waste. Everybody’s happy—most of all Boase, who is inspired and invigorated by the process.

But what of those who don’t or can’t compost? Or those who are just so darned excited that they’ve stocked up on Earthcycle containers, and heaps of them are piling up in the yard? “You can include them in the waste paper stream,” says Boase (shown here holding an empty fruit bunch from an oil-palm tree). “We’ve had the products tested and proven to be re-pulpable.” There ya go. No excuses.