Paper bags don't take 500 years to decompose. Plastic bags don't result in deforestation. What's the best option? B.Y.O.B.

We've written before about biodegradable plastics, such as the corn-based containers used at eco-minded stores like Wild Oats. The containers are a great idea in theory, and could one day revolutionize the fast-food industry. But for the moment, the containers can pose a problem.

Back when I lived in an apartment, I used to cringe during the food-prep phase of every dinner party I threw. With each soufflé or pistou or rellenos con crema, I was throwing away entire garbage bags full of carrot butts, peanut shells and grapefruit rinds.

Sure, you can turn a lot of that stuff into stock — but even after all the simmering, that's still a lot of biomass headed for the landfill. (According to the EPA, over 27 million tons of food waste was generated in 2003.) Alas, if only someone had told me about in-kitchen vermicomposting.

More of your car could soon avoid the landfill, thanks to developing technologies to recycle various types of plastic used in cars. Up to 80 percent of the materials that make up cars is currently reused or recycled, but researchers hope to boost that number soon.

According to the web site Environmental Science and Technology Online, a program at the Argonne National Laboratory is testing new ways of sorting, separating, and extracting various forms of plastics so that they can be used to make new products.

Could Styrofoam someday be biodegradable? New research has found that microbes can help turn the notoriously hard-to-break-down material, which