I’m truly sorry for the title, but it says what I think about this succinctly. I tried half a dozen variations and kept coming back to the one word.
There are days when I think I just won’t see anything stupider cross my inbox. Then, today brings a new surprise on the winds of change. Carbon Free Sugar. Let me repeat that. Carbon Free Sugar – certified even.
Those of you who remember their basic high school chemistry might remember this simple and indelible truth: sugar contains carbon.
There is no getting around that. Don’t believe me? Try frying up some sugar in a sauce pan and watch the results. Or just pick up a used mass spectrograph on Ebay and run an analysis.
Or just consult any number of chemical handbooks. Sucrose is common table sugar (as pictured in the bag) and has the chemical formula: C12H22O11
Looks like twelve atoms of carbon combined with eleven molecules of H2O doesn’t it? That’s why it is called (drum roll please) a carbohydrate.
Eating and digesting sugar turns it into water and carbon dioxide that we exhale, so for it to be truly “carbon free” as the label says, we have to get those twelve molecules of Carbon out. So how do they get the carbon out of that sucrose anyway? It’s really easy, all we need is a catalyst.
Reacting sucrose with sulfuric acid (H2SO4) dehydrates the sucrose and forms the element carbon, as demonstrated in the following chemical equation:
- C12H22O11 + H2SO4 (as catalyst) → 12 C + 11 H2O
So assuming they get the acid out of the mix, we are left with some pure carbon and a bunch of water. Yummm! Perfect for cereal in the morning.
Ok, I’m being a bit extreme, I realize the idea is to promote a carbon neutral production of sugar.
But really, couldn’t the marketing people at Domino realize how stupid this claim sounds? I’ll bet the guys at the Domino company labs are having a fit. I’d love to see the emails that went flying when they learned of this one. Beakers were probably flying across the lab too.
But some companies will do anything to appear green these days, because they want to keep that “other green footprint” high.
Ah, the sweet smell of success.
CodeTech (18:10:05) :
adoucette, nobody here is “ANGRY”
We’re laughing at something that is really funny. That’s pretty much 180 degrees from anger.
I’m sorry you don’t get the joke. Maybe studying up on some chemistry texts might help?
Right, could have fooled me.
Earlier you claimed the company was lying.
Now you are talking down to me.
If this whole tread was that it was Ironic or funny, I’d be right there with you, but it hasn’t been.
Trust me, I know chemistry, and so does Domino, and they are smart enough to figure out how to use chemistry and physics to produce this product from renewable energy.
They DON’T talk about AGW or Climate Change and they DO promote clean renewable energy, and for that they really don’t deserve 140 or so childish comments in what is otherwise one of the best blogs on the internet.
In fact I’ve been so impressed with their creativity that tomorrow I plan to buy some of their stock.
Arthur
adoucette (16:56:19) : “If Domino has found an enviornmentally sound way of producing sugar and not using fossil fuels to do so, and do it cost competitively, what about that is not a GOOD THING?”
*sigh* As others have pointed out, they’re NOT competitive. The US sugar industry depends on exclusion of cheaper imports, remember? So with prices artificially inflated, the cost of patting themselves on the back (advertising) is passed on to the customer.
BTW, I wonder how much it costs (us) to be certified “CarbonFree”?
Gary,
Being globally competitive is an entirely different issue.
But from what I can tell we have a very efficient sugar industry.
http://www.sugaralliance.org/library/2004/ISJ%20article%20Roney%205-04.pdf
Still we import over a million tons of sugar a year and other countries subsisides their sugar growers so there is no simple comparison between countries.
Oh, and remember, I’m all about free markets, so yes the consumer gets to decide if they want to buy Domino or some other brand.
Are you against Advertising and Marketing as well?
Arthur
Nasif Nahle (11:55:28) :
Matt Beck (Man of the West) (11:24:35):
We can all agree on the nonsense of global warming without denigrating real religion.
Thanks,
-Matt
I agree. I’m not a religious person, but I deeply do respect other people’s beliefs.
I don’t agree at all. Vegetarianism ( to which I subscribe) is constantly the butt of jokes and snide comments and that’s fine with me. If you can make fun of me, then I can make fun of you; without having to guess what unrevealed sensitivities you might have.
I don’t expect anybody to respect my beliefs ( I’m not sure that I respect them, myself ) but I do want them to respect my right to hold them. Really, that just means that I don’t want to be imprisoned or fined; you can still not invite me to dinner!
Reply: Ok, I was trying to think of a clever comment here, but I have the mind of a vegetable tonight ~ charles ba dum….ching! the moderator
Actually, competition IS the issue. If the US sugar industry is so competitive, then why continue lobbying for import quotas? If the demand for sugar is so high that we still import it, the US sugar industry should have no problem, right? If Domino’s saves “a million barrels of oil a year”, then they should grind the competition into the dust, no? But if being green doesn’t make them more competitive, then they should pay the price, right? Y’know, like in a free market?
Oh, and if if foreigners are stupid enough to subsidize their sugar industries, too, then great! I don’t mind receiving a little “foreign aid” at their expense.
BTW, I answered my own question. I can send carbonfree.org $99 and get a bumper sticker certifying I’m carbon free, no questions asked. Hopefully Domino’s had to go through a bit tougher “certification process” from this “reliable organization”:
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/08/04/pollution-without-all-that-guilt/
Gary Hladik,
Carbon credit prices, from your link:
If there isn’t massive fraud going on right now in the carbon credit business, I’ll eat my carbon free, sugar coated hat. But hey, at least those do-gooders being separated from their money feel good about it.
“Carbon-free” is NOT the right term for what they are doing.
However IF (a big IF) they are powering their *entire* planting/harvesting/refining/transporting process with energy obtained from the sugar cane, and not from previously sequestered oil/coal/gas THEN they could truthfully claim “carbon-neutral”.
IF the above is true, ALL the carbon in the sugar and ALL the carbon fuel burned to power the process has come from the atmosphere when the sugar cane was growing and is returned to the atmosphere when the sugar is processed and consumed. A net-zero tranaction with respect to atmospheric carbon.
Are people dumb enough to actually go for this? Hint: The answer lies in our ever-increasing “organic” sections at grocery stores.
adoucette… thanks.
I was a little down today, but you’ve cheered me right up!
(For the record, I’m a little down because they closed the factory my car was being built at for “30-60 days”… I’m so looking forward to getting my Hemi Challenger…)
I encourage you to continue explaining Domino’s for me.
Ira, CarbonFree is the term that CarbonFund.Org came up with to certify companies products as being Carbon Neutral.
I agree, its not the best term, but it’s not Domino’s term.
Interestingly Domino does not claim that they use any of the questionable offsets one can purchase from Carbonfund.org to achieve their status.
As far as the powering of the plant, that’s supposedly what the independent 3rd party certified.
Is that a reasonable assumption?
Well, they sell excess power to the grid and one look at the power plant and it certainly seems like its entirely possible.
http://www.floridacrystals.com/content/112/renewable_energy.aspx
The point is, in this long thread I’ve seen no one actually challenge Domino’s claim of being Carbon Neutral with any facts.
Arthur
I remember commercials for Oil Free Oil of Olay, so this is hardly surprising.
gary gulrud (16:13:31) :
This makes me think of all the attempts to remove calories from sweetners:
saccharin
cyclamate
aspartame
splenda
stevia
Anyone interested in the interaction between business, science and politics should read up on Aspartame (banned by the FDA until Donald Rumsfeld, then chairman of GD Searle, got busy) and Stevia, which is a natural product also banned by the FDA and EU, in contrast to the (patented) extracts used by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which are perfectly safe, apparently.
It is quite difficult to avoid Aspartame, despite its suspected neurotoxicity and (to me, at least) revolting taste!
The point is, in this long thread I’ve seen no one actually challenge Domino’s claim of being Carbon Neutral with any facts.
Arthur – I think the original joke was the implied suggestion that sugar, the daddy of carbohydrates, might be ‘carbon free’. I applaud Domino’s use of their own waste for fuel, although it would be pretty mad to throw it away in favour of expensive oil. Perhaps the worst their production process can be accused of is making a virtue of necessity, but the argument here is more about their marketing.
They have bought into a scheme that has no apparent certification requirement whatsoever, yet it looks as though they might well pass a test for ‘carbon neutrality’ that other subscribers almost certainly wouldn’t. Do they really want to belong to a club like that..?
Perhaps we should leave Domino out of it and turn on the marketers of a scheme that promotes a mythical, but politically-correct, concept on the sole basis of ability to pay…
ever-increasing “organic” sections at grocery stores
I can see that organic chemists might object to the term as applied to foodstuffs, but I think it is generally understood what it means, namely that such food has been produced without artifical fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides. Therein lies its appeal to consumers, who buy it mostly for what it doesn’t contain, and its ability to annoy agrochemical companies and their political representatives.
IIRC, Monsanto lobbied hard for the inclusion of GM crops (and, by extension, Roundup weedkiller) in the definition of ‘organic’. Not only that, but they also wanted the exclusion of any replacement term indicating what has originally been meant by the word!
James P
Except that is not remotely true. Organic means produced with hippie-approved artificial pesticides, such as copper sulfate, more commonly found in Drano.
Allan M R MacRae (02:03:14) :
OK Anthony – I am inspired by this wonderful new Carbon-Free Sugar.
I have just declared myself a Carbon-Free Trade Zone. Every morning, I add up all the CO2 I’ve use in my previous day’s activities. Then I buy Carbon Offsets from myself, carefully taking money from my right pocket and transferring it into my left pocket.
There! All better! I’m Carbon-Free!
****************************
Good morning Anthony and moderators:
I am feeling particularly good today, and especially benevolent towards my American friends and neighbours.
As a gesture of international goodwill, I have extended my Carbon-Free Trade Zone to encompass the entire USA.
Specifically, I have taken a very large sum of money from my right pocket, and transferred it to my left pocket, purchasing Carbon Credits for the entire coal reserves of the USA!
That’s right! From this day forward, ALL US Coal is Carbon-Free!
Since the US has about 30% of global proven coal reserves, I’ve also solved your energy problem.
You are welcome, all in a day’s work, and it’s still before 4am here.
Enjoy your day.
**************************************
Hey, if Al Gore can do it, so can I.
hippie-approved artificial pesticides, such as copper sulfate, more commonly found in Drano
We could probably argue all day about what constitutes ‘artificial’ (I think CuSO4 occurs naturally) but what I should have said is ‘complex’ or ‘synthetic’, perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t appear in Drano, AFAIK, although that does contain sodium chloride, a.k.a. table salt, so I don’t quite follow your argument.
All things being equal, I would rather my food were produced with minimal intervention, as I would in my garden. Sulphur and copper sulphate are among a limited range of permitted simple, non-systemic, treatments (sulphur and copper are also essential dietary trace elements) that are worlds away from the complex synthetic compounds like neonicotinoids that kill bees, for instance. See how much pollination you can do without them!
GM may provide a temporary advantage, if you don’t mind glyphosate in your corn flakes, but it only raises the stakes, as the herbicide resistance will naturally transfer to the weeds, for which new and more drastic remedies will have to be found. Ditto pesticide resistance.
Or do you think that agrochemical companies really have your best interests at heart?
Sorry if this is OT, but it’s not wholly irrelevant, I hope.
There! All better! I’m Carbon-Free!
If I buy coal (or oil) futures, I am investing in carbon that hasn’t been used yet and am therefore offsetting my present use for heating/electricity/transport, so I should get some credits, yes?
It can then be sold when all the AGW nonsense has been debunked.. 🙂
Allan M R MacRae (02:57:49) :
Dang. I went to feed the coal stove this morning and found that all my coal had turned into slightly radioactive ash. At least I know who to blame.
Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Greenshirts; same, same, same. If you don’t have your Carbon Neutral sign posted in your corporate window, it is just a matter of time before the Greenshirt Kristallnacht visits you. If you own a business that is dependent on special government support, you have already been visited by the Greenshirts. Florida Crystals had no choice but to obey the green fascist movement’s order to become carbon neutral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
“No common and concise definition exists for fascism and historians and political scientists disagree on what should be in any concise definition. … Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long and furious debates concerning the exact nature of fascism. … Benito Mussolini promoted ambiguity about fascism’s positions in order to rally as many people to it as possible, saying fascists can be ‘aristocrats or democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists’. … Mussolini claimed that Italian Fascism’s economic system of corporatism could be identified as either state capitalism or state socialism, which in either case involved ‘the bureaucratisation of the economic activities of the nation.’ … Fascist states have pursued policies of indoctrination of society to their fascist movements such as through propaganda deliberately spread through education and media through regulation of the production of education and media material. Education was designed to glorify the fascist movement, inform students of it being of major historical and political importance to the nation, attempted to purge education of ideas that were not consistent with the beliefs of the fascist movement, and taught students to be obedient to the fascist movement.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
“Corporatism is a system of economic, political, and social organization where social groups or interest groups, such as business, ethnic, farmer, labour, military, or patronage groups that are joined together under a common governing jurisdiction to achieve societal harmony and promote coordinated development. … The word “corporatism” is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. This meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, but rather a general reference to anything collected as a body. Its usage reflects medieval European concepts of a whole society in which the various components – e.g., guilds, universities, monasteries, the various estates, etc.-each play a part in the life of the society, just as the various parts of the body serve specific roles in the life of a body.”
Patti (07:59:25) :
[Reply: Providing Domino’s email address would be helpful. ~ dbstealey, moderator]
Let’s not go down the road boycotting companies. They are only playing too the fad, as companies do. A better approach is to point out the ridiculousness of their claim and suggest they could explain on the back of the packet how they are energy officiant. This would politically neutral and educational for the kiddies. It would also divert the adults attention away from their children’s rotting teeth.
If nothing else, Domino are contributing to the corruption of the language. Yes, like the use of the word “organic”. In their FAQ, they say, “The CarbonFree® label strictly refers to the assessment of greenhouse gas emissions and is completely unrelated to the structure of sugar.” But still they use a term that is likely to confuse. And it’s no use them saying it’s a term used by CarbonFund.org – they didn’t have to obtain that “certification.”
Ironically, “organic” means compounds containing carbon atoms; I wonder how long it will be before we see products advertised as “organic CarbonFree®”? Oh – wait – Domino have done that, too: http://www.floridacrystals.com/content/110/carbonfree.aspx “Florida Crystals® CarbonFree® Organic and Natural sugars…”
(The Domino FAQ at http://www.dominosugar.com/carbonfree/faq.html lists Florida as their “sister brand”.)
Drat, you beat me to it. I’ve had a picture of this product posted by my office door for several months now:
http://mybrands.com/Product.aspx?pid=4833
Yes, it’s CarbonFree Organic Sugar.
I’m afraid that most people who examine the picture ask me what’s so funny about it — even after I try to explain it to them.
There is carbon in everything, it is the largest building block of everything on earth so carbon free sugar is pure bull shyte just as fat free butter is BS, butter is fat.
The image takes me to a page not found
Disregard, I got it.