Does ‘compostable’ plastic actually break down? Here’s what to know.
Does ‘compostable’ plastic actually break down? Here’s what to know.
Making sure a product has been properly certified is one way to know if it will really break down in commercial composting operations.
TL;DR no
Certainly not in your home composter. You need heat >~145F for extended periods, your typical home composter only hits those temps for a short period of time because of how small they are. I've seen anecdotal home experiments on those really loud Sun Chip bags that are supposed to be compostable and they last for 1-2 years in home composters.
I thought this was meant to be the difference between biodegradable and compostable?
Biodegradable will degrade in an industrial composter, compostable will do so in the compost bin in your back garden.
Pay/reg walled from the article so didn't actually read it....
I put a “compostable” plastic cup in my home composter once and watched it go round and round through the thing over and over again for years, still virginal in its plastic cup shape with everything else decaying around it into dirt
I have no way of knowing whether my composter was unable to achieve the right conditions or the claim was just a bunch of shit, but I know which is my feeling
It appears some are having issues with the pay wall. Here's the archived version: https://archive.ph/MMQYc
For anyone not in the know, should you encounter a paywalled article, find an archiver like archive.ph, paste in the URL, and they'll get you a non-paywalled version the vast majority of the time.
But the article about the EN 13432 norm says:
The test criteria include:
- Biodegradation – measures the packaging material’s rate of metabolic, microbial conversion into water, carbon dioxide, mineral salts of any other elements present and new cell biomass.
- Disintegration – packaging material is mixed with organic waste for 12 weeks, after which time, no more than 10 percent of material fragments are allowed to be larger than 2 mm.
- Toxic substances – there must be a minimal negative effect on the quality of the resulting compost.
- Ecotoxicity effects – compares compost produced with and without the addition of packaging material.
I'm confused.
I can only see one and a half paragraphs, where is the rest of the article?
worth it for good straws.
Once I used a "plastic" bag as kitchen bin, it did not survive to garbage I've put in, so I gess it is highly compostable when you put wet stuff in.