Every establishment is moving to “biodegradable”, “compostable”, “plant based” packaging these days, in a push to move away from disposable plastics.
Which would be great, if compost collection bins were equally as common. But no. The majority of businesses who have switched to biodegradables still expect you to chuck it in the regular trash. Even where I live, Vancouver, Canada, where the use of the compost collection program is mandatory for homes, and you can actually get fined if you don’t, the vast majority of businesses don’t have a compost bin for customers. I’ve literally asked many times, along the lines of “you have biodegradable packaging, but where is the compost bin?” at restaurants, and they had no answer for me. There aren’t compost bins in the vast majority of public places either, like parks, bus/train stations, street sides, malls, etc. Even places controlled by the city that is mandating compost collection for homes.
Yeah, that means your biodegradable packaging is basically useless. Organic material, when dumped in a landfill, at best doesn’t decompose at all, we’ve found decades old newspapers and even food buried deep in landfills, or at worst, decomposes anaerobically and releases methane, a much much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. You can also get groundwater contamination as the “juices” of the decomposing organic material mix with other landfill pollutants and rainwater, and form a toxic liquid called leachate, that seep into the soil and the water table, and the organic component of that can react with and help further leach out other pollutants.
Like, I get it. Compost bins tend to stink, they can attract bugs, and they need to be emptied anywhere from daily to hourly if indoors in a busy place. But, the first two can be solved by doing the latter, and the latter, just suck it up if you actually want to claim to be pro biodegradables.
It’s exhausting how many entities spend so much effort claiming that they’re “doing their part” for the climate or environment, while at best not improving the situation and at worst worsening it.
Organic material, when dumped in a landfill, at best doesn’t decompose at all, we’ve found decades old newspapers and even food buried deep in landfills
Fact checked: mostly true. They decompose ~25%.
Source copy pasta:
Environment and Plastics Industry Council www.plastics.ca/epic A Council of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association www.plastics.ca 5915 Airport Road, Suite 712, Mississauga, Ontario L4V 1T1 Tel (905) 678-7748 Fax (905) 678-0774
Modern sanitary landfills are managed so that little material actually degrades.Landfill excavations have uncovered newspapers that are still readable after almost 40 years, ten year-old carrots that are brown on the outside and bright orange on the inside, and 20 year-old steaks with meat still on the bones. ` As people become better informed about solid waste issues, the focus of attention will shift away from the degradability myth and toward real solutions such as source reduction, reuse, recycling, composting and recovery of energy – solutions in which plastics play an important role. Biodegradation Won’t Solve the Landfill Crunch What happens deep below the surface of a landfill? What doesn’t happen would be a more accurate description. More than two thirds of the garbage going into landfills may be theoretically “degradable”, but little change actually occurs once it gets there. “Here today, gone tomorrow – that’s what many people believe biodegradability really means. Bury newspapers, wood or food scraps and they’ll disappear over time through decomposition. “Not so,” says Dr. William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who believes biodegradability is North America’s favourite myth next to Santa Claus. “Nothing has as popular an image as biodegradability in landfills. Unfortunately, though, it simply doesn’t happen.” Scientific research has demonstrated that very little biodegrades in modern sanitary landfills. The Buried Evidence Excavations of landfill sites across North America have uncovered some startling facts: newspapers are still readable after almost 40 years; ten year-old carrots are brown on the outside but bright orange on the inside; and 20 year-old steaks still have meat on the bones. While some food debris and yard waste may degrade at a very slow rate – perhaps about 25 per cent in the first 15 years – there may be little or no additional change for at least another 40 years. Put another way, trash entering landfills essentially retains its original weight, volume and form for the entire active life of the landfill. This confuses people – they think things biodegrade rapidly in landfills; yet a head of lettuce stuck in the back of a refrigerator for ten weeks may look worse than one buried in a landfill for ten years. Why aren’t materials – even raw organic debris – rapidly biodegrading in landfills? The answer is simple. Many people believe that landfills are just big, carefully controlled compost piles. They are not! In compost piles, the garbage is chopped, kept moist and stirred. No one chops garbage in a landfill and no one adds fluids – it’s usually illegal. And no one has figured out a way to stir it. The result is very little biodegradation. There’s another problem: the micro-organisms in a compost heap are aerobic – oxygen breathing – and they could biodegrade metal. The anaerobic bugs in a landfill just don’t receive the proper balance of moisture, nutrients, temperature and particle size to biodegrade much of anything. EnvironmentI have a compost bin, but a small one. My frustration is that compostable packaging simply does not compost. My compost bin is simply too small and does not get hot enough to properly decompose the packaging.
Yeah, I’ve heard that from others too. They’re really meant to be composted in a commercial digester, with constant agitation and temperature control. They’re just too dense and waterproof to be composted at home. Which is why I generally prefer plain paper (i.e. with no wax) over compostable plastics.
Which is why I generally prefer plain paper
Up to a certain point, I use it in my compost as well (just as long as it is not bleached or printed). Our municipality does collect paper and cardboard individually, but when the paper or cardboard is saturated with fatty material (e.g. pizza boxes), it is supposed to go into the trash.
My dumb take on this, correct me if i;m wrong:
for lemmings reading this don’t bother throwing compostables in the trash in most regions, ideally throw it into the wilderness for like the birds.
For things like uncoated paper and food, sure. BUT, that’s only in the context of they’ll decompose readily, you can still end up with problems, namely wildlife getting habituated with the food and associating humans with it, which increase the incidence of human wildlife conflicts when they lose their fear of us or start expecting us to give them food, which is bad. A bird or mouse getting habituated might not be a problem for people, a bear getting habituated is very bad. So, still not recommended.
For things like biodegradable plastics though, their decomposition can actually be quite slow without the use of something called a digester, literally a giant tank with microbes in it, that’s constantly mixed around, and usually what goes in has been through a shredder and is a slurry, not whole forks and straws. It’s what they do in large scale composting programs to produce both energy and fertilizer. This is because though organic (often cellulose based), they’re much denser than any natural polymer like wood, and are usually also highly water repellent. You often see this disclosed on said plastics, that they should only be sent to a commercial composting facility. I mean, they’ll still decompose in open air eventually, but that could be a very long time, likely on the order of many decades (I guess that’s still better than anywhere between millennia to literally never, though).
What can us as individual lemmings do if we don’t have access to a composter?
I think the best thing will be to petition your municipality for a composting program, or if you already have one, maybe ask your favourite restaurant to set out a compost bin.
maybe ask your favourite restaurant to set out a compost bin.
this one is good low hanging fruit, but where would they dump the compost?
This is assuming that it’s already in a city with a compost collection program. If not, start a petition to the city first.
No compost program here, only half a recycling program, long story short.
I Read through https://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Petition
the difficulty curve there is pretty enourmous. Yeah I can start a petition that will go nowhere, but a successful petition involves applying all the marketing/tactics from c/fedivangelism and promoting the fediverse is already extremely difficult.
I think a lower hanging fruit would be explaining what I should do with an banana peel, given that no formal compost program exists here
instead of having an actual compost bin on premises, couldn’t you just have a dedicated trash can then transfer the waste to a compost bin somewhere else?
Yeah, the latter is how city wide composting programs work. You don’t do the composting on premises, it’s just a dedicated trash can for organics, that’s collected and sent to a central facility, which much more efficiently produces fertilizer and energy from it than you can at home.
my next question would be why all cities don’t already do that, but i feel like i know the answer :/
Yes, it’s one (economical) matter to produce “organic” packaging to increase sales of a product, but a whole different (political) matter to establish structures for proper disposal of packaging material.
If we had such structures, it would still be an educational matter of teaching everyone how to recycle trash accordingly.
It becomes evident that it’s all just greenwashing and that companies are only interested in pushing out “green” products to a target group that wants to “save the world” by spending money.
