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.
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I 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.
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 :/
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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).
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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.
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This is assuming that it’s already in a city with a compost collection program. If not, start a petition to the city first.
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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.
