Ever wondered how compostable products breakdown?

Using compostable products has the potential to divert plastic packaging and food waste from the landfill while allowing more materials to be transformed into compost and soil.

But why don’t we see more compostable products being used today?

Many people have concerns about unpredictable or incomplete breakdown of compostable products. If these products don’t breakdown properly, they won’t be helping the soils, but harming them. Organizations like the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) are supporting research to make sure that when products are certified compostable they truly break down the way they are supposed to.

Regenerative Waste Labs does research and testing to provide technical information and educational resources to show that compostable products can play a role in achieving sustainable production and consumption! We just need to understand the details of how these products work.

  • In this project we wanted to compare the break-down of five different compostable materials: recycled paper egg carton, a paper fibre bowl, a mango pit, a fibre-compostable plastic straw, a compostable plastic cup and lid, and a compostable spoon.

  • We put these materials into a compost tumbler along with fruit and vegetable waste and paper, all in the correct ratios to build the perfect compost!

  • Every week we added more food waste. We also collected data on the compost temperature, compost pH, and compost moisture. We used this data to make sure that the microbes in the piles were happy and healthy!

  • After three months, we emptied out our compost bin to see how the products were doing.

  • We were excited about what we saw! There was no sign of the recycled paper egg carton or paper fibre bowl. Those had completely broken down.

  • The fibre-compostable plastic straw, compostable plastic cup and lid were well on the way to being biodegraded!

  • The compostable plastic cutlery and the mango pit were still in very similar shape as when we put them into the pile!

  • We put all the products back inside the bin and continued the composting process. Check back in November to see the final results!

Click here for more technical info!

FAQs

  • The term bioplastics is a tricky one! It can refer to plastics made from renewable resources OR it can refer to plastics which are biodegradable. Because of these two definitions, some bioplastics are petroleum based and biodegradable, some are bio-based and non-biodegradable and some are both bio-based and biodegradable.

    To avoid this confusion we recommend using the term compostable plastic (a plastic that has been certified to biodegrade in compost environments), or bio-based plastic (a plastic that is made from plants or organic waste).

  • Certified compostable products have been tested under standard conditions to show that they do biodegrade in compost environments.

    Even though many products have been proven to breakdown in compost, this is not the only factor governing what we can put into our green bins. It's always best to check with your local municipality before adding certified compostable products to collection bins.

  • The degradation occurring in your backyard compost pile works the same way as in a city compost pile.

    The city employs people to check and manage their compost piles every day, and they have much more material to work with, so city compost piles usually reach the optimal tempperature and moisture conditions for degradation to happen. This means that materials often break down faster in city piles, than the piles in your backyard.

  • Microplastics are formed by physical degradation processes, the first step in the degradation pathway.

    The challenge with conventional plastics is that when they form microplastics, these don’t chemically or biologically degrade and so they persist in the environment for a long time. During this time they pick up and hold onto toxic compounds in the environment, which can cause additional harm to our ecosystems.

    Compostable plastics also form microplastics, but these microplastics are able to break down further through chemical and biological processes and so they don’t have the same negative environmental impact.

  • Oxo-degradable plastics or land-fill degradable plastics are conventional, non-biodegradable plastics with additional ingredients that help the plastics turn into microplastics.

    While the microplastics form quickly thanks to the added ingredients, there has not been evidence to show that these additives improve the biodegradation of these microplastics. Because of this, they often end up causing the same environmental harm as microplastics.

    Some businesses use these plastics because they think it will reduce plastic waste, but they have actually been shown to be very harmful!

  • That is a great question! There are so many plastics that we use every day, some we use only once, some we use for a few weeks, some for a few years. Because there are so many types of plastics we also need lots of different ways of managing their waste.

    Reusing items for longer and recycling plastics allows us to minimize our consumption of plastics. In situations when the plastic can’t be recycled because it’s mixed in with food or other organic waste, composting is a good alternative for ensuring that products don’t end up in the landfill.

    We need as many solutions as possible so that we can close the loop on plastics and build a sustainable future!

  • Join our community page for updates and more information or reach out to our team to organize a call!