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60% of home compostable plastic doesn’t fully break down
- djmips 4y agoDoes this include the green plastic bags that are ubiquitous for putting food scraps for a compost.
- jvolkman 4y agoThose seem to break down in my hand.
- SicSemperUranus 4y agoIt's a magic trick!
- nonethewiser 4y agoAs someone whose generally against more government regulation and the whole green revolution, banning single use plastics seems pretty reasonable.
- Retric 4y agoSingle use plastics have massive indirect benefits which are easily overlooked. Substituting say aluminum foil for food packaging has it’s own tradeoffs. It’s even less degradable than plastic and takes significantly more energy to create.
- coryrc 4y agoBut it isn't creating novel microplastics which tunnel toxic chemicals past our immune systems. At some "econonomics" needs to take a back seat to "we have poisoned the rain".
- Symmetry 4y agoSingle use plastics that end up in a landfill won't be turning into microplastics. It's more a matter of re-usable plastic items gradually wearing down.
- ksidudwbw 4y agoWaxed paper would do the job
- Gigachad 4y agoYou don’t need aluminium to degrade. It’s completely safe as it is. It’s like complaining clay bricks aren’t biodegradable.
- kennywinker 4y agoJust an fyi - “green revolution” is usually reserved for talking about transitions in agriculture that happened in the 1950s/60s - which from context probably wasn’t what you were referring to.
- Victerius 4y agoI mean, plastics were basically invented _because_ of their resistance to natural degradation and corrosion. A material that nature cannot destroy is a weapon of mass destruction. Anything sold to the general public _must_ be biodegradable. Instead, we're going to invent bacteria that can eat plastics, and plastics will lose its utility as an indestructible material.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoPaper is really such a great fit to replace single use plastic. Biodegradable, can be incinerated, plasma gasified, or landfilled. Will decompose if not collected for disposal, and wax can be used for the more tricky packaging applications. Fast growth timber can meet the need without impacting more at risk forestry. Bottles and cutlery traditionally made from plastic can be made from agricultural plastic substitutes. You might use more energy (which can be sourced from clean sources), but the trade off is less persistent pollution and micro plastic waste. > Anything sold to the general public _must_ be biodegradable. I love this guiding principle.
- im-a-baby 4y agoPaper might be a good replacement for dry things that are guaranteed to stay dry, but a poor replacement for everything else.
- viburnum 4y agoMilk comes in paper cartons.
- zamfi 4y agoThose cartons are not only paper.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoWhich paper milk cartons don't use plastic/aluminum coatings?
- dehrmann 4y agoI'm not sure if this is a real issue or just an annoyance. If the plastic degrades fully within a few years, it's already much less pollution than plastics where you're looking at 100 years.
- nicbou 4y agoIt's a real issue for Berlin's trash collection service, who reminds people not to use biodegradable bags for their bio waste.
- wiseowise 4y agoHow do you isolate bio waste then?
- justinclift 4y agoWhen I lived in the UK for a few years, I had a compost bin and used it for a few years with the green "compostable" bin bags they're talking about. eg these ones: https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/waitrose-compostable-garden-refuse-sacks/555925-549984-549985 https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/waitrose-compostable-... After 2 years, those bags hadn't degraded at all. Completely unfit for purpose, false advertising, etc.
- buck4roo 4y agoAdd the required enzymes at the point of manufacture... https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/19/intropic-plastic-decomposition/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/19/intropic-plastic-decomposi...
- userbinator 4y agoIMHO things like "compostable" and "biodegradable", effectively a sort of planned obsolescence, is a great way of both continuing to manufacture and sell more material while at the same time pandering to the "green" trend of environmentalism. Reuse is always better than recycling, and no doubt it would be perfectly possible to engineer reusable plastic products that truly could last orders of magnitude longer in addition to all their other desirable attributes, but there's no profit in that. For example, I have several-decades-old(!) plastic bags which are still perfectly usable, and probably have lasted several times longer than intended. As the results of the experiment show that the compost contains plastic that has not fully disintegrated, plastic inevitably ends up in soil of UK citizens That said, I don't think this is really a big deal. Plastics are used because they are quite inert, even those engineered for deliberately short lifetimes. Soil contains a lot of other inert matter too. The most widely-used plastics are also the most inert, so they'll just end up existing until someone finds a way to make use of them again. The whole "plastic scare" seems to mainly be due to the health effects of plasticisers found in things like PVC and ABS, which are not quite as abundant as PE and PP, both of which don't need plasticisers.
- colechristensen 4y agoIf it’s just PLA, who cares? Lactic acid will get broken down and is everywhere already in most living things, the concerns with microplastics eyc in the environment don’t exist with PLA unless there’s some issue I’m not aware of. There may be concerns with materials added to PLA to make it have better qualities, I’m not familiar with those.
- eropple 4y agoPolylactic acid is a generally safe plastic, but it is not particularly digestible by bacteria and so on. It's considered "degradable", but only in specific environmental situations or in an industrial setting. Also, Most flavors of "PLA" (both used in 3D printing and without) are mixtures, though. 3D printing "PLA+" and "PLA Pro" are usually mixed with acrylic or with thermoplastic urethane. (I do some 3D printing, and this is a big reason why I try to cut down on waste as much as is practical - and also why I'm trying to do more and more with PET/PETG. Even though I have a PLA-and-friends recycler in my area who just takes the stuff, the recycling paths for PET/PETG are more broadly available and understood. For prototyping, I've been trying to move more towards Algix Alga as much as possible, though it's tough because it's pricey and rarely in stock.)
- colechristensen 4y agoNobody is going to recycle your PET from prints/failures/etc. though, they're just going to get dumped. There's no magic plastic identification and separation in anybody's recycling. The way I see it you have three viable options: * Use raw PLA * Accept that you're going to generate some plastic waste * Burn your plastic waste Really unless you've gone completely carbon neutral, burning a small amount of plastic isn't a big deal, it's really where most plastic waste should go. Waste to energy plants are just fossil fuel power plants with extra steps.
- eropple 4y agoThe only plastic allowed in our recycling is PET. (And we have a local 3D printer recycler anyway, where both go anyway--it's more of an incentivization thing. It's a marginal incentive, but better than nothing.) Of course I accept that I'm going to generate waste--but I am trying to generate less of it. Hence NonOilen and Algis Alga as prototyping materials.
- jeffbee 4y agoIn the US I’ve never seen plastics marketed as compostable at home. Everything I’ve seen has been clearly marked as compostable in commercial facilities, where they heat the piles. Edit: never mind, these do say “home compost” according to some European regulations under the more prominent label that says commercial composting only, on the same bag!
- pfdietz 4y agoA local "green" grocery store replaced its plastic hot bar containers with compostable cardboard containers. But when I looked at the maker of those containers, and dug a bit, I discovered they used polyfluorinated alkanoates (PFAs) to keep the hot greasy liquids from soaking into the cardboard. Compost these things and you'll get fluorinated forever chemicals in your garden.
- RetpolineDrama 4y agoI give it another 20 years before people rediscover the milkman model
- pfdietz 4y agoI'd be fine with plastics, separated from the trash stream and sent to a big petrochemical plant to be thermally decomposed into a petrochemical feedstock. It would make a lot more sense than pretending plastic bottles can be directly turned into more bottles. When oil stops being a thing and carbon becomes scarce for making stuff I think this will make sense to do. Until then, let's just make piles of the old plastic so they can conveniently mine it then.
- braveyellowtoad 4y agoLove your thinking. Rather than comingle the plastics with waste, let's keep them separate at the landfill for use when future humans figure out what to do with it. By mixing it all together we just make it much more difficult for ourselves later.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> when future humans figure out what to do with it I'm not keen on models that include: "Let our grandchildren solve the problem". I have grandchildren.
- pfdietz 4y ago
- PKop 4y agoThinking about this problem reminded me of the video from last year [0] made by an employee of an animal feed manufacturer. He documents how a bunch of plastic-wrapped food waste is ground up in a large grinder, with the plastic still on the food, and the end result goes straight into the pig feed...almost certainly with many bits of micro plastics inside. Many don't realize how pervasive are these sorts of issues. [0] https://youtu.be/Xp0NSIrbu3Y https://youtu.be/Xp0NSIrbu3Y
- geniium 4y agoThis is really terrible, you can see this everywhere on earth, in some countries more than others. I think we do not realize the mess it will be and how complicated it is to clean that up.
- clolege 4y agoThis past year, I've taken to throwing all of my plastic waste directly in the trash. It saves me time from trying to figure out if it's compostable or recyclable (god forbid I get it wrong) and gives me back a tinge of guilt that makes me wish I had bought something else with less packaging, or brought my own cup to the cafe. Most plastics that claim to be recyclable aren't. And now it seems like most that claim to be compostable aren't either. When will people realize that it's all a sham to make us buy more plastic shit?
- elevaet 4y agoI completely agree that it's a sham, and the plastic is not even close to as recyclable as it is spun to be. The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill. At least if you "recycle" it, something like 30% actually does get fed back into the system (35% according to https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actually-gets-recycled https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actual...) vs. 0% in the landfill. It's terrible, but it's something. In the landfill it will probably never be worth mining, it will be so mixed up with other crap. I think the tinge of guilt you're talking about is really important and I wish more people feel that when they buy something in plastic. Plastic recycling really does make people feel off the hook, and they don't realize how poor plastic recycling actually is.
- nosianu 4y ago> The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill. Here in Germany most is burned - or exported (the number I found was 6% of the total; we also import some trash from European neighbors and it varies widely depending on type of trash and it's complicated the more I read). Even when I tried returning unused drugs to the drug store as recommended they looked at me funny and told me they'd just throw it into the regularly trash too anyway, since it's all burned. The burning facility uses extra high temperatures. Map of the 66 German trash burning sites: https://static.dw.com/image/50749190_7.png https://static.dw.com/image/50749190_7.png https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-have-a-burning-need-for-more-garbage-1445306936 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-have-a-burning-need-for... We do that so much now this causes concern about the CO2 balance sheet: https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growing-over-incinerating-garbage https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi... https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/publikation/long/3872.pdf https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/pu... (2008 but it's a government agency paper) So... before you are concerned about landfill impact I think you may want to check if this is where your trash actually ends up. Maybe it's burned. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-burning-trash-a-good-way-to-dispose-of-it-waste-incineration-in-charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-burning-trash-a-good... https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/the-environmental-impacts-of-waste-incineration/ https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/th... The last two links also discuss environmental impact of trash burning. I did not find much about the technical side unfortunately, how good is current trash burning tech at filtering toxins? I understand 30 year old plants won't be good, but what about more modern ones? This German article quotes a chemist specializing in "sustainability" saying that the air quality is not a problem these days (from trash burning). There are a lot of toxic waste products from the process, but apparently they are filtered out. They still need to be disposed of of course. --- https://www.dw.com/de/m%C3%BCllverbrennung-in-deutschland-entsorgung-mit-risiken/a-50759483 https://www.dw.com/de/m%C3%BCllverbrennung-in-deutschland-en... Reading further in that article, there still is some toxins left in the air, so over time there still is a problem of accumulation in the environment especially around the plant. It also says there are 350,000 tons of filtered toxic waste after burning every year, and they are treated with a salt solution and stored-buried in an abandoned mine. ---- At first I only wanted to point out that some countries use a lot of trash burning instead of landfills, but I googled and read a bit and it's very interesting and complex, and there is soooooooo much detail... overall though, no really good option exists, and all those methods are "leaking", meaning toxins end up in the environment one way or the other. Long-term we need something else, or we can hope for evolution to create more toxin-resistant lifeforms.
- blindriver 4y agoI think there needs to be a strict law that fixes this. 1) All consumer plastics should be recyclable, and there should only be 1 or 2 different types of plastic allowed. I don't care how expensive this makes it. That Pacific Ocean Plastic Island or whatever it's called really changed my opinion on this. 2) Anything that touches food should be either glass or truly compostable, no more plastic and not fake compostable like this article. I don't care if it's more expensive and if it doesn't last as long. Glass works good enough for long-term storage. 3) Get rid of styofoam entirely, fuck that toxic waste.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYour item 1 actually makes things less expensive. This can be proved by looking at places that force the producers to pay for it, but don't otherwise interfere. When businesses assign people to do it in the cheapest possible way, but aren't allowed to externalise the cost onto society, what you describe happens, because its cheaper. Not quite as cheap as blaming the consumer and telling lots of lies unfortunately, or we wouldnt need any regulation to achieve the most efficient outcome.
- afiori 4y agoThat Pacific Ocean Plastic Island is mostly made of fishing nets. Fishing nets are also the most likely source of most microplastic in the oceans. It is a huge problem, but not really connected to food packaging.
- dvh 4y agoComposting plastic makes no sense. When bacteria eat the plastic they produce CO2. Just burn the plastic in power plant and you'll have the same amount of CO2 plus energy.
- harg 4y agoI think the motivation behind compostable plastic is to reduce the amount of micro plastics ending up in the environment rather than CO2 emissions. That said, burning non-compostable plastic (with appropriate emissions control) does seem like an appropriate way of disposing of it, and generating some energy in the process.
- bergenty 4y agoIt’s not about CO2.
- lopis 4y agoWhen bacteria eat anything, they produce CO2. But instead of energy you get compost. It's not clear to me that one is better than the other.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoWhen bacteria eat things, unless you're very careful to keep things aerobic, you end up producing a lot of methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas.
- Roark66 4y agoAnother thing. I absolutely hate the taste of those materials that pass for compostable stuff these days. The McDonald's around here switched to paper straws (EU laws) and wooden ice cream spoons. I seriously stopped going there since they did. People always tell me, why don't you take your own plastic straw and a spoon if you want to go to McDonald's? Well, when I did used to go it was usually on a whim, when travelling on a motorway far away from home. I would have to remember to carry this stuff with me all the time, just to ocassionally benefit from it. So they lost my business. What they should've done is what IKEA did when single Use carrier bags were outlawed. Just have much stronger multi-use equivalent one can buy there and then.
- kuroguro 4y agoYep, one of my favorite places to grab a coffee on the go changed their lids from plastic to something that resembles egg carton (pulp?). By the time a third of the coffee is gone the lid turns into a soggy mush. It doesn't fall apart. Just disgusting to handle... not getting coffee there anymore.
- bergenty 4y agoWhat’s wrong with wooden spoons?
- lopis 4y agoThe feeling of wood spoons running on my tongue and lips send shivers through my spine. It's a very unpleasant sensation. I understand the need to stop single-use plastics but I rather not eat icecream if I need a wooden spoon to eat it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sxv 4y agofirst world problems..
- astura 4y ago
- pizza234 4y agoThose materials must fulfill opposite requirements: 1. not break down while used; 2. break down quickly after use. So no big surprise, if they take a long time. The main problem here is standardization; without it, there's nothing clear about them, e.g. how much those materials share with plastics (ie. harmful additives). A consequence of this is what the article describes - they can't be properly treated. Having said that, I find less worse to find a bag of material "derived from potato starch" in the ocean, rather than a plastic bag.
- throwaway09223 4y agoThese articles always strike me as a red herring. Sure, these won't break down in compost or a landfill, but why are you composting plastics to begin with? The proper way to dispose of plastic is in an incinerator, as is commonly done in the EU. Regular old polyethylene burns cleanly and easily. Do you know what's actually dangerous to the environment? These new "paper" alternatives which are often coated in PFAS chemicals -- which cannot be safely mulched or incinerated because they are "forever" chemicals. Just use regular plastics please, and burn them. It's by far the most environmentally friendly solution.
- thefounder 4y agoOk, but people don't burn plastics. Source: look around. Better ban both plastics and paper coated with PFAS chemicals
- Asooka 4y agoMost every European country has bins for collecting plastic. People shouldn't be burning it themselves, just collect it in the appropriate bin and send it to the incinerator.
- pixl97 4y agoIf every bit of plastic was burned in Europe, then we'd still only be talking about 10% of the problem. The US for example is high effective at burying their plastic problem in sanitary landfills, something tiny, like less than 1% of plastic waste escapes this flow. Once you get out of US and EU these numbers can vary wildly up and to the point of everything getting thrown in the nearest ditch and flowing down the river to the closest ocean. Dealing with worldwide problem with a EU/US mindset is a great way to propagate a worldwide disaster.
- yakak 4y agoWaste to energy is something that can easily be implemented worldwide because the resulting infrastructure has income to pay for itself. There are world wide infrastructure programs that build less useful things. It's much harder to get high quality landfills made and maintained because they don't have a source of profit.
- mhb 4y agoOn Second Thought, Just Throw Plastic Away https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doesnt-work https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doe...
- no_butterscotch 4y agoThis is basically what I decided too. Nonetheless when presented with a recycling bin, compost bin, or trash bin - I still always stand there for a split second like "uhhh" before often deciding on what I think the correct bin is. I do feel though that we'd likely be better served just replacing them with one giant garbage bin.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoRecycling should be labelled what it can take. Locally only 1-3 are recyclable for me but theres no way to tell. Its not labelled on any recycling bin. Theres no information about this at the point of sale. I had to look this up myself on my own prerogative and I have to do this in any locality I happen to be in because its aways slightly different what is taken.
- gilbetron 4y agogrow plants to pull carbon from atmosphere -> create plant based plastics -> use plastics -> bury plastics forever we need to sequester carbon, this seems like one good method
- specialist 4y agoWe need some DARPA-style investment and design competitions for reduce, reuse, recycle. Like the X-Prizes, Bill Gates' quest for a composting toilet, Project Warp. This is a proven strategy for goal directed innovation. Local optimizations, relying on individual actors in a long and complicated lifecycle supply chain, will not result in a global optimum. (Cite theory of constraints.) In 15 min, everyone here could imagine +100 solutions. Ceramic coatings, an engineered fiber that breaks down with a specific enzyme, thin clay disposable cups (tried in India?)... And then we should try every idea, funding based on plausibility.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoI think bamboo is such an underexploited resource. You can grow it literally anywhere, even in places that see winter. A pub could have a stand of bamboo in the back that they cut pint cups from. Of course its invasive but at this point anywhere with human activity is so unnatural to begin with that it wont matter much.
- Insanity 4y agoOn a related note, what’s up with the plastic packaging in NA? Often vegetarian food has the plastic packed so tightly it is annoying to unpack. There is no easy way to open those packages and the plastic completely sticks to the food. In EU, they just come in a plastic container without plastic sticking to the food.
- nanomonkey 4y agoI'd love to see a standardized sized titanium reusable wide mouth jars, that could be returned and reused almost indefinitely. While titanium has a high upfront embodied energy, it is super light weight and doesn't react with most things in our environment that you would expect purchase in it. One could imagine purchasing food (sauce, milk, oil) then reuse it to hold your left overs. You could reheat on a stove, but sadly not in the microwave. With a cozy of some sort you could even hold hot and cold beverages. Bonus points would be that you could easily compare prices as a 1 liter jar of one marinara sauce would be the same as another brands jar. On the same note, I'd love to go back to reusable glass jars that were manufactured for reuse and cleaning capabilities. Sadly they are a bit heavier and more fragile than a titanium version, but at least you can look into the contents.
- sershe 4y agoSomething similar was already done in Soviet Union with glass containers (standard for obvious reasons) - instead of being recycled the usual way, they were washed and reused, so you could return them for a non-trivial fee[1]. I wonder if the only reason it doesn't work in the US for big companies like Coca Cola that have existing distribution network that could be used to e.g. collect intact standard bottles for a discount, is it's just not worth it, cause everyone is too rich to bother returning the bottles. Or maybe the US is more efficient so it's not worth it economically to bother collecting, transporting and cleaning them (or maybe it wasn't even economical in the USSR, I dunno). [1] the joke is, the first derivative of a drinking session is another drinking session you can have with alcohol purchased with bottle return fees from the initial one; and a really good party must have a non-zero 2nd derivative.
- cco 4y agoA quick litmus test you can perform if you're curious: with contact with water, heat, or food, does the material in question start to degrade? If yes, it's likely compostable. If not, then you've got plastic and it won't.