Com­postable plastics break down in less than 22 days in real life indus­tri­al composting

Cent­ral aim of the study was to gath­er more empir­ic data on the ques­tion wheth­er the dis­in­teg­ra­tion rate of com­postable products is suf­fi­cient to be com­pat­ible with the cur­rent organ­ic waste treat­ment prac­tices. In an indus­tri­al organ­ic waste treat­ment tri­al, a set of nine dif­fer­ent com­postable plastic products, con­sist­ing of organ­ic waste col­lec­tion bags, plant pots, tea bags, cof­fee pads, cof­fee cap­sules, and fruit labels were tested. ​“We stud­ied how com­postable plastics behave in the cur­rent Dutch sys­tem for the treat­ment of GFT (i.e source sep­ar­ated muni­cip­al biowaste) and came to the con­clu­sion that com­postable products can be pro­cessed well with GFT“, says Maarten van der Zee, co-author of the study. After the first waste treat­ment cycle of only 11 days, the PLA plant pot already com­pletely dis­in­teg­rated. ​“This is sig­ni­fic­antly faster than paper and most organ­ic mat­ter. Even the orange peel and banana skin (the ref­er­ence mater­i­als) did not com­pletely dis­in­teg­rate and needed more time” de Bie com­men­ted on the study. ​“The PLA tea bag, which is a typ­ic­al con­sumer product, also suc­cess­fully dis­in­teg­rated with­in 22 days.” The study also ana­lysed the com­pos­i­tion of the cur­rent visu­al con­tam­in­a­tion of con­ven­tion­al plastics in com­post, and no com­postable plastics were iden­ti­fied amongst the plastics that were found in the com­post. ​“The import­ance of this res­ult can­not be over­stated”, de Bie stresses. ​“All stake­hold­ers involved in the busi­ness of organ­ic recyc­ling, be it waste man­agers, industry, or legis­lat­ors, now have the proof that cer­ti­fied com­postable plastics actu­ally deliv­er.” European Bioplastics also wel­comes the fact that the Dutch Waste Man­age­ment Asso­ci­ation (Vereniging Afval­bedrijven, VA) and Hol­land Bioplastics (HB), the asso­ci­ation rep­res­ent­ing the Dutch bioplastics industry jointly defined the research ques­tions, which provided the basis for set­ting-up the pro­ject. Besides, VA selec­ted and provided the test facil­ity while HB con­trib­uted the test products. It is import­ant that waste industry and bioplastics industry are work­ing togeth­er. ​“In view of the upcom­ing devel­op­ment of the frame­work for bio­de­grad­able plastics included in the European Green Deal, I kindly ask the European Com­mis­sion to take these research res­ults into account and to also sup­port more sim­il­ar research pro­jects”, stated de Bie. Source: European Bioplastics, press release, 20.02.2020