When A1 Organics announced last year that it would stop accepting pizza boxes, cutlery and other certified compostable food items from Denver residents, some took to Reddit to express their displeasure.
“Damn,” one user wrote. “I looked forward to composting plates once in a while.”
But what really upset others was the reason Colorado’s largest composter — then contracted to manage Denver’s organic waste — decided to make the switch. According to s notice A1 published in February 2023, 10 percent of the material it received was deemed “too contaminated to process effectively.” In other words, it was littered with plain old plastic rubbish – bags, cutlery and packaging, some of which might seemed their certified composable appearance, but was not. All that waste compromised the quality of A1’s finished compost.
“Pollution is the number one challenge facing our industry in the residential and commercial organics recycling stream,” A1’s press release states. As of April 1 last year, the company said it would only collect people’s food waste and yard trimmings, plus one very specific type of certified-compostable, 3-gallon bag used to collect food scraps.
The kerfuffle pointed to a much broader confusion surrounding consumer products made from bioplastics — an umbrella term for products that are supposedly biodegradable, made partially or entirely from plant material, or both. These products tend to look similar to those made from conventional fossil fuel-based plastics, except that they are tinted green, labeled with a leaf, or labeled with words such as “biodegradable”, “oxo-degradable” or “composable.”
One problem is this those labels don’t mean much; the United States has no enforceable guidelines on “degradability” claims, and the word “composable” is only valid if backed by third-party verification. Even then, certified compostable products may only break down in certain facilities operating under specific conditions.
The other problem is that by saying they will accept certified compostable products, composters are opening themselves up to a potential flood of pollution from non-certified plastic lookalikes. Sometimes even the pickiest customers can’t tell the difference between products that are compostable and those that aren’t. Other times, the pollution is the result of carelessness.
A1 was by no means the first composter to meet these challenges. Nor was it the first in the US to respond by moving away from compostable consumer goods altogether. In 2021, Vermont’s largest composter said it would no longer accepting compostable packaging due to high contamination rates from non-compostable plastics. The the same thing happened in 2019 with one of Oregon’s largest composters.
Since then, various states — including California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington — have tried to solve the problem through “truth-in-labeling” laws that explain which products are and are not compostable. Colorado’s lawconsidered by one environmental group to be the nation’s “most comprehensive,” went into full effect last month. It says compostable products must be certified by a third party and marked in specific ways — for example, with the word “compostable” and with green-colored stripes or other markings. Products that are not certified compostable is prohibited from using similar labeling schemes, including the color green and words such as “natural,” “biodegradable,” “degradable,” “oxo-degradable,” or any other phrases that imply decomposition.
Marco Bulgarelli / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Many advocates are hopeful that these laws will stop or reverse the trend of composters limiting their lists of accepted materials.
Julie Mach, owner of a small Salido, Colo.-based compost company called Elements Mountain Compost, said she’s especially eager to see better labeling of compostable bags. “There’s a lot of greenwashing” around these products, she told Grist — “on Amazon, online, wherever you’re going to buy them.” Her company does take compostable consumer goods. She said she worked on one occasion where volunteers mistakenly collected food scraps in non-compostable plastic garbage bags just because they were tinted green. Mach didn’t find out until three days had passed, after she had already incorporated the bags into her compost.
“I pulled them out of my stack a year later,” she said.
At the same time, however, environmental groups and even composters themselves question whether simply getting rid of plastic pollution is enough. Some say it’s the sheer volume of bioplastics that’s the problem – composting facilities were never designed to process this kind of waste in such large quantities. They say policymakers should not only address misleading marketing claims surrounding compostable products, but also reduce the need for so much single-use packaging and serviceware in the first place, compostable or not.
Truth-in-labeling laws “certainly will make it easier in some cases moving forward,” said Danny Katz, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Public Interest Research Group. But he said it’s important that compost advocates also remember other waste mitigation strategies, including reusable cups, containers and utensils. “We need to continue to remind everyone that we need to emphasize reusable items first.”
To understand composters’ perspectives, it is important to understand one of the main motivations behind composting: to divert food waste for the sake of the climate. Keeping food waste out of landfills prevents it from being emitted methanea greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. According to one estimate from the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, separating and composting organic waste could help the world’s cities reduce methane emissions from landfills by almost two thirds.
Compostable packaging and foodware furthers this goal only when it diverts food scraps that would otherwise have gone to landfill; bioplastics themselves are considered “collateral damage” which do not contribute valuable nutrients. Several composters Grist spoke with said that’s what they first thought these products would do — those thin green bags, for example, could make compost more palatable to people who otherwise don’t like cleaning mold out of their kitchen bins or to carry the drums. outside to their large curb containers.
Over time, however, they found that people began to see compostable dishes, cups, cutlery and other products as one-to-one replacements for single-use plastics. And they asked composting facilities to handle the resulting waste.
“We are now seeing a transition from food waste composting to treating compostable products,” said Bob Yost, A1’s former vice president and CTO, during a virtual roundtable in March.
This is a problem because compostable packaging does not make good compost; food waste does. And so the risk of scaling up the adoption of compostable packaging and foodstuffs – even if the fossil fuel-based plastics are filtered out – is that it will encourage the use of the stuff in ever-increasing quantities, instead of moving to less resource-intensive ones. switch options. such as reusable items. Jeff West, owner of Port Orchard, Washington composter NextGen Organics, said during the virtual roundtable that the single-use composting tables he receives usually outweigh the amount of food waste people send him.
“The solution is not just more disposable items,” Clinton Sander, A1 Organics’ marketing manager, told Grist. Other experts have expressed concern about toxic chemicals used in compostable productsor incomplete degradation of assumed compostable materials. All of these factors can hurt the finished compost’s selling price due to a perceived drop in its quality.
In the absence of a systematic, society-wide shift away from single-use products, many composters are hopeful that at least truth-in-labeling laws will prevent contamination from harming their bottom line — and public health. According to a report released earlier this year by the US Composting Council, an industry group, composters spend approx 20 percent of their operating costs on contamination. But if plastic is not removed from compost, it can breaks down into smaller fragments known as microplastics which can be harmful to humans. Some research suggests that chemicals released by microplastics can crops’ cells and genes are damagedand the microplastics themselves can adsorb on crops’ seeds and roots, inhibiting the uptake of water and nutrients.
Sander said Colorado’s truth-in-labeling requirements are a “step in the right direction,” and that he could envision reinstating compostables on a product-by-product basis at some point. Mach said she has seen some companies change their product offerings — such as one that used to offer compostable dinnerware in a number of colors but now only sells it in bright green.
Denver replaced A1 Organics with a new composter, Waste Management, as a result of a bidding process several months ago. Waste Management has not announced any plans to begin accepting Denver’s compostable products and did not respond to Grist’s request for an interview for this article, but a spokeswoman for the city of Denver said she is hopeful the law will encourage more of the region’s processors to accept compostable packaging.
