Composting In Practice
We’re all being urged to compost more of our household waste nowadays, and quite rightly so. We receive a constant stream of advice on what to compost, how to do it, and what to do with it afterwards. But once you’ve made that leap of faith, acquired your (hopefully recycled) plastic compost bin and established a regime to stick all your suitable stuff in there, what happens? What expectations do YOU have of the end product?
Well, I finally got round to breaking open one of my bins the other day, and you can get an idea of what I found from the picture above. The bin was about half full of moist, crumbly compost, with no odour apart from a faint hint of an oak wood after rain. And for the squeamish amongst us, no creepy crawlies at all. Visually, it’s a bit different from the stuff you buy in bags from the garden centre, being full of things like eggshell fragments, tea bag husks, fruit stones and corks. But once you’ve dug it in to your vegetable patch or spread it out on the flower beds as a mulch, it blends in pretty well. Those ‘bits’ don’t bother me at all.
What I did find a little disturbing was the persistence of some materials that I was led to believe would decompose during the composting process. The conventional wisdom nowadays is to combine the usual ‘green’ materials (vegetable scraps, grass clippings, etc) with ‘brown’, such as paper and cardboard. This makes sense on several levels; not only does it reduce the burden on the recycling collection service, it keeps the contents of the compost bin drier and hotter. I just rip up our cardboard roughly by hand and mix it in with the soggy stuff. Easy.
However… amongst the rogue items that crept in there by chance that you would never expect to rot down, I found this.
This is plastic. It is the outer layer of what appeared to be a cardboard packet, which originally contained Sainsbury’s Biscuits For Cheese. As usual, I ripped it up and stuck it in with the potato peelings, thinking the exterior design was just printed on. Sadly, I was mistaken. This is persistent stuff, given that it has been in there for getting on for a year. The bin had had no new material added for at least six months.
Yet another example of the pitfalls of packaging made from mixed materials. We’re all aware of the issues surrounding the cartons that are increasingly used for liquid and semi-liquid products, such as those made by Tetrapak and Elopak. A sandwich of card, plastic and metal foil, these are a nightmare to recycle, requiring specialist facilities such as that established in Fife, Scotland in 2004. Sadly, there aren’t enough of these to cope with the mountains of these cartons we dump every year. On the side of my pack of Sainsbury’s White Grape and Peach juice drink, it says proudly “Beverage Carton- widely recycled”. Not here in the People’s Republic of Suburbia, it isn’t. The London Borough of Bromley’s guidelines for its ‘Recycling For All’ initiative specifically exclude drinks cartons. So I’m guessing these cartons all go to landfill.
Here’s another example of mixed materials in packaging. We’re encouraged to crush our plastic bottles to exclude the air, then reseal by replacing the screw top, before putting it out for recycling. That’s fine in principle, but what would the recycling depot do with this?
This is a bottle of Sainsbury’s Peach High Juice Squash. The label quite clearly and conscientiously informs us that the bottle is made from PET, while the cap is made from HDPE. Another nightmare for someone, maybe not my bottle in isolation, but when scaled up across the Borough, who knows how many bottles like this there are?
Small wonder, then, that the Local Government Association, whose members are desperate to meet their recycling targets, have written to the government to complain about the major supermarkets’ use of excessive packaging, plastics in particular, that are “undermining” local authorities’ efforts to recycle.
In a letter to Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, Councillor Margaret Eaton, chairman of the LGA, said:
“Supermarkets must be open with people about how much packaging they are producing. It is vital that consumers can make informed choices about where they shop and which products they buy.
“The public needs to see hard evidence to back up the claims of supermarkets that they are taking the problem of packaging seriously, that their claims to be cutting packaging are real and that targets are effective.”
According to councils, the plastic covering on food and drink products adds millions of pounds to people’s tax bills as the cost of waste disposal rises. And it’s not just the cost of dumping rubbish in a hole in the ground that is rising, it’s the cost of the systems and processes that are being put in place to recycle things, like my biscuit packet, that did not have recycling as a design criterion.
Anyone got any ideas on how we can compost plastic? That would be a nice little earner.
Pete Smith @ July 11, 2009
http://cyberboris.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/beautiful-birds//2010/01/30/beautiful-birds/
Thin plastic bags are an absolute menace, they serve no purpose except destructively.
Yes Angela, I agree plastic bags are a waste of resources, a danger to our environment, and a symptom of our general laziness and ignorance. I disagree with you on your second point though, they obviously DO serve a purpose, or people wouldn’t use them. And I don’t put them in my compost bin.