Is Compostable Plastic Really All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Buying compostable plastics or composting your food scraps is an attractive choice for many consumers, but do we have the infrastructure to make this eco-friendly market work? 

Composting is the process by which organic matter is turned into fertilizer. Compostable plastics used in food packaging, take-out utensils, and napkins are often labeled with a green leaf or ‘100% Compostable’ tag. 

Compostable cups, the most heavily purchased compostable item in the U.S. and Europe, are made from a corn-based substance called polylactic acid (PLA). According to Jeremy Kranowitz at Sustainable Living, “PLA cups are better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions since the corn used to create them captured carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the cup, if recycled, can enrich the soil.” 

The problem is, most compostable plastics are not disposed of in the proper composting facility because the municipality in which those products are being circulated has no infrastructure for it. 

Garden composting systems are not hot enough to break down compostable plastics. But they can be broken down in industrial facilities with the right combination of heat and time. 

According to Adele Peters of Fast Company, “most municipal composting centers were originally designed to take yard waste like leaves and branches, not food.” And certainly not PLA plastics. 

Despite the necessity for municipal composting, Peters noted only 3% of facilities take food waste. Less than half of those facilities process compostable plastics. 

Peters wrote some compostable packaging can take up to six months to break down, and that’s only if the facility takes them. Oftentimes, they end up in the landfill.  

Kranowitz said compostable plastics can take decades to break down in a landfill. And because recycling operations are meant for oil-based plastics, most compostable items can’t be recycled either. 

The EPA published data on the amount of packaging waste produced in the U.S. between 1960 and 2017. Ideally, this data includes total waste generated, recycled, composted, and thrown in a landfill. The composting data, however, has not been published. 

There are two explanations for this: 1) the composting data is so small that the numbers are negligent or 2) the EPA does not build infrastructures necessary for composting and processing compostable goods. Perhaps it is a combination of both. 

We can’t tell what percentage of the packaging market compostable plastics hold; we can only say that, in some countries, it’s growing. 

According to Severin Carrell at the Scotland branch of The Guardian, a compostable packaging company called Vegware experienced a 50% growth in sales in 2018 after the E.U. taxed oil-based plastics and France banned them altogether. Carrell noted, however, that the company experienced some threats after taxes for the plastics decreased and oil-based alternatives were a less expensive option once again.

The U.S. is falling behind in the emerging composting market. According to Future Market Insights, Europe held 50% of the compostable packaging market in 2018 while the U.S. lagged at less than 25%. 

Most of the market share is held by small restaurants who, to the best of their knowledge, want to make their operation sustainable. But compostable take-out items can’t reach their full potential without the infrastructure to process them. 

In the small town of Pleasantville, NY, composting is a new project. According to Helen Meurer, chair of the Conservation Council of Pleasantville and an active member in the Pleasantville Recycles Group, the town’s composting program began in early October of 2019. 

Meurer recently featured in Pleasantville’s local news station as the face of “What Would Helen Do,” “something of a meme” she called it. In the infomercial, Meurer answered common questions about in-house composting, what scraps of food could be recycled by the composting facility, and where to bring the compost. 

Pleasantville residents bring their compost to the Department of Public Works on Saturdays. From there, it is trucked across the river to a composting facility in Cortlandt Manor run by Sustainable Materials Management, Inc. 

As part of their Drop-Off program, SMM comes to the DPW to collect residents’ compost every week. Their facility accepts all food products as well as compostable packaging. As one of the few facilities in the United States to take compostable plastics, they are an anomaly.   

Even if you live in a community that composts food and compostable plastics, everything has a cost. “I worry that people become complacent,” said Meurer, “and they don’t think…that even a compostable container takes resources to make.” 

The water and farmland needed to produce the crops that are used for compostable packaging, the refining of those crops to generate plastics, the transport and packaging of food containers, among other things. This is all part of the carbon footprint of supposedly sustainable plastics.  

Meurer believed that composting in the backyard is preferable. But “so many people don’t have the space,” she said. And even if they did, compostable packaging would need to go elsewhere. 

If you compost on your own property, she said, you start to understand how valuable your food waste is. But she noted, “the out of sight out of mind mentality is worrisome.” 

Meurer agreed that the biggest problem is education. “Even at restaurants they don’t know much about recycling,” she said. Not only is compostable packaging more expensive, but most people don’t know how to properly dispose of it. 

“There are a couple of restaurants near [Pleasantville] that are using compostable lids and bowls,” she said. “But” she added, “they themselves are not composting because they don’t have access to a composting pick-up, and they technically aren’t within Pleasantville so they can’t bring it to the DPW.” 

Meurer wanted composting to be popular enough in Pleasantville to implement a curbside service, similar to how trash is picked up. 

But something like this would require expanding the food scrap program to Mount Pleasant. “Everything has a cost,” she said. 

Compostable packaging is, ideally, better than fossil fuel-based plastics. But the cost of organizing and transporting compostable materials is high. “Ideally,” said Meurer, “we would all have less take-out containers.”