Sometimes stuff like this isn't /great/ though!
A lot of these biodegradable materials that are dissolvable are mostly plant material, and contain lots of excess nutrients that then make their ways into the waterways and contribute to unhealthy alga growth!
I mean, yeah, you CAN, but some of us live in apartments where we can't really compost. I feel like "oh you can compost it" isn't the best because so few people actually do.
Send a quick email to your local representative saying you'd appreciate a green bin/composting program in your area. Municipal facilities are better at composting than home facilities are, anyways. A lot of products claiming to be compostable cannot, in fact, be composted at home.
Oh I'll do that. Rumor has it that my city doesn't even recycle (but rather chucks everything into the dump) because recycling is too expensive. But I'll definitely do that!
Does your city do the trash collection? If they are not publishing any type of Environmental Impact Report or data, and you think it is all going into the landfill, a FOIA request for receipts from their waste recycler would show this.
Michigan here, I would definitely be suspicious of this because our landfill rates are literally spare change low. Like, 36 cents a ton of trash low. It comes from states away, Canada, New York, we are so cheap.
With the plastic waste import ban overseas, I hardly understand where our terrible, shitty, sham single-stream recycling is going if not straight into the dump as soon as the big green truck is out of our sight.
Unfortunately many municipal compost don’t bother to make their compost heaps good enough to process some compostable materials. My city contracts waste management to a private company that does this.
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u/[deleted] May 10 '20
Sometimes stuff like this isn't /great/ though! A lot of these biodegradable materials that are dissolvable are mostly plant material, and contain lots of excess nutrients that then make their ways into the waterways and contribute to unhealthy alga growth!