Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
Food is a quarter of what goes into landfills and is linked to well over half the methane that escapes them. The reason is that a landfill is not a compost heap — it is the opposite of one.
Energy recovery has a legitimate place in a waste system. It sits below prevention, reuse, recycling and composting - and roughly a tenth of what goes in still comes out as ash bound for landfill.
A compostable label describes how a product behaves under specified industrial conditions. It is not a promise that your compost heap, or your recycling bin, can handle it.