Are We Ready for Compostable Packaging?

NPR’s Marketplace did a great piece recently on compostable packaging.

The industry is booming.  Growing at about 19% each year, it’s reached $130 million globally.

But does it do us any good?  Evidently not, unless you have an industrial composter.  Throw most “compostable” packaging in the trash, and it acts like trash.  It won’t compost but will instead sit in a landfill for decades to come.  Throw it in your compost heap at home and it won’t compost either, unless you’re using the high heat typical of industrial composters.

Compostable, yes. Composted? Probably not.

And yet even industrial composters aren’t easy to find.  So what’s the point?

NPR seemed somewhat skeptical of compostable packaging, but I take its growth as a good sign.  There are two steps to getting us to compost more of our waste: making our waste compostable and providing a means to compost it.  We’re clearly already well on the way to tackling the first part.  Once we’ve done this, it will make a lot more sense for someone to invest the resources necessary to take the second step.  Probably, we need some sort of new collection or repository system, and who’s ever going to create one of those in a world where no packaging is compostable to begin with?

So, for now, NPR does have a point that we should be circumspect in priding ourselves on our latest purchase of a compostable fork.  That fork will probably just sit in a landfill anyway.  But it may well be the predecessor of billions of disposable forks that will one day compost back into something far finer than landfill–rich, hearty soil.  And that can’t happen until someone first markets a compostable fork.