Environmental Question #1 [Biodegradability]

 Courtesy of Reddit user u/Kischter

Q: Aren't biodegradable and compostable different? Compostable breaks down into natural materials and biodegradable means that the environment can break it down but it isn't fully broken into naturally found materials?

A: The difficult truth is that the idea of biodegradable and compostable are so new in the industrial space that literally neither of them has been officially defined. That is why greenwashing is so easy right now, since as far as I'm aware there are no governments or scientific bodies that agree on what they mean, so there are no laws restricting the use of the words and companies can just slap either or both of them on any label they want. A colleague of mine is actually currently working with the EU government to write official standards for what constitutes a biodegradable material and/or a compostable material, but once those standards are released they will be the first official standards of that kind produced by any major government in the world.

To give you a bit of an idea of why the standards are so difficult to write, I'll tell you a bit about the different kinds of degradation. For the sake of this discussion I'll just use degradation as a catch-all term for both biodegradation and composting. Here are some different degradation situations:

"Home" Degradation: If I throw an object into my back yard, it will break down into individual molecules in a few months to a few years.

"Industrial" Degradation: The object can degrade into individual molecules, but it needs to be put through a factory process to break down, such as exposure to high temperature, specialty chemicals, or special genetically engineered bacteria.

"Ocean" Degradation: The object will degrade in the ocean quickly (within a few weeks) to minimize the chance it gets eaten by a fish.

"Waterway" Degradation: The object will degrade in freshwater or saltwater, as well as in municipal sewer systems.

Those are the generally agreed upon degradation types, but the names are all ones I made up, because no one can agree on what to call them. Within these classes there are also additional confounding factors that make it even tougher to define. Like for example, if a material degrades into individual molecules, but those molecules are in themselves toxic, does that count? If a material that is designed to last a long time takes 20 years to degrade, is that still degradable, or does it need to degrade at a certain speed to count?

There is also a problem that worries me in particular in that most standards that have been written by individual nonprofits usually allow for some wiggle room in the amount of degradation, such as something might count as degradable if it's 95% degraded in a week. The way it's written it's pretty obvious that this is just to give some wiggle room in case the material needs a few extra days to degrade, but manufacturers often take advantage of this kind of loophole to instead include 5% non-degradable plastic in their products while still being allowed to put the green label on it.

As you can see this is a very complicated hot-button issue and scientists are still working with governments to figure out a reasonable solution.

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