Call for clear legislation and Standards to cover composting

Currently there are no national or international standards to cover home composting. At present Packaging manufacturers can claim their products are "compostable" leading to consumer confusion and misinformation.

Products that are listed as compostable are often only suitable for industrial composting or hot composting and will not biodegrade in your home composter or even in an anaerobic digester.

{This has been the case with several so-called biodegradable plastics: they are proven to break down faster under specific environmental conditions (which may not actually reflect the normal environment), but may not be effectively degradable under natural conditions. The labels of 'biodegradable', 'bio-based', 'compostable', are therefore often claimed and used in marketing contexts, with little understanding for consumers on what these definitions mean in practice.

A key current challenge of biodegradable plastics is that they tend to need particular waste management methods which are not always widely available. They usually need to be separated from the traditional recycling stream (which can be difficult and expensive), and have to go to specific compostable facilities. This doesn’t mean such methods are unfeasible, but could be additional economic cost especially if they're in the waste stream at low concentrations, and would take significant work in terms of infrastructure redesign}

Quoted from Our World in Data

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-truth-bioplastics.html#jCp