Modern agriculture is more than a market full of food products; it’s a modern miracle, producing enough fruits and vegetables to meet a hungry world’s demands. In fact, more than enough; nearly half of all produce grown and sold each year goes uneaten, destined for landfill. Dumping that produce is bad for the environment – but if it, along with the packaging it comes in gets composted, the environment actually benefits.
While the moral and ethical issues surrounding food waste need to be addressed, sending unwanted produce to the dump also creates a huge problem for the environment. Rotting produce that’s buried under other waste without access to oxygen releases methane and other greenhouse gasses. In fact, decomposing food produces as much as 8% of the greenhouse gasses that pollute the atmosphere.
And then there is the packaging – often plastic – that consumers use to take home produce and that wholesalers and shippers use to transport produce; that plastic tends to get tossed together with the unwanted produce. This packaging waste makes up some 30% of all municipal solid waste. Plastic waste from packaging sticks around long after the produce that it protected disappears, eventually breaking down into microplastic particles absorbed by humans, animals, and the soil. According to research published in the journal of the U.K.’s Royal Society, “these particles may cause inflammation, traverse cellular barriers, and even cross highly selective membranes such as the blood-brain barrier or the placenta. Within the cell, they can trigger changes in gene expression and biochemical reactions, among other things.”
One solution with much broader potential to these issues is composting. By using increasingly innovative approaches, composters can reduce the amount of methane produced from produce waste. Among these encouraging rising innovations to help address the issue are compostable plastics. With these eco-friendly plastic substitutes, consumers and retailers can safely dispose of unwanted produce by sending it to the composting heap together with compostable plastic, which ultimately breaks down into nutrient-rich, non-toxic, and non-polluting dirt. In a truly circular fashion, the resulting compost itself can be used by farmers as soil, which sequesters carbon, to grow even more produce.
While the carbon sequestration techniques used in composting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are well-known – and widely implemented – compostable plastic is somewhat less well-known. Still, its adoption is growing as consumer demand for sustainability surges and legal policies increasingly mandate partial or full bans of plastic packaging. In Europe, for example, EU legislation seeks to ban single-use plastics in the sale and shipment of produce, requiring that “conventional plastic [be] replaced by recycled plastic or coated cardboard.” Meanwhile, in the US, many municipalities and states have adopted similar rules.
However, “recycled plastic,” “coated cardboard,” or other recyclable materials don’t really solve either the food waste or material waste problem – at least not by themselves. In fact, over an estimated 90% of all recyclable plastic ends up in landfills. Other non-plastic options such as cardboard and paper come with their own challenges; besides being a major contributor to deforestation and a huge consumer of energy; the wood pulp/paper industry (paper/cardboard packaging utilizes nearly half of the world’s wood pulp production) is the fourth largest industrial consumer of energy in the world, and the third biggest polluter of water and air in the US and Canada. While these plastic materials can detract from certain plastic waste, neither can prevent the release of greenhouse gasses from decomposing produce.
Fortunately, farmers, wholesalers, and retailers are realizing the benefits of compostable plastic with the market growing at a healthy annual rate, especially for food packaging. According to industry experts, the market for compostable packaging could reach $75 billion by the end of the decade. And consumers are on board, too; a recent UK study showed that, when shoppers were able to identify food packaged in compostable wrappings, composting levels rose 23%. There is a long way to go, but as more farmers, producers, shippers and consumers adopt compostable plastic packaging in lieu of traditional plastics, packaging can increasingly become a way to nurture the earth rather than damage it.
By: Daphna Nissenbaum, CEO & Co-founder of TIPA