Bloody Abel & Cole

[brixtonbrood]

I have just spent a merry half hour trying to extract compost from the bottom of the Dalek to make space for the weeds and grass clippings to go in the top.

This has been a deeply tedious job because the "degradable" cornstarch compost caddy liners which I used to use until about a year ago when it became evident that they do not work as advertised have made an impermeable web of semi-degraded plastic string.

But I'm used to that - what I was surprised by was the "home compostable" Abel & Cole plastic bag, still 100% intact, with all its writing entirely legible, still full of the potato peelings I put in there a year ago. The semi-decomposed peelings went back onto the top of the bin for another trip through - the bag went straight into the bin and off to landfill. There were two if them, and I probably have a few more to find.

Fortunately many of my work colleagues buy their lunchtime sandwiches in cute little brown paper bags, and I've trained a couple of them to pass them on to me, so I do have an endless supply of free caddy liners which actually do biodegrade.

Comments

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

Compostable plastic bags - one of the great myths of composting. Along with "egg shells make great compost" and "twigs decompose it just takes a bit longer".

[k425.livejournal.com]

Add tea-bags to that list. I gave up using tea-bags and started drinking leaf tea after I realised the bags weren't composting. They're still turning up three years later!

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I can cope with the teabags, because the innards clearly do compost, and the little bags are small enough that I'm reasonably happy to ladle compost onto the garden with them still in it and let them finish the job there. Egg shells on the other hand are a total bust and not going to rot down any time in the next century as far as I can see.

I also take a relaxed approach to twigs because twigs are a plausible part of soil.

But wine corks are surprisingly unsuccessful. Even if I haven't been fooled into putting a particularly realistic plastic one in, I still end up fishing them out of the bottom and putting them back in the top for another go.

[zengineer.livejournal.com]

Cork is basically a mixture of suberin and lignin and as peat bog archaeology attests lignin survives thousands of years in anaerobic environments and suberin is wax that ensures the inside of a cork is pretty much always anaerobic.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Corks are pretty good at the bottom of plant pots to aid drainage. They don't add weight, though, so won't help in windy conditions!

(Why yes, my pots have blown over, how did you guess?)

[jinty]

Oh dear. That's an interesting if depressing experiment in such things - useful info for my plastic-free July thoughts. Can I summarise your experience in an update on my journal? And - fancy trying the same experiment with the compostable food waste bags, by any chance?

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

Feel free - it's not a locked post. But to be fair to Abel & Cole, they did work out for themselves a while ago that this was not actually working, and have switched to regular plastic bags with an exhortation to return them for recycling. I'm still cursing them however, because the last two year's bags are still working their way through the Dalek.

The caddy liners were these things. They probably work fine in a big hot council composter, because unlike the Abel & Cole ones they do degrade noticeably, but they're noticeably slower to decompose in a home bin than the tealeaves, potato peelings, cat hair, grass clippings etc that I put in them, which makes them pretty much pointless.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

We have some enormous council composters, well anaerobic digesters, near where I work, they look very strange.
http://www.agrivert.co.uk/facilities/wallingford-ad-facility (photo on page, not very good, only shows one of them)