Composting doesn’t have to be complicated. But it can be once you start digging into companies that market consumer products like bags, cups and plateware as compostable or biodegradable.
Enter the Hippo Sak, a compostable bag so advertised by the Huntington Park-company Crown Poly. They appeared on my radar when a reader sent managing editor, Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, a pack after writing how she’d briefly “quit composting” under the city of San Diego’s new food waste recycling program.
The company’s website says the Hippo Sak boasts compostability (I’m making that a word) certifications from U.S. and European organizations. Lori Greiner from Shark Tank even created an Instagram video advertising the “silky softness” of Hippo Saks, sold at Trader Joes.
I dug deeper – not literally into Lopez-Villafaña’s compost bin per se — but into Crown Poly’s description that their product breaks down both in at-home and commercial composting systems. Turns out, it can be hard to verify. BPI, of International Biodegradable Products Institute, which calls itself the leading authority on compostable packaging in North America, certified Hippo Sak as compostable in commercial facilities or large-scale composting sites like the one at the Otay Mesa Landfill. A company representative told me they couldn’t share any research or test results due to confidentiality agreements with companies. TUV Austria, which certified Hippo Sak as compostable in at-home piles, didn’t respond to my inquiry in time for this article.
“I always wonder what these certifications mean because a lot of this isn’t super regulated yet,” said Jennifer Brandon, a plastics expert who now owns her owns consulting firm that helps businesses meet sustainability goals. (She published a study while at Scripps Institution of Oceanography showing mini-microplastics were very likely undercounted by the millions as they made their way into gelatinous filter-feeding ocean invertebrates called salps.)
Consumers need to pay attention to the terms companies use, Brandon said. Biodegradable and compostable are commonly used interchangeably but mean two different things. The former means a product will naturally break down into carbon and other elements without any help – think tossing an apple core in the dirt. Plastics made of oil, gas or fossil fuels will basically never biodegrade. They may break down into smaller pieces, aka microplastics, but these plastics are so processed and their carbon bonds so old, they almost never break down, Brandon said.
Then there’s the brave new world of plant-based, otherwise dubbed, compostable plastics.
“That gets really messy because some are 100 percent plant-based, made of corn or seaweed, and they should be biodegradable,” Brandon said. “Some are only 50 percent plant and 50 percent petroleum-based plastic. A part of it will never break down.”
The Crown Poly website says its Hippo Saks are made from 100 percent vegetable starches. Corn starch, to be exact, Cathy Browne, general manager during Crown Poly’s 33-year history, told me. The company sells bags of many types, including ones containing recycled ocean plastics and natural gas instead of crude oil – still a fossil fuel but, yes, with a lower carbon content.
“We try to be very sustainable,” Browne said. “One of our goals as a company is that every one of our bags has some component of recycled material to reduce the use of virgin materials.”
She said their compostable bags should degrade in both at-home and commercial composters in less than 180 days. Their produce bags, in under 90 days. Still, that’s definitely more time than it takes an apple core to decompose. Other starch-based bags in a large study tested by the Plastic Pollution Coalition reduced to mere visible shreds after 64 days.
Here’s the kicker – even if HippoSak has a truly compostable product, the city of San Diego doesn’t want them going in green bins. Why? The city doesn’t consider them to be compostable at all.
Kelly Terry, a spokesperson for the city’s Environmental Services Department, wrote in an email that products labeled “compostable” do not all break down the same way, so the Miramar Greenery composting facility cannot accept these items.
When they do end up at the Miramar Greenery, a part of the Miramar landfill repurposed for composting the city’s food waste, they “cause contamination and diminish the quality of the finished compost,” she wrote.
“All plastic bags labeled compostable or biodegradable should be placed in the trash bin,” Terry wrote.
But Browne said some cities, like San Francisco, have been collecting them for years. Why? I don’t know. Tune in some other time for more greenwashing investigation.
In Other News
- Look up tonight, it’s a super-blue-full moon. That’s when the moon is closest to the Earth and a full moon, the third of four full moons in one season. (NPR)
- Desperate for justice, San Diego keeps blaming the U.S. federal government for Tijuana sewage spilling over the border. And the feds keep saying, it’s not our fault. Why we continue to ignore the source of the stink. (Voice of San Diego)
- The Colorado River’s biggest single user – farmers in Imperial Valley – made another agreement with the federal government to cut their take of the overused, threatened river for the next two years, with help from San Diego. (Voice of San Diego)
- What remains of San Diego’s commercial fishing wharf near Point Loma enters its twilight as the Port of San Diego prepares to assume control of the facility. (Union-Tribune)
- Survivors of San Diego’s record-breaking Jan. 22 flood still struggle to find affordable rentals after floodwaters washed-out properties they owned or rented. (KPBS)
Sacramento has the same program as SD, yet there you can place the compostable bags in the the green bin. Why can they make it work and SD is not able to?
All these companies are trying to sell their product. There is a big difference from “degrading” after six months and completely decomposed. And even if one company could figure it out, how do you get 1.4 million people to use that one brand of bag?
Not putting any type of plastic bag in the green bin is not that difficult. It makes for a cleaner compost, which I use on my property.
If someone still thinks it is a good idea, they should leave some of the “compostable bags” in their yard and let them do their thing and report back to VOSD.
Thank you for the your hard work providing this important information.
As you point out the answers aren’t really known as a practical matter to the issues you address.
An even bigger question regarding plastic bags, to my knowledge, relates to whether prohibitions over the last decade actually work. There are two issues. One is whether the amount of plastic waste from bags has declined since imposing various bans.
The other is whether the diversion of cardboard for use as boxes that consumers are given, e.g., at Costco, has meant that the ban on plastic bags is a net negative for overall recycling goals, cardboard being one of the most easily recycled items out there in general use.
So much to know. So little government transparency in regard to the real world impact of environmental laws.
Please keep up the good work on these issues.
EDCO in Escondido uses a digestor for green waste. It’s a different process than composting and the methane produced by the digestor is used to run their trucks. No compostable plastic bags or any plastic bags allowed. Paper Bags are ok. An additional story on this topic might be interesting to your north county readers.
No big deal to me. As long as SD has this policy, very few people will use their green bins for anything other than yard waste. There is a very simple solution of course but way too complex for the government employees to implement. Simply provide people with a specific compostable bag that is acceptable to them or allow people to order them from a city website. Way too complicated for government employees so it will never happen. I know some organizations that were onboard with green bins for some time that just stopped using those due to the problems with stink, flies, and other bugs. It was a nice idea but implementation in San Diego was obviously not very good.
As I see it. We need federal standards on what is and is not compostable. And to eliminate plastics which by their makeup, are either not recyclable or too expensive to recycle.
Force manufacturers to only use an easily recyclable range of plastics and non plastic items which can be composted.
Encourage this by setting a “Non recyclable/compostable tax on each item. Manufacturer will pay the tax to the state before the items are sold. They get their money back from the item’s sale.
Nothing works faster then when you take a manufacturer’s money.