The Biodegradable fallacy

When my girlfriend Bree and I were living together in 1987, we had a bright idea:  why mess around with the labor of composting?  We had a huge garden, and everything that went into the compost was biodegradable.  Why not compost the way nature does?  So we did what seemed to make sense:  we started tossing our food waste directly into the yard, beneath our fruit trees, beneath shrubs, in amongst the herbs. Soon our garden was littered with orange and banana peels, lettuce ends, apple cores, and other detritus from our kitchen.

We learned a few things over the year that we ran this experiment.  We learned that without a moist anaerobic environment, vegetable matter dries out and degrades very slowly.  We learned that even natural matter scattered around the garden looks like trash – we noticed it, and the neighbors complained.  Above all, we learned that “biodegradable” does not mean it’s ok to throw it in random parts of the yard, and that yes, there is a reason to go through the little bit of effort  necessary to accelerate decomposition through proper composting.

Which brings me to the topic of today.  Ever since the advent of the compostable coffee cup, there seems to be an uptick in the amount of coffee cups dumped on the side of the road.  I second guessed this observation for months, but when the cups started to pile up in certain areas, it became evident that one or more somebodies had fallen prey to the same fallacy that I had decades before: that “biodegradable” or “compostable” means it’s ok to just drop the cup in the dirt on the side of the road, and that nature would take care of disposal. 

I ran into the same fallacy this week in South Lake Union when I came across a mall pile of discarded containers in the gravel near Whole Foods.  I picked them up and, sure enough, they all had the word “compostable” printed on them. 

Folks, these are not leaves decomposing on the forest floor.  They are man-made artifacts that are designed to break down when shredded and mixed with a bacterial slurry in a composting facility.  When they disappear from where you left them, it does not mean that nature has taken its course.  It means that somebody with more common sense than you has picked them up and disposed of them properly, one piece at a time.