It's Green So It Must Be Good

Let us journey now into the dark heart of compostability. Turn not thine Eye away from thy Bagges conspiring to remain intact even once discarded in purest Earth, and despite their agreeably emerald Hue!

Last month, an Australian study found an extensive range of microplastics in industrial compost, a situation which has been confirmed several times elsewhere. The majority of these microplastics seem to originate from plastic food containers and utensils, which make sense as the most likely type of plastic to end up in commercial compost. But my garbage bags are compostable, I cry! It says so in luxurious italic script right on the carton!

For a long time now, the reassuring term of art for this kind of product was “biodegradable” plastic, which in strictest sense describes a plastic that breaks down under the biological process of microbial action. However, this often just means breaking down into microplastics faster, and the resulting microplastics are no more degradable, bio- or otherwise, than those produced by regular plastic waste.

More recently, we see plastic products marketed as “compostable,” which seems simple enough but is of course fiendishly obscure in application. Compostable plastic is a term usually applied to bio-based plastic and/or bioplastics, which are formed with the aid of corn starch, sugars, or other agricultural products. There are a number of national and international technical standards governing when a plastic may be described as compostable. Probably the most commonly referenced is the ASTM D6400, but there are several others with various trade and environmental associations covering different use cases and end states for relevant products.

The first issue here is that the majority of compostable certifications only apply to composting in industrial facilities, where standards of high temperature, aeration, and other physical characteristics can break down bioplastics much more reliably than conventional home composting. Most people don’t even have access to industrial composting, and a compostable trash bag tossed in a backyard bin may resist decay just as long as a conventionally evil plastic bag.

Not only that, but the standard of “compostable” itself does not mean your green bag is wholly constructed from a pristine bushel of corn. In fact, “bioplastic” can contain as little as 20-25% biological ingredients, with the rest being the usual polymers or other petroleum products. Under some standards, you can call something bioplastic when merely the precursor ingredients are vegetable, even if they’ve been torturously processed into something virtually indistinguishable from petroleum plastic (and which breaks down into regular ol’ microplastics). This explainer has a clear anti-bioplastics agenda but nevertheless walks through these complexities without much prejudice. And this Atlantic article points out how compostable plastic can create its own problems when disposed of in a landfill, such as producing more greenhouse gases. The few recent studies that talk about bioplastic decay mostly arrive at the conclusion that there are not enough studies, and this doesn’t even encompass the pollution or negative social impacts that bioplastic production shares with conventional plastic production.

So should you use compostable trash bags? What’s the right answer, for God’s sake? As is so common in our enlightened age, there is no Right or Good Answer, other than picking which Bad Answer you can tolerate. Your ethical mileage will certainly vary, but it seems clear that supposedly compostable plastic should not go in home compost, at least. Even my local food scrap composting facility asks citizens not to bring food waste in compostable bags, since they prevent food waste from commingling easily with yard waste, thus slowing down the overall composting process.

Producing incrementally fewer conventional microplastics feels like my personal best Bad Answer, for now. So I’m trying to use the least petroleum-y bioplastic bags I can for household trash, while harboring no illusions that I’ve net-solved any big problems. At least my home bins remain innocent of sinful plastic, or at least I can tell myself that until I get my own compost tested.

One hundred million years ago when I worked for Nick Denton at Gawker Media, I’d been recently right-sized from Gawker dot com to Valleywag, a site meant to be Gawker but for Silicon Valley. A terrible fit for all concerned, not least because I was based in New York and had little personal background knowledge of the various Valley tech-business people we were meant to gossip about. For example, I was perplexed when a giddy and conspiratorial Denton said he wanted to out Peter Thiel as gay, but he was cautious because Thiel had threatened to “destroy” him.

I was long gone when Denton got his wish, with a Valleywag post unambiguously titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” It took almost a decade but Thiel eventually and famously orchestrated the destruction of Gawker Media in revenge, not to mention nearly bankrupting Denton personally.

I wouldn’t presume to substantially grasp Denton’s mind even back when I worked for and knew him a little bit. And I have no idea what he’s been up to since. But now that he’s suddenly back to Posting, I and many other old heads were struck by his blasé-contrarian take on American politics beginning with “I mean, Thiel is right, as usual.”

Denton’s a dedicated shit-stirrer, sensationalist, and manipulator, and I doubt any of that’s changed. But just imagine giving up a “gotta hand it to em” for the seething nerd who all but ruined your life, publicly, and with great relish. And then that nerd went on to further massive success and political influence, while you languished in relative obscurity. Peter Thiel is right, as usual? Is he now.

But this was a personality management tactic I marveled at back in the day, as a provincial bumpkin freshly exposed to New York media circus chatter. It’s very Denton, and very New York, and maybe just very much a mannerism of powerful people or those who presume to power. You never cop to hating someone because that concedes they’ve gotten under your skin. You’re too big for that, even if your enemy has absolutely crushed you. It’s just business. All in the game.

I’m too small-minded and venal for such an act, and I think it looks more than a little … how to put this … performative? Maybe even anachronistic, in this age of celebratory public spite. And few people deserve spite like Peter Thiel, especially given that what he did to Denton is way, way, way down his list of sins.

And yet here I am still posting about Denton, when we were mere mutual blips in each other’s lives, years ago! Imagine granting Denton magnanimous credit for being right, about anything, if he’d done something to yours truly like Thiel did to Denton? Couldn’t be me.