Can you imagine what actually gets into compost

If the dish cloth is natural fabric it will break down
The stickers will have non natural products on them so not likely to break down for a few hundred years.
Everything breaks down eventually and as long as its not big quantities it's not gonna make much difference unless its like plastic bottles etc which I'm sure get sorted out first.

sullivlo wrote: »

Why do we need stickers on our apples?

Well they are edible

Plastic the marvelous invention (really only been in widespread use 50-70 years?) and the bane of the future (and now as is seen in the seas)

the city where I live atm (not in Ireland) is very keen on organic waste because they built a plant which produces gas with this organic household waste. they also sell the compost which is left as the end product.


but I always ask myself, it's the 'perfect way' to spread fine plastic particles into private gardens all over the region here. because when I look into the green bin people throw their organic waste in there in plastic bags... it's all so stupid..

I think plastic is so cheap for companies to buy that it's value is actually negative. They must be getting paid money to take the raw material off the oil producer's hands.

So you see companies coming up with ever new creative ways of hiding more plastic into the things people are buying

There are the remains of an old estate house near here. The house is gone since the sixties and the once grand gardens are long since returned back to agriculture. Afaik the site has been in continuous habitation for at least 600 years. First as a tower house, then an Elizabethan manor and finally as an mid Victorian pile. The farm yards are still in existence. The peculiar thing is that the detrius of all those centuries of occupation are still very much evident in the soil. Old bottles, bits of china, metal etc. I have came across broken bits of potery from the the late 1700s to the 1800s just poking up out of the soil.. and all this in addition to the fact that the soil is almost black from the constant addition of organic matter over hundreds of years.

Now go to any old house - even modest ones and in the days before refuse disposal - rubbish was buried or discarded in garden middens or wherever. This could include just about anything including old glass bottles, bones, nails, delph, bits of tile, you name it. Human and animal waste was also land spread. Bits of machinery got buried or were left to rot where they were abandoned.

Go further back into medieval times and archaeological sites are a wealth of abandoned detritus and human waste which archaeologists have a field day over.

Go back further and even stone age humans and neantherals dropped the things they used in everyday life in the very places where they lived.

Our modern habits only differ in the huge amounts of waste collected centrally and disposed in landfills and the materials now being included such as plastics and the separation of human waste which now is dealt with as sewage. Otherwise we continue to do what humans have been doing for an awfully long time.

And no that is not an excuse of this behaviour. Just that we appear to have changed very little as a species over time.

Briggs Mushy Gooseberry wrote: »

Tea bags are compostable.

yes but they take an extraordinary amount of time to actually break down. they are still visible in a compost heap for 6 months or more

Problem Of Motivation wrote: »

What's that? I didn't get much when I looked it up!

Delft. a kind of pottery which takes its name from a town in Holland.

suicide_circus wrote: »

what kind of a depraved degenerate psychopath puts plastic in the brown bin?

haha, psychopaths...bit harsh. but I don't get it either if you're that caring to seperate rubbish and have an extra bin for organic waste in the kitchen, why then throw it in the brown bin with a plastic bag?? Brains go into shut down when throwing out the waste or what...??.:P:P

The post from the OP, illustrates how difficult it is to compost, or recycle effectively, there is always something that manages to get through. It's difficult enough when you are trying to do it properly, but the damage being done by people who don't give a damn, must be massive.

I have been a regular re-cycler (if that's a word) at several council depots over my lifetime and as far as I can see, a lot of people just use the facilities as a dump, simply pouring in filthy and mixed material items at will, and apparently without any consequence. I have never seen anyone asked to remove dirty or unsuitable items and yet I am aware of how precise you have to be with what you attempt to recycle. I often wonder if my efforts are constantly negated by the next person dumping filthy crap into the cages.

I have also never seen anyone being told to pre-crush cans and save on transport, or being told that there are specific types of plastic that can not be recycled in this country. The truth is that our recycle 'industry' is based and paid/subsidised on bulk weight statistics and no one is particularly interested in doing it efficiently or effectively.

Local re-cycle and compost operations need to be taken out of private and even council responsibility and dealt with on a serious level by a national and co-ordinated authority.

We have declared an emergency, we are doing really badly, what are we going to change?.... apart from taxes???? Maybe if we did the job properly by banning the importation of unsuitable packaging and then effectively re-cycling what actually can be dealt with, we might make more progress than simply constantly hitting the people at the bottom of the chain with paying for all the responsibility.

The creation of a waste 'industry'has created a monster that needs us to keep doing things badly, to survive. If we did re-cycle properly and work as a national priority to reduce potential contamination, then our friends in big business would be out of business. All I hear and see are add campaigns by industry representative bodies and associated vested interests (thinly disguised as public minded info campaigns) telling us to carry on and recycle more.

If we were doing it right we should be telling people how to reduce the need to recycle in the first place and how to recycle properly so that we recover more usable material. But that doesn't suit the current agenda where re-cycle success is based on bulk weight of crap shipped off to anywhere in the far east.

A national emergency should be directly managed by a national and accountable body. Our future can not be trusted to commercial interests, particularly with our history of not regulating effectively in this country and all the complicated and ineffective oversight layers we put in place to deflect responsibility. Give the job to someone that wants to do it, with legal clout and environmental and social motivation.