The plastics industry is always coming up with bullshit initiatives to make people feel good about using plastics. First recycling, then composting. In the end, these initiatives are known to be failing.
The only way is to reuse and stop using single use items.
"Stop using single use items" is a REALLY hard goal. Outside of extreme homesteading/off-grid situations, I don't think it's actually possible. At the grocery, I can purchase some produce and dried goods (from bulk food bins) without needing single-use items. But most of my produce has stickers or rubber bands, even at the farmers market, so I still cannot avoid them.
"Grow everything yourself and never interact with society" doesn't seem like a very fulfilling life to me.
There's a difference between "stop using single-use items completely" and merely reduce their usage. There's a lot of excessive packaging in supermarkets that can be addressed without compromising usability/user-experience and ultimately reducing the plastic footprint significantly.
Most produce doesn't need stickers or rubber-bands for example, nor does it need individual packaging - the packaging can be provided at the supermarket in the form of a single plastic bag.
Living in Germany, I don't even need plastic bags - I take produce from large bins, and carry it home in my bag pack (or shopping bags if I'm out doing a week's groceries). Why do we even need single-use plastic bags at all? Supermarkets over here sell more robust, reusable shopping bags at the checkout. These are a good alternative if you forget your own.
Problem with reusable bags is that you have to have it on-hand. Fine if you plan your visit to the supermarket or have a car where you can always have a few stashed.
If you don’t have a car and only go to the supermarket occasionally on the way back from somewhere else you’re very unlikely to have a bag with you, so you end up buying the “reusable” bag every time and at this point I’ve thrown away several hundred of those over the last couple years as they accumulate at home and I have no use for them.
I’m a bit reluctant to not see how your problem could be solved with minimal planning of your shopping trips, going outside with a bag pack or having a shopping bag stuffed somewhere. It’s not that hard - this falls into the „get your adult life together“ category to me.
It’s not a problem for me, I was just making an observation that the bans on thin plastic bags may be counterproductive with some people.
Accumulating & eventually throwing away the reusable bags in bulk is a minor inconvenience compared to making sure I’ve always got one on hand which I pretty much always fail at.
We might have to train people to think about things before they do them. Or heck, even plan things ahead of time, like adding things to a shopping list instead of buying one item at a time on impulse. Though I admit this might be too radical an idea for the majority of today’s youth.
Natural rubber or synthetic? The former is biodegradable and compostable at industrial facilities. Don't put rubber in your backyard compost bin, though, even if you're 100% sure it's natural.
I agree about the little plastic stickers, though. Those are an abomination.
If anything should get compostable plastic it’s food stickers.
I used to volunteer with a group that got compost from the yard waste composting facilities in Seattle, and that stuff was full of banana and apple stickers. And that’s presumably after it had been through a screen. Microplastics or soon to be.
I don’t know what the alternative is. If you want to write your congress critter it helps if you have an alternative suggestion.
Paper stickers with a corn based glue and a bit of clay to make them shiny seems like a reasonable solution that still works with sticker guns.
Those second stickers you see the stores put on, I haven’t seen those in the compost, so I’m suspecting they either break down or compost, but the distinction is important. Invisible plastic is still plastic.
At the very least I think it's a reasonable goal to require that plastics not be used for single-use items.
Plastic is a fantastic material for reusable items of sorts, but it doesn't belong in a single-use drink cup, food container, or bag, until we have the technology to truly recycle it and the law enforcement to require that said recycling happen.
Execution is important. I've been seeing so much fuss about banning plastic straws but no fuss about the cup. I frequently see drinks in plastic cups with paper straws. Completely backwards.
Collecting rubber bands from grocery store purchases is kind of like long-term saving. You should start early and not fret about downturns (eg: the occasional one breaking from wear). If you keep a steady supply, you’ll have a healthy nest egg that you can call on when you need it.
I never understood why the stickers are usually plastic rather than paper. I'm sure there's a reason that I just don't know. It just always seemed to me that if paper is good enough for a price gun, it should be good enough for a barcode.
I have almost completely eliminated single-use plastics from my life to the point that my only non-recyclable waste output is a single half-full 20-gallon bag set out for collection approximately every three weeks.
The very few remaining items are typically cleaning supplies such as bleach and hazardous cleaning agents but for safety and hygiene purposes I do not consider those a high priority for finding non-plastic alternatives.
Please note that I do not include the several-microns-thick coating of plastic that coats the insides of some cardboard boxes and aluminum cans as "plastic output" due to its total annual weight (in my case) being less than that of a single bottle of shampoo.
For shaving I use a safety razor, whose blades come in cardboard. For shaving cream I use a puck that comes in cardboard packaging. My toothpaste comes in compressed pellets and all of my soap, even shampoo, comes in bar form. There are currently no plastic single-use items in my bathroom. Even my toilet paper is purchased in bulk, 80 rolls at a time, and comes in a large cardboard box with each roll packaged in paper. It is a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line.
Rather than paying for water most of my cleaning products are purchased in powder form, usually under a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line, in bulk. This means that yes, I do buy a 5-gallon bucket of laundry detergent but in over a year after I have finally used it all I have a reusable 5-gallon bucket that does not go into the waste stream. You can also buy items like that in cardboard boxes lined with a plastic liner but even then the volume of plastic is, after many years, less than that of a single plastic laundry detergent container which only lasts months.
Even cleaning products that, again for health and safety reasons, come in plastic containers I buy them in bulk, dispensing them into reusable (and much higher quality) applicators. This means that the (realistically) unavoidable use of plastics is minimized. The amount of plastic used in a single 128-ounce bulk "industrial" cleaning bottle is less than that used in 4 32-ounce (typical sized) bottles and the reusable (again, "industrial") spray bottles I use to apply the product last for years if not decades.
For food items I typically do not buy anything that comes in plastic with the main exception being sliced bread, but again that volume of plastic is so low it is almost irrelevant. When I realized that I was throwing away ~30 plastic yogurt containers per month I started making yogurt myself in an instant pot and storing the yogurt in glass jars. Doing so requires almost no effort-- the instant pot does it for you. I've been doing this since 2011 with the same jars, which will probably last another 100 years, so I have not thrown away over 4,000 yogurt containers.
In your example, the rubber bands and stickers are irrelevant. Years, if not decades, of rubber (assuming you mean synthetic rubber, natural rubber is fine and will biodegrade) bands and stickers add up to a single bottle of dish soap's worth of plastic.
Plastic is a wonderful material but it is immoral, to me, to use it without foresight of its impact and costs.
It requires effort, but is not "hard". Effort does not equal "hard".
My anti-plastic crusade started because I live on the Chesapeake Bay and became involved in Bay cleanup initiatives about a decade ago. I'd say 9 out of every 10 items I recovered were plastic items, some from as far away as New York State, having floated for hundreds of miles down the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers.
Since the move from single use plastic bags to reusable ones, my environmental impact has increased.
Firstly I now have to buy garbage bags, where I previously reused shopping bags. That completely negates the benefit. But let’s ignore that and say most people just trash them.
Even in that case you’d have to reuse a reusable bag 20 times to break even. I don’t know about you, but on average maybe I get 0-5 reuses out of these bags. That’s just squarely worse off than we were before.
I just reuse my "disposable" bags anyway, like ziplocks and stuff. I agree the fancy "reusable" plastic bags are pretty much junk (when storing food, like lunch items). It does make sense using the reusable grocery bags, though. Those things last a long time and don't get gross inside.
I'm waiting for someone to invent the re-usable dog-poop bag. ;)
I think it depends that you're reusing them for. I bought some of those "Stasher" branded reusable plastic bags for lunch things, they got gross pretty quickly, hard to wash, and then they started coming apart at the seems. Pretty dumb optimization, considering they cost $15 for three bags. My grocery bags, though, for loading up at the store are good, and last a long time.
There are reusable bags that are fairly durable. I bought one in Mexico, I think its woven plastic. Not cheap thin plastic by any means. I bought it from Bodega Aurrerá which is owned by Walmart de México y Centroamérica. The bag is labeled 100% recyclable. I've been using it for eleven months, so far it has a one 2 cm cut in the bottom of it. It is still very useable.
>A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to a classic supermarket plastic bag that's reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. (If that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times, with the report assuming a lower yield but the same input of raw materials.)
Hey if you've been using the same bag for a shopping trip every day, for all that time and never replaced it or got another, and it wasn't organic, you're almost halfway to having a smaller environmental impact than just using single use plastic bags all that time.
This of course isn't accurate. The original study had a few assumptions which led to this high number, but those assumptions aren't accurate for many even in Denmark, much less throughout the rest of the world. This is a pretty good read about it - https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s...
So you'd need to reuse a cotton bage 70-1000 times most likely to come out ahead. Or you could reuse cotton you already have and lower that number to effectively 0.
We definitely reuse bags more than twenty times. At the grocery store, one of the bags I use is from a trip I think I took almost a decade ago. Or another from my kids orthodontist, and he is in college now. You are probably not getting very good quality bags.
You buy strong canvas grocery bags. Don't attempt to put so much in each one that they literally structurally fail. Wash them if they get dirty. They last indefinitely.
Shopping bags were always terrible garbage bags able to hold only tiny amounts of trash meaning you had to use a ton of them and as many as you needed the average household received 100x as many bags as they could profitably use as trash bags. Consider throwing everything wet into centrally located large trash receptacles with large bags and either not lining small trash cans or lining them with paper bags.
Because consumer marketing now thinks only recycling makes them money.
In the Great Depression and then during several nostalgia cycles after, companies sold products in or with reusable containers. Everything from tins to depression glass was a value add for the products. Your grandma may still be keeping sewing supplies in old cookie tins, reusing Ball jars that food came in, etc.
True. Almost all talk of plastic packaging waste is a (deliberate?) distraction from larger issues. e.g. buying a new car will generate more plastic and other waste than a lifetime of plastic bags and utensils.
"Compostable" plastics are a polymer made of lactic acid units chained together called PLA. It is absolutely compostable, but needs specific conditions. In nature it breaks down very much faster than other plastics and in pure form at least, though it still lasts a while. Because it's lactic acid and animals are already full of lactic acid, the concerns about polluting the environment with it are much lower.
It sounds like the recycler they're using only has the correct facilities to process some but not all of these PLA plastics and are having contamination problems with people putting non-compostable things in along with the compostable ones.
They're also refusing used coffee filters so it seems the problem isn't plastic industry scams but poor compliance with people putting the wrong things in the compost bin.
I've known several well intentioned but slightly clueless people who put just about anything in the recycling or compost not realizing that they were just contaminating the stream and making things much worse. It's almost the opposite where recycling/composting proponents are giving and getting wrong impressions about how much really needs to be put in the landfill.
I use paper filters, and unbleached if I can get them. I’m not convinced that all of the tea bags we get are plastic free. In fact some fancy tea we tried definitely was in a plastic bag. I got us interested in other teas ASAP. I wonder if there are coffee filters loaded with plastic out there.
Coffee is wonderful on its own for composting. It’s very nearly the correct C:N ratio just by itself.
A lot of Keurig pods claim to be compostable, with the caveat that it depends on your local services. I'm sure many folks don't bother looking up what composting services are available.
I wish we would just refuse to recycle to push for reuse.
Reuse could actually work. If we were to standardize on thicker plastics, that could last longer, we could just have like 10-20 standard container sizes and constantly reuse them.
I expect this to be the start of a trend based on my own personal experience. I bought some "compostable" bags for my kitchen scrap bin that I would then dump in my outdoor composter. Six months later when I went to get my compost, large pieces of bag not only remained but had harded into solid chunks. Took an hour to sift out the chunks from the compost.
Edit: turns out I was ignorant of how they actually work.
A good rule of thumb is that truly compostable bags are almost completely useless as bags in the real world. They're just barely good enough to carry the scraps from the kitchen to the compost bin but they won't work as a liner for more than a few hours in the presence of moisture.
The normal way people solve this is with materials that require a small amount of heat to break down in addition to moisture. Industrial composting facilities run at 120-140F.
But yes, these don't break down with home composting which is almost always much lower temperature.
How large is your composter? Many of the "bio-plastics" require high heat composting to decompose, and even then may require a large amount of time. Unless you've got a massive compost pile with adequate aeration and turning, almost no bio-plastics will truly decompose at home.
From the EPA[0]:
> If a plastic product is labeled “compostable,” can I add it to my home compost pile?
> No. Unless the label indicates that the product is okay for home composting, you should not try to compost it at home. Plastic that is labeled as compostable is generally intended to be sent to an industrial or commercial composting facility which has higher temperatures and different breakdown conditions than those found in a typical homeowner’s compost bin. If your community has a residential compost collection program, check with your local government or recycling company to find out if they will accept compostable plastic under this program.
I thought compostable plastic bags only worked in commercial composters? I probably wouldn't use those in a home situation. But your home situation, you're kind of lucky, because you can just go dump the bin in your compost pile at anytime, and aren't waiting for a pickup or anything.
Yes, during warmer months I just food scraps into my tumbler and I put yard waste in a separate setup. However, during the winter the tumbler ices up and opening it becomes a process.
What happened to plasma gasifiers? I kept reading about them years ago and I thought New York City had ordered some, but haven't seen them in the news since.
Molten Salt Oxidation. "Burn" plastic (and everything else) in a bath of red-hot liquid salt. Exothermic reaction. Produces "synthesis gas". It's used to dispose of munitions and DDT and shi-- stuff like that.
Even if these compostable service items can’t be composted at least they would degrade in the environment, right? There is no real issue with landfill space. True problem is lots stuff never makes it to the landfill.
This is not obviously a good thing. Landfill space is plentiful, and many plastics are quite stable in landfills and lock up their carbon content. But things that decay are likely to emit methane and CO2.
IMO the biggest benefit of compostable materials in food service is that they have a decent chance of eventually degrading to safe materials if they end up outside a landfill.
I imagine it depends on what happens to them. They’re largely made out of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, in a fairly high energy state. If they turn into microbe food in an aerobic environment, they probably turn into CO2 and H2O. In an anaerobic environment, they could turn into all manner of chemicals.
When organic mass is sent to the landfill instead of being composted, it decomposes without oxygen, buried in the fill. Anaerobic digestion produces methane, while aerobic digestion only produces carbon dioxide. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Yes, if your landfill doesn't make any attempt to capture methane. Modern landfills, however, generally do, and this can be much cheaper than running a separate collection and handling system for compost.
The captured methane can either be flared off, or used as a fuel.
Fair point, and I think most of the older fills at the Denver/Arapahoe site have flares retrofitted. Composting also produces agricultural substrate, but whether or not large-scale industrial composting of single-use products is a net benefit is definitely debatable. I think there’s a clearer benefit to composting your own food waste, which is generally very practical if you have a bit of space.
> Even if these compostable service items can’t be composted at least they would degrade in the environment, right?
No, most don't.
I was flabbergasted when I discovered this. Until recently I thought "biodegradable" and "compostable" meant that the item would degrade naturally in the "biosphere". In other words if you put it outside and came back in a decade, it would be mostly gone.
Instead what happened is the plastics industry managed convinced politicians to redefine those terms to mean "will degrade in an industrial composter". Turns out the industrial composter's they had in mind used high temperatures, and a very specific mix of chemicals to break down the plastic. Quoting https://theconversation.com/t-156566 :
> But most certified compostable plastics are only for industrial composts, which reach very high temperatures. This means they’re unlikely to break down sufficiently in home composts. Even those certified as “home compostable” are assessed under perfect lab conditions, which aren’t easily achieved in the backyard.
It appears to me the plastics industry solved the environmental image problem by getting the legal meanings of "compostable" and "biodegradable" redefined to mean "there exists some industrial process converting the material into something biosphere can consume". All they have to do to get earn the right to stamp their products as "biodegradable" is pay some industrial chemists to create an process that transforms their product into something a plant can use.
But as far I can tell it doesn't mean they have to actually do any composting in practice. In fact doing it seems unlikely because there are already lots of very cheap ways to produce compost that don't need an industrial plant or lots of energy (heat). Which they've solved their image problem with a small one off cost - no need for any costly collection or recycling efforts. And no need to actually reduce the environmental impacts of plastic pollution either.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadThe only way is to reuse and stop using single use items.
"Grow everything yourself and never interact with society" doesn't seem like a very fulfilling life to me.
Most produce doesn't need stickers or rubber-bands for example, nor does it need individual packaging - the packaging can be provided at the supermarket in the form of a single plastic bag.
> The only way is to reuse and stop using single use items.
If you don’t have a car and only go to the supermarket occasionally on the way back from somewhere else you’re very unlikely to have a bag with you, so you end up buying the “reusable” bag every time and at this point I’ve thrown away several hundred of those over the last couple years as they accumulate at home and I have no use for them.
That can‘t be too hard and you should be able to figure that out without wasting several hundred reusable bags
Accumulating & eventually throwing away the reusable bags in bulk is a minor inconvenience compared to making sure I’ve always got one on hand which I pretty much always fail at.
Natural rubber or synthetic? The former is biodegradable and compostable at industrial facilities. Don't put rubber in your backyard compost bin, though, even if you're 100% sure it's natural.
I agree about the little plastic stickers, though. Those are an abomination.
I used to volunteer with a group that got compost from the yard waste composting facilities in Seattle, and that stuff was full of banana and apple stickers. And that’s presumably after it had been through a screen. Microplastics or soon to be.
I don’t know what the alternative is. If you want to write your congress critter it helps if you have an alternative suggestion.
And I guess there are edible inks (which at least offers the opportunity to remove the plastic, even if it still off putting).
Those second stickers you see the stores put on, I haven’t seen those in the compost, so I’m suspecting they either break down or compost, but the distinction is important. Invisible plastic is still plastic.
It sounds like a great life to me... but not very realistic in this day and age.
Plastic is a fantastic material for reusable items of sorts, but it doesn't belong in a single-use drink cup, food container, or bag, until we have the technology to truly recycle it and the law enforcement to require that said recycling happen.
Execution is important. I've been seeing so much fuss about banning plastic straws but no fuss about the cup. I frequently see drinks in plastic cups with paper straws. Completely backwards.
The very few remaining items are typically cleaning supplies such as bleach and hazardous cleaning agents but for safety and hygiene purposes I do not consider those a high priority for finding non-plastic alternatives.
Please note that I do not include the several-microns-thick coating of plastic that coats the insides of some cardboard boxes and aluminum cans as "plastic output" due to its total annual weight (in my case) being less than that of a single bottle of shampoo.
For shaving I use a safety razor, whose blades come in cardboard. For shaving cream I use a puck that comes in cardboard packaging. My toothpaste comes in compressed pellets and all of my soap, even shampoo, comes in bar form. There are currently no plastic single-use items in my bathroom. Even my toilet paper is purchased in bulk, 80 rolls at a time, and comes in a large cardboard box with each roll packaged in paper. It is a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line.
Rather than paying for water most of my cleaning products are purchased in powder form, usually under a recognizable brand's "Industrial" product line, in bulk. This means that yes, I do buy a 5-gallon bucket of laundry detergent but in over a year after I have finally used it all I have a reusable 5-gallon bucket that does not go into the waste stream. You can also buy items like that in cardboard boxes lined with a plastic liner but even then the volume of plastic is, after many years, less than that of a single plastic laundry detergent container which only lasts months.
Even cleaning products that, again for health and safety reasons, come in plastic containers I buy them in bulk, dispensing them into reusable (and much higher quality) applicators. This means that the (realistically) unavoidable use of plastics is minimized. The amount of plastic used in a single 128-ounce bulk "industrial" cleaning bottle is less than that used in 4 32-ounce (typical sized) bottles and the reusable (again, "industrial") spray bottles I use to apply the product last for years if not decades.
For food items I typically do not buy anything that comes in plastic with the main exception being sliced bread, but again that volume of plastic is so low it is almost irrelevant. When I realized that I was throwing away ~30 plastic yogurt containers per month I started making yogurt myself in an instant pot and storing the yogurt in glass jars. Doing so requires almost no effort-- the instant pot does it for you. I've been doing this since 2011 with the same jars, which will probably last another 100 years, so I have not thrown away over 4,000 yogurt containers.
In your example, the rubber bands and stickers are irrelevant. Years, if not decades, of rubber (assuming you mean synthetic rubber, natural rubber is fine and will biodegrade) bands and stickers add up to a single bottle of dish soap's worth of plastic.
Plastic is a wonderful material but it is immoral, to me, to use it without foresight of its impact and costs.
It requires effort, but is not "hard". Effort does not equal "hard".
My anti-plastic crusade started because I live on the Chesapeake Bay and became involved in Bay cleanup initiatives about a decade ago. I'd say 9 out of every 10 items I recovered were plastic items, some from as far away as New York State, having floated for hundreds of miles down the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers.
As consumer there are only limited ways you can reduce single use. We need to change the economics so excessive packaging is too expensive.
Firstly I now have to buy garbage bags, where I previously reused shopping bags. That completely negates the benefit. But let’s ignore that and say most people just trash them.
Even in that case you’d have to reuse a reusable bag 20 times to break even. I don’t know about you, but on average maybe I get 0-5 reuses out of these bags. That’s just squarely worse off than we were before.
I'm waiting for someone to invent the re-usable dog-poop bag. ;)
I’ve had the same reusable bags for probably 5 years now and not a single one has failed.
As in all things, moderation, do the 80% etc...
Hey if you've been using the same bag for a shopping trip every day, for all that time and never replaced it or got another, and it wasn't organic, you're almost halfway to having a smaller environmental impact than just using single use plastic bags all that time.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/world/cotton-tote-vs-plastic-...
So you'd need to reuse a cotton bage 70-1000 times most likely to come out ahead. Or you could reuse cotton you already have and lower that number to effectively 0.
Sure if you got random cardboard one it won't be that great
Shopping bags were always terrible garbage bags able to hold only tiny amounts of trash meaning you had to use a ton of them and as many as you needed the average household received 100x as many bags as they could profitably use as trash bags. Consider throwing everything wet into centrally located large trash receptacles with large bags and either not lining small trash cans or lining them with paper bags.
TLDR buy better bags and use small paper bags.
In the Great Depression and then during several nostalgia cycles after, companies sold products in or with reusable containers. Everything from tins to depression glass was a value add for the products. Your grandma may still be keeping sewing supplies in old cookie tins, reusing Ball jars that food came in, etc.
It sounds like the recycler they're using only has the correct facilities to process some but not all of these PLA plastics and are having contamination problems with people putting non-compostable things in along with the compostable ones.
They're also refusing used coffee filters so it seems the problem isn't plastic industry scams but poor compliance with people putting the wrong things in the compost bin.
I've known several well intentioned but slightly clueless people who put just about anything in the recycling or compost not realizing that they were just contaminating the stream and making things much worse. It's almost the opposite where recycling/composting proponents are giving and getting wrong impressions about how much really needs to be put in the landfill.
I live with people who keep putting soiled cardboard in recycling. Only last year did I win the war on pizza boxes.
In general coffee grounds should be compost. Maybe people were trying to compost whole coffee kureg pods or something?
Coffee is wonderful on its own for composting. It’s very nearly the correct C:N ratio just by itself.
Reuse could actually work. If we were to standardize on thicker plastics, that could last longer, we could just have like 10-20 standard container sizes and constantly reuse them.
Edit: turns out I was ignorant of how they actually work.
But yes, these don't break down with home composting which is almost always much lower temperature.
From the EPA[0]:
> If a plastic product is labeled “compostable,” can I add it to my home compost pile?
> No. Unless the label indicates that the product is okay for home composting, you should not try to compost it at home. Plastic that is labeled as compostable is generally intended to be sent to an industrial or commercial composting facility which has higher temperatures and different breakdown conditions than those found in a typical homeowner’s compost bin. If your community has a residential compost collection program, check with your local government or recycling company to find out if they will accept compostable plastic under this program.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/trash-free-waters/frequently-asked-quest...
Perhaps the labeling you saw was intended to be about use, but it looked like it was about disposal?
IMO the biggest benefit of compostable materials in food service is that they have a decent chance of eventually degrading to safe materials if they end up outside a landfill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogenesis
The captured methane can either be flared off, or used as a fuel.
No, most don't.
I was flabbergasted when I discovered this. Until recently I thought "biodegradable" and "compostable" meant that the item would degrade naturally in the "biosphere". In other words if you put it outside and came back in a decade, it would be mostly gone.
Instead what happened is the plastics industry managed convinced politicians to redefine those terms to mean "will degrade in an industrial composter". Turns out the industrial composter's they had in mind used high temperatures, and a very specific mix of chemicals to break down the plastic. Quoting https://theconversation.com/t-156566 :
> But most certified compostable plastics are only for industrial composts, which reach very high temperatures. This means they’re unlikely to break down sufficiently in home composts. Even those certified as “home compostable” are assessed under perfect lab conditions, which aren’t easily achieved in the backyard.
It appears to me the plastics industry solved the environmental image problem by getting the legal meanings of "compostable" and "biodegradable" redefined to mean "there exists some industrial process converting the material into something biosphere can consume". All they have to do to get earn the right to stamp their products as "biodegradable" is pay some industrial chemists to create an process that transforms their product into something a plant can use.
But as far I can tell it doesn't mean they have to actually do any composting in practice. In fact doing it seems unlikely because there are already lots of very cheap ways to produce compost that don't need an industrial plant or lots of energy (heat). Which they've solved their image problem with a small one off cost - no need for any costly collection or recycling efforts. And no need to actually reduce the environmental impacts of plastic pollution either.
What's reason for that ?