You may have seen a message like this before:
This brings up all sorts of questions.
What is that?
Where do I find one?
What’s the difference between that and my compost pile or tumbler.
Understanding what an industrial composting facility is and how it works is critical to understanding how to properly dispose of compostable plastics. These products need a very specific set of conditions in order to break down, otherwise they will just sit for decades and do anyone any good at all.
So what makes them different? There are a few pieces to this answer but it really all starts with heat.
A well built, well managed compost pile will start to produce heat as micro organisms begin to break down and digest the organic material you’ve fed to your pile. As the pile heats up, it becomes a hospitable environment for more and more types of bacterial. This continues until it peaks out around 140-160 degrees.
Over the course of a few months, the heat inside the pile, and the bacterial activity begin to break down material at an astonishing rate, and it will begin to break down compostable plastics… along with most other things.
To get a pile that hot and stay hot for months, you generally need to build a pile that is at least 6 feet high and 4 ft wide. Not something every home composter can do. Second, it needs to be turned frequently to infuse enough oxygen to keep the compost engine burning. Oxygen+Fuel= Heat. It usually takes specialized equipment to turn that much waste.
If you can imagine a pile of food and garden waste piled as high as a small building
It can be done at home, but it is difficult. It’s likely that just the very center of your pile would be hot enough to break down compostable plastics, and it might not be hot enough for long enough.
The sustainment of these conditions allows composting facilities to take on a lot more waste by volume. But it also means that they can take on many more materials. Things that are notoriously difficult to compost at home have not trouble here.
Generally, these facilities can take. Meat, Dairy, Bones, compostable plastics, and paper products.