Do you compost "plastic-free" plastic wrapping, marked as "home compostable"?

Fire

Natoora say they use  'plastic free packaging'.

"We have developed our own revolutionary packaging which is entirely plastic-free and home disposable. Each of our recyclable cardboard punnets is flow-wrapped with home-compostable film which, unlike traditional plastic flow-wrap, disintegrates within 180 days."

They encourage customers to treat the wrapping "like orange peel".

I cannot see any detail of what it's made of. It's generally pretty hard to find out exactly what film packaging is made of, so, often we have to make choices without this information.

If you have home composting systems do you add "plastic-free plastic" to yours?

Lyn

Yes , although I’ve only just come across something like that that says compostable, we had a cake and coffee out somewhere last week and the cake forks and cups said compostable,  they looked like ordinary plastics to me but I’ve put them on the compost and will wait and see.
I also have a pack of toilet rolls in a plastic compostable wrapper, will try that soon. 

Nanny Beach

no

It goes in the council recycling bin

steephill

No, I used to use so-called compostable plastic bags for my kitchen waste bin. Years later they are still intact in one of my daleks. Maybe if you had a very large hot heap they might degrade.

Singing Gardener

no

I did when I first came across them but they didn't disintegrate so now I put them in the council garden bin instead.

JennyJ

no

I've tried it (with the magazine wrappers that are supposed to be compostable) and found them un-composted when I turn the heap. I suspect they need a much higher temperature than my small domestic bins reach, or a longer time than the other stuff that I compost. Either way, it doesn't work for me.

philippasmith2

No  but only because I haven't yet come across the one described.
I compost anything I can so I'd be more than willing to try anything which said it was possible.

Fire

There are other threads here that have discussed the wide array of language that describes packing that are 'compostable', home compostable', 'bio-degradable etc', all labels that usually don't describe exactly what they mean by it.

Digging more into Natoora, in particular, I find that they use a film made by Tipa. Tipa don't seem to say what the components are (a big trade secret, I would imagine). But they do say

"....In order to create packaging with the complex qualities of high-performing flexible plastic packaging, our products are made partially from fossil-fuel based polymers..."

I don't know about manufacturing plastics, but "fossil-fuel based polymers" would seem to be regular plastic, made, as normal, from oil.

The word 'polymer' just means "a substance which has a molecular structure built up chiefly or completely from a large number of similar units bonded together". I suppose the question is what happens to the units as they break down?

Fire

The key phrase here is "home compostable", which would seem to me to me to suggest that you don't need high heat or special processing for the film to break down.

Fire

steephill said:

No, I used to use so-called compostable plastic bags for my kitchen waste bin. Years later they are still intact in one of my daleks. Maybe if you had a very large hot heap they might degrade.

"Compostable plastic" is such a wide term. They might not be designed to break down at low temps.

Dovefromabove

yes

I understand that quite a few home compostable polymers are made from potato starch.