In New Zealand much single-use compostable food packaging ends up in landfills rather than being composted. The composting industry has concerns about the extent to which compostable packaging can degrade in the timeframe required, in the range of composting environments used throughout New Zealand.
A practical study led by Scion aims to determine for both industrial and home composters whether materials certified as compostable will degrade within the time frame set by the standards in the New Zealand context.
The study is investigating the degradation of different materials in industrial and home composting systems. It is designed to determine whether packaging certified as compostable according to European Standard EN 13432 will break down in New Zealand composting facilities within the required period and without detriment to the final compost product.
Due to be completed in May 2021, the study is funded by the Ministry for the Environment’s Waste Minimisation Fund with additional funding from Convex.
Members of WasteMINZ Organic Materials Sector Group are closely involved in this project. “The sector is keen to find out whether EN 13432 is an accurate predictor of disintegration across the range of compostable materials which are coming onto the market, or whether sites will need to continue to run material-specific trials to determine whether they can be accepted at their facility,” says Chris Purchas, Chair of the Organic Materials Steering Committee.
If your composting facility would like to take part in the trial, please email [email protected]
Can you please confirm to me if the EN13432 is required here in NZ or not as there is a lot of packaging here with non of this.
So EN13432 is not specifically required but our recommendation is that if a claim of compostability is made it needs to be backed up by one of the internationally recognised standards such as EN13432, AS4736, ASTM D6400 or 6868 or the home compostability standards such as AS5810 or the OK Home Compost.
These standards prove that a product or packaging has been tested and meets the criteria for compostability below:
• Chemical Characterization: Ensures materials do not contain unacceptable levels of heavy metals and fluorine. Also checks materials have at least 50% volatile solids.
• Biodegradation: Ensures that the reason the material is breaking down is due to it being converted into carbon dioxide by microbes.
• Disintegration: Ensures material breaks down and can be considered to become part of the compost within a specified timeframe.
• Ecotoxicity: Ensures that resulting compost will not have a negative impact on living organisms such as earthworms or germinating plants.
Any product that does not meet a standard may have only been tested to meet the disintegration test as this is the only one that can be measured by eye, rather than in a lab. Therefore it cannot be guaranteed that heavy metals etc are not present, that it biodegraded as opposed to fragmented, and that the end compost will not be ecotoxic.
If you know of any claims being made about compostability without substantiation you can put in a complaint to the Commerce Commission who will investigate and ask the company to substantiate their claims.