We recently stumbled upon an excellent resource in the battle to reduce single use plastic bag use—a recently published report from the Florida DEP on retail bag use and ways to curb it. While its data is skewed towards the authoring state, it’s chock-full of interesting and useful information to anyone—worldwide—contemplating a reusable bag program. Many of the interesting tidbits are things we at Bulletin Bag [.com] have covered in other blogs (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, getting by without plastic bags, etc.), but we wanted to discuss one thing we haven’t touched on in any of our other writings: biodegradable bags.

While biodegradable and compostable bags aren’t new to market, there has been a relatively new push towards their use as alternative to traditional plastic bags. Even though bags that don’t persist in the environment sound like a positive step, there are serious drawbacks.

All types of biodegradable and compostable bags must be placed under specific conditions to degrade properly. For instance, a photo-degradable bag will not break down if it is covered by water or otherwise obscured from light. An oxo-biodegradable bag requires direct access to oxygen and sunlight to degrade.

So what are the ramifications of improper use of biodegradable bags? Any consumer who places a biodegradable bag in the home compost pile will not see the promised degradation because the required high temperatures achieved in municipal composting facilities cannot be achieved with home composting. Additionally, some of these bags leave plastic pieces or other residues when they break down—leftovers that natural systems and wildlife cannot tolerate.

The unfortunate truth is that biodegradable bags are also inadvertently leading to litter because consumers assume the bags will quickly break down or compost, whatever the conditions, and that’s just not true.

Want to learn more? Read the full Florida DEP Retail Bag Report here.

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