Part 3 of an experiment in home composting.

I am conducting an experiment to see whether The Guardian’s compostable bags do actually degrade in a home compost heap.

I checked up on the heap again on Sunday 4 August, four weeks after the last check and fourteen weeks after I started the experiment. Again, I removed the material carefully with a spade and trowel, placing it all into a large bin. A few inches down, I came across the material I had deposited four weeks ago. On the left you can see what it looked like then – a paper cup and a large transparent bag, which had been a bread wrapper.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is very little left of the transparent bag – in fact the printed label is the only distinguishable bit remaining. Here is what it looked like:

So hats off to NJB who say they make a compostable film. My experiment would seem to justify this claim. The compostable coffee cup has decomposed less, but it looks as though it is also on the way to breaking up completely.

I carried on removing material in order to reach the bottom of the heap, where the two original compostable bags were placed back in April. Here is what I found:

There is now very little left of either bag. The pieces shown above were the only traces of both, and I therefore have every hope that there will be nothing left to report next time round.

My latest addition to the experiment is a pouch which once contained Happy Pear granola, manufactured by the Israeli company TIPA. The packaging tells you to put this into ‘industrial composting’ (i.e. a brown bin) but as I only use our brown bin very rarely, I decided to see how well it goes in a home compost heap. Here is how I left it:

I’ve now returned all the compost to the heap. I will keep on adding more material on top and we will see what it all looks like again in a month or two.