The compost from the city yard waste collection facilities is full of pea sized pieces of plastic, especially produce code stickers. If there’s plastic I can see and pick out, you just know there’s a bunch you can’t.
What do you suppose it would take to get plastic produce stickers banned in favor of biodegradable versions?
Either an outright ban, or taxes that gradually increase. However, what's also needed is an alternative that's readily available and not ridiculously overpriced. With produce stickers, I'm actually thinking: are stickers on produce actually useful/necessary? If we really care to tag products, could we just laser engrave them quickly?
These exist, are in use and have been commercialised.
If you look very closely at the expiry date printed on packaged products you'll often find it's actually laser etched, not printed. It's considerably more reliable and readable, particularity for small fonts.
Yeah, laser engraving has become a lot cheaper. However, it can't be mass-produced before the fruit (and labor to engrave is likely to be way more expensive).
Safe to consume doesn't mean biodegradable, likely it passes right through you.
Goobingling around I see a few biodegradable produce stickers marketed as "not like those other nonbiodegrable produce stickers" but that's not conclusive either.
It is in the air you breathe:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246858441...
I wonder about our insect friends who have been recently disappearing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2018/09/29/microp...