This is something we get asked every day, and for a good reason - it’s been made complicated by marketers. All compostable products are biodegradable, but not all biodegradable products are compostable. Biodegradable is a word that was taken over by marketers in an effort to greenwash our brains. Biodegradable can be translated as ‘will break down at some point’, so that could be a year from now or, more likely, hundreds of years from now. And it’s likely to leave millions of microplastics that we all know by this point is why we all have plastic inside of us.
Compostable, on the other hand, has government tests around it, so you know what you are getting - and the Aussie government tests are some of the most stringent in the world. In Australia, our standards are AS 5810 for Home Composting and AS 4736 for Commercial Composting. The AS 4736 standard requires that 90% of the original material is gone after 12 weeks, and it’s completely biodegraded after 6 months.
In the dog poop bag world, if you see biodegradable and no compostable logos, that is code for the dog poop bag has got plastic in it. If you see the Aussie composting logos, you know it’s passed the government tests here for compostability.