As part of our unit of inquiry on sustainability last year, we explored whether companies had used greenwashing when advertising that their products were biodegradable. Greenwashing is when a company says their product is eco-friendly even though it isn’t because they want to sell more.
We hypothesized that none of the products we had found, except for a paper fork and spoon wrapper, would biodegrade. We buried seven products in really good soil that had bokashi dug in it and had many microbes to help with biodegrading.
Surprisingly, many of the products disappeared. However, it was unclear whether they had broken down or if something else happened. Maybe they did break down, but maybe some creature took them.
Or maybe our hypothesis was wrong and some of the products are actually biodegradable. If this is true, this is a great thing. However, it is not clear whether the products all biodegraded or if something else happened.
An application of the findings of this experiment is that sometimes we can trust companies when they say their packaging is biodegradable. We can’t always know but we can find out or we can ask them for more information about why it is biodegradable if we are unsure.
Our experiment could be improved by keeping the products in a closed space to be sure that they disappear because they are biodegradable and not because something steals them. It would be best to take photos every time the products were dug up and also to cover the garden bed with a net that lets air, water and light in but not animals or people!
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