Biodegradation and Compostability Legislation

Many biodegradable plastics were not very well labelled due to some misapprehension about the difference between a degradable and a biodegradable plastic. Due to this fact, many international standards were developed in order to clarify this misconception. Among the associations dealing with these products are the American Society for Testing and 

Materials (ASTM), European Committee for Standardization (CEN), German Institute of Standardization, Japanese Industrial Standards and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). 

Plastics biodegradation could be aerobic or anaerobic, depending upon the environment in which they are degrading, and biodegradation is measured by the amount of carbon by-products that are produced by the biodegradation process in which the sum of all the carbon by-products is equal to the total amount of carbon in the non-degraded material. 

The European Directive 94/62/EC, amended by 2004/12/EC, indicates that composting of packaging waste is a form of recycling, since the original product, the package , is transformed into a new product, the compost . Following this Directive the European Standard EN 13432 was introduced. This European Standard defines the characteristics that a material must accomplish to be defined as compostable  

According to these standard norms, a compostable plastic demonstrates a satisfactory rate of biodegradation when achieving 90% of the organic carbon in the whole item or for each organic constituent, which is present in the material at a concentration of more than 1 wt% (by diy mass), and is converted to carbon dioxide by the end of the test period when compared to a positive control. 

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