Compost Queen is a leader in the community composting space, leveraging a decentralized network of on-farm composting facilities to service Fort Collins’ food waste recycling needs.
Colorado is working hard to implement the Environmental Producer Responsibility laws that will cover compostable products. Facilities that accept and process these products will be eligible to receive direct funding for manufacturers to help subsidize the cost of the end of life processing of these materials.
Eco-Products is a global leader in compostable packaging, based right here in Boulder, CO. Their extensive line of BPI Certified cups, plates, bowls, cutlery, straws, takeout packaging and more meet the highest quality standards. They’ve also recently come into compliance with the Colorado state law requiring all compostable products to have a green mark and third party testing labeled directly on their products.
Eco-Products is truly committed to making products that have a viable service life, and a viable end life right here in Colorado. They kindly sent over their team members to help with our field testing program for compostable packaging in our facility.
We initially started with a bag test, in which we placed several compostable products inside of an onion bag along with mixed feedstocks of residential food waste, wood chips, leaves and yard waste. These bags were easy to identify as they were bright red and had red strings attached to them – but the bags didn’t quite let all the same moisture and air flow occur that would happen in a normal pile.
We saw impressive results with the bag test, including nearly complete degradation of PLA products and significant degradation of fiber board based products.
We did notice that other natural items inside the bags were also identifiable, like the notoriously difficult avocado skins and pits. Thus, we were inspired to take our test “real world” and initiate a dose test.
In a dose test, we add in compostable feedstocks to a normal pile as if they were collected along with food waste. This replicates as closely as possible a real world experience of our food recycling members using compostable plates, cups, cutlery, straws and more.
Overall, Compost Queen was highly impressed with the total degradation of materials in our covered aerated static pile composting process, which takes about 120 days to complete. This includes four hot composting cycles and a four week curing process before screening material to one quarter inch.
After screening, the overs were carefully investigated to determine any large pieces that did not degraded during the composting process.
Compost Queen had difficulty finding any compostable products that were individually passed through the hot composting process. Items that were found were stacked in multiples, like cups inset within each other or stacked fiber plates.
We’re celebrating International Compost Awareness Week for 2025 by releasing the below video documenting our process and our results for other facilities to model. Careful testing and consideration should always be paid when attempting to include new feed stocks. As they say, “you can’t put Pandora back in the box”.
Compost Queen is still completing three more phases of a controlled dose test in our Covered Aerated Static Pile system, but early results are leaning towards our inclusion of Eco-Products in our community scale composting operations.
Thank you to Meghan, Kat and Jordan at the Eco-Products team for all of the help in this process!