Fruit stickers are the scourge of the compost pile

They are in the compost caddy, stuck in the sifter, peeping out of the garden beds, and the eternal bane of many home gardeners: the small, ubiquitous, and remarkably indestructible produce sticker.

I painstakingly remove every produce sticker from every piece of fruit and veg that enters our home, says James Hohman, a professor at the University of Connecticut. His compost pile is on top of a pile used by the previous owners of his house. When his family first moved in, he removed a lot of stickers from the pile and the garden beds.

He knows his pain and has composted blue jeans before the stupid stickers went away. His family feeds their food scraps to their chickens, resulting in produce stickers all over the yard.

"I have to put down the shovel and pick the stickers out by hand every other scoop", says Gretchen Cheverton, who constantly finds stickers in her compost pile at home in Colorado.

Composting is the process of decomposing organic matter. Kitchen scraps and lawn clippings are going to rot. Compost pile can be done faster and with less greenhouse gas emissions if it smells like forest floor. Home composting focuses on boosting aerobic decomposition, which is both more sustainable and less disgusting, because the same anaerobicbacteria that make rotting garbage smell so bad also emit methane.

Composting can be a fairly hands-off process, but the science behind it can turn this chore into a mini-game. Composters post pictures of the thermometers they have stuck into their piles and fuss over their nitrogen to carbon ratios on the r/composting. A hot pile is an achievement worth celebrating.

Nitrogen is an important part of the chemistry of a compost heap and can be found in vegetable scraps and fruit peels. Nitrogen feeds the microorganisms that break down the compost. A pile will break down slowly if there is too little nitrogen. It starts to smell bad if it is too much. Composting at home requires a balance between nitrogen and carbon. Grass clippings, coffee grounds, and urine are some of the common nitrogen sources.

The produce stickers are next to the kitchen waste. They cling to a spent orange rind, linger on a discarded banana peel, and are brushed into the compost bucket with a pile of leafy greens. Hypervigilance is required to prevent a produce sticker from entering a compost pile.

It is worth mentioning that people compost a wide range of things at home. While most backyard piles aren't capable of breaking down a bioplastic fork, people have composted popsicle sticks, fingernail. The cover was removed before the book was composted. The bones, the T-shirt, and the book are all gone and turned into a brown humus. The produce stickers are still there.

Produce stickers, which are made of plastic, will maintain their shape and sometimes their bright colors, though they often wash out to a blinding white. When compost is broken down, they stand out like sore thumbs, with perfect little circles, ellipses, and rectangles contrasting against the dark brown earth of finished compost.

Simpson thinks that they can get away with not putting stickers on fruit.

The International Fresh Produce Association (IFIPA) created the Price Look Up (PLU) system in 1988 and has since become the Produce Marketing Association (PMA). A bar code can be found on a PLU sticker. A cashier needs to ring up produce at the checkout. The three components of the stickers are plastic, paper, and ink. The stickers are required to be food grade, but that isn't the same as being compostable. I stopped swallowing my chewing gum because it isn't compostable.

Many of the individual components that make a PLU sticker can be recycled or composted, according to the International Federation for Produce Standards. If the glue is stuck to plastic, what good is it for it to be compostable? The IFPS acknowledges that the stickers can be found in the recycling process.

Following the passage of laws in Europe that ban certain types of single-use plastic, the IFPA is working with other industry groups and the USDA to develop PLU stickers that can be composted at home. This move comes after many years of criticism and proposed solutions, including a very fanciful idea for laser-etched fruit.

Cheverton thinks that the stickers are more of an annoyance than a problem.

It causes a little angst over the amount of plastic in our world.

The lifespan of the sticker is likely to be decades or centuries, after which it will likely be washed away into the water and the air and everything around us. That's not reassuring. The produce sticker is unbowed, perfect, and completely un-compostable.