Composting

I've been practicing trench composting for over a year now in my small garden. It's been a good way to eliminate waste and improve soil health. By putting food scraps back in the ground, it adds nutrients to the soil, sparking life and feeding my plants. It also gets me going outside and a good discipline to hold myself to - not to mention the more time I spend at my garden, the more I'll inadvertently care for it. However there's some plant-related topics I want to get off my chest.

It has recently come to my attention that the stickers that come on fruit (like bananas, apples, or avocados for example) are not compostable! For some reason, I had just assumed they were compostable because of the widespread rumor that they are edible. However, that itself is a lie: The stickers are non-toxic, which doesn't make them "edible." Either way, they cannot be composted, because they contain a thin layer of plastic, typically vinyl.

I typically throw those stickers away in the trash when possible, but I sometimes just end up tossing them (with the fruit) into the nearest compost bin, which includes my own compost bin when I'm at home. Luckily, this happens infrequently, so not too much damage has been done. Sadly, it makes me wonder how we got to this point of such a plastic-dependent society that even the things that should so obviously not be made of plastic are still made of plastic anyway.