Landfill
Ingeo Does Not Biodegrade In A Conventional Landfill
Neither does anything else. The reality is that today's waste reduction systems capture just a small amount of the total plastic flowing into landfills, and options for recycling and composting are limited. Then because a landfill does not offer the climate necessary to compost, it is unlikely that any product will decompose efficiently. That said, if both biobased Ingeo products and oil-based plastic products end up in a landfill, the Ingeo products are already better because they contributed less greenhouse gases and used less nonrenewable energy when they were made, something oil-based products cannot achieve.
Does Ingeo Release Methane In A Landfill?
We've published a peer-reviewed article in the journal of Polymer Degradation and Stability that shows Ingeo to be essentially stable in landfills with no statistically significant quantity of methane released. This conclusion was reached after a series of tests to ASTM D5526 and D5511 standards that simulated a century's worth of landfill conditions.
Two scenarios tested
Conditions in landfills can vary considerably by geography, management practices, and age of waste. As a result, our researchers in conjunction with Belgium-based Organic Waste Systems performed two different series of tests spanning a broad spectrum of conditions. The first was at 21˚ C (69.8˚ F) for 390 days at three moisture levels. The first series did not show any statistically significant generation of biogas, so the team decided to push the stress tests to a higher and more aggressive level and instituted a series of high solids anaerobic digestion tests.
Today, some landfills are actively managed to act as "bioreactors" to intentionally promote microbial degradation of the waste, with collection and utilization of the by-product gas. To capture this scenario, the second series of tests were designed to simulate high solids anaerobic digestion under optimal and significantly accelerated conditions and were performed at 35˚ C (95˚ F) for 170 days. While there was "some" biogas released in this aggressive series of tests, the amount released was not statistically significant according to the peer reviewed research paper. Both series of tests were designed to represent an examination of what could happen under a range of significantly accelerated anaerobic landfill conditions and were roughly equivalent to 100 years of conditions in a biologically active landfill.