>>> Residual waste

At first glance, biodegradable and thus compostable plastic bags seem to be a practical and ecological solution for the collection of organic waste. Strictly speaking, they are not "plastic bags". The bags are rather made from corn starch, cellulose, sugar cane or even potato starch, for example. This means that they are basically biodegradable.

However, if you don't have your own compost heap, but dispose your organic waste via the brown bin of the Berlin city cleaning service, there are some difficulties: The industrial composting facilities are designed for rapid composting in about six weeks. However, the organic waste bags take much longer to decompose, three months or even much longer depending on the environmental conditions, so the organic waste bag is far from degraded at the end of the industrial composting process. In addition, organic waste bags are usually sorted out because the automated sorting systems cannot distinguish them from the classic plastic bags. So in the end, these bags end up in the residual waste again.