Our greenbags are 100 percent biodegradable and compostable.  Regular plastic bags can take a 100 years to degrade, and are not compostable under any conditions.  Less than 2 percent of ALL plastic bags ever get recycled.  They litter the streets, wilderness/backcountry, and waterways.  Fish and Game estimate that over 100,000 marine animals and more than 2,000,000 sea birds die each year from ingesting pieces of plastic as they scavenge food particles in them, or from being caught in "rafts" of plastic debris.

A few manufacturers are now "blending additives" to polyethylene (a plastic) to produce so-called "biodegradable" bags that break down "more rapidly."  Here's what really happens.  The "additives" merely break the bags into pieces of plastic debris that do not degrade at all.  In fact, these "additives" have caused even more harm since the sea animals and birds find pieces of plastic perfectly sized to gobble up.  

A genuine biodegradable product has the ability to break down, safely and relatively quickly, by biological means, into the raw materials of nature and disappear into the environment. These products can be solids biodegrading into the soil (which we also refer to as compostable), or liquids biodegrading into water.  Our greenbags contain no polyethylene materials whatsoever.  They are fully certified by the U.S. Composting Council to be 100 percent biodegradable and 100 percent compostable.  And remember, Dame Nature knows the difference.  Our greenbags are made from cornstarch and other earth-friendly ingredients.  They should be disposed of by burial or placed in an approved waste receptacle.  They work perfectly with the Packit Toilet design, but will also work with your  home toilet if it becomes inoperative for some reason.  

If you intend to use a single greenbag for a few days, either at a campsite or at home, baking soda will reduce odors (we recommend backpackers carry some baking soda in a zip lock bag for this very purpose).  Sustainable disposal of any product requires that its wastes return to the earth and are able to degrade.  Dame Nature degrades everything it makes back into basic building blocks, so that new living things can be made from the old.  Every resource made by Dame Nature returns to her - plants and animals degrade - even raw crude oil will degrade when exposed to water, air, and the necessary salts.  Dame Nature has perfected this system - we just need to learn how to participate in it by helping her do her work.

Crude oil, for example, will degrade in its natural state, but once it's turned into plastic, it becomes an unsustainable pollution problem. Instead of returning to the cycle of life, these products simply pollute and litter our land, air, and water.  Of all the environmental buzzwords, "biodegradable" has perhaps been the most misused and is perhaps the most difficult to understand.  Because in the past there have been no guidelines or regulations, many products have called themselves biodegradable without any real justification.  Unfortunately, the word biodegradable (mush like the word "organic") has frequently been applied to products that generally aren't (such as detergents or plastics) and almost never used for products that really are (such as soap or paper).

A leaf is a perfect example of a biodegradable product: it is made in the spring, used by the plant for photosynthesis in the summer, drops to the ground in autumn, and assimilated into the soil to nourish the plant for the next season. The basic concept seems straightforward enough, however, there are several factors to consider in determining the biodegradability of a product or material.