The science is complicated. So is the decision.
We switched back to compostable coffee bags. Which, admittedly, requires a little explaining.
We’ve used compostable bags almost exclusively since I started the company in 2020. Sustainability has always been a pretty important part of how I operate the business, and compostable packaging seemed like one of the most obvious decisions I could make. Except, like most things involving sustainability, waste management, global manufacturing, and climate change, it turns out to be significantly more complicated than that. Furthermore, our old bags were compostable, but the one-way valves were not, requiring customers to cut out the valve and recycle it, then compost the bag. But new compostable bags are 100% compostable.
Over the last year or two, I started digging deeper into how compostable packaging is actually manufactured and disposed of. I spoke with manufacturers, our bag suppliers in Taiwan and China, composting companies, waste-management professionals, and other folks working in sustainability. I also spent an arguably unreasonable amount of time reading studies about bioplastics, landfills, methane and packaging life-cycle assessments.
And eventually I came to a somewhat uncomfortable conclusion:
A bag labeled “compostable” does not automatically mean the bag is better for the environment.
Below is a long, nerdy, low-key white paper about compostable coffee bags, how they’re made, and why I’m bringing them back.
Why I initially moved away from using compostable bags
One of the biggest misunderstandings surrounding compostable packaging is what the word compostable actually means.
Most commercially compostable plastics are not designed to disappear in your backyard compost pile. The U.S. EPA explains that commercially compostable plastics generally require the elevated temperatures, humidity, microbial activity and controlled conditions found at a commercial or industrial composting facility. (For the environmentalists, ASTM standards such as D6400 and D6868 establish the requirements these materials need to meet.)
So throwing a compostable coffee bag into your garden doesn't necessarily mean you'll come back in six months and find a particularly caffeinated patch of dirt. And unfortunately, access to industrial composting is still inconsistent.
We use My Green Michigan for commercial composting at the roastery. They collect food scraps and BPI-certified compostable products throughout Metro Detroit and send those materials to industrial composting facilities. But even with access to a professional composting service, we learned firsthand that certified compostable and successfully composted in every real-world system are not always the same thing.
Coffee bags need to keep oxygen and moisture out for months. They need to survive shipping, be heat-sealed, and require inks and adhesives. Most specialty coffee bags also need a one-way valve that allows carbon dioxide from freshly roasted coffee to escape without allowing oxygen back inside. And with most compostable bags, that one way valve isn’t actually compostable.
Basically, we’re asking this little bag to spend several months being extremely good at not breaking down, and then, the moment we're finished with it, we'd like it to become dirt.
Safe to say that material science has its work cut out for it, and the science and production aren’t quite there for compostable coffee bags to properly break down in residential composting. They can break down with commercial composting that utilizes incinerators and incubators to speed up the composting process. But compostable bags can sit for years in residential compost piles without fully breaking down.
The composting infrastructure problem
This was probably the biggest reason I initially changed packaging. A compostable product only really fulfills its intended purpose if it reaches a composting system capable of processing it, whether in a backyard compost pile or a commercial composter.
A 2023 Forbes article reported an estimate that only about 3% of compostable packaging in the U.K. was actually reaching an appropriate composting facility at the time. I want to emphasize that this is U.K. data, not Michigan or U.S. data, so it shouldn't be treated as a universal composting rate.
This illustrates the larger problem: making a product compostable doesn't accomplish very much if the bag doesn’t actually make it to a composter. BUT, you can see this inconsistency here in Detroit. For example, my Green Michigan accepts all organic, compostable products through its commercial collection program (this includes meat and other “harder” organic materials that won’t break down in a backyard compost pile). Meanwhile, the City of Detroit's community compost drop-off program accepts things like food scraps and coffee grounds, but specifically tells residents not to bring compostable dishware or meat. This also means compostable coffee bags.
Same city. Both compost programs. Different rules.
But why?
As I mentioned above, commercial composting involves commercial incinerators and incubators to break down compostable materials much quicker. Most residential composting programs rely strictly on the natural process of allowing materials breaking down organically through sunlight, soil, and time. The system itself is confusing! And the question I kept asking is, “Is a compostable bag (or any compostable product created by humans) better in a landfill, to break down naturally with other trash?”
What happens if a compostable bag goes to a landfill?
Industrial composting is an aerobic process, meaning oxygen is deliberately introduced while microorganisms break organic material down. In a landfill, trash breaks down through an anaerobic process, without oxygen. And when biodegradable organic materials break down without oxygen, methane can be produced.
Methane matters enormously from a climate standpoint. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, methane is responsible for roughly a third of the warming we're experiencing today and has approximately 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Research shows that certain bioplastics, such as compostable coffee bags, can generate more methane under landfill-like anaerobic conditions than ordinary trash. One study looking specifically at PLA found substantial methane generation under certain higher-temperature anaerobic conditions, although degradation varied considerably depending on temperature and environment. That doesn't mean every compostable coffee bag immediately becomes a methane factory the second it lands in the trash. It means the end-of-life scenario matters.
A compostable material undergoing a proper industrial composting process is fundamentally different from the same material being buried in a landfill. And that became one of my biggest frustrations with compostable packaging. The environmental benefit isn't contained entirely inside the bag. It depends on the system surrounding the bag. And how the bag is disposed of.
Which led me to wonder if compostable bags are just greenwashing consumers to believe that compostable bags are better for the environment, regardless of how they’re disposed of? It turns out the answer is really complicated and led me down a rabbit hole I still haven’t emerged from.
Manufacturing compostable bags isn't simple either
Another assumption I had was that plant-based or compostable plastic must inherently have a lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastic. Again: sometimes. But not always.
Many compostable goods are made from bioplastics, produced from corn, sugarcane, starches, cellulose and other renewable feedstocks. That can reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which is meaningful. Fossil-based plastic production itself is a significant climate issue: the OECD estimates that the plastics lifecycle generated about 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019, approximately 3.4% of global emissions, with roughly 90% coming from production and conversion.
But growing and converting biological feedstocks into polymers also has environmental consequences. Agriculture requires land, irrigation, fertilizer, and a ton of water… Then those biological materials need to be fermented, processed, polymerized and turned into packaging. A 2024 review of bioplastics found exactly what you would probably expect after reading this far: there is no simple winner.
Some bioplastics produce substantially fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional plastics. Others have higher impacts in categories like land use, water consumption or eutrophication. Results can change depending on the crop being used, where it was grown, the energy source powering the factory and what ultimately happens to the material after use.
So saying "compostable plastic takes more energy to manufacture" is too broad. So is saying "compostable plastic is better for the climate." The answer is incredibly annoying- It depends.
Welcome to sustainability…?
There was one other study that initially gave me pause. A 2023 paper published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials showed that the production of compostable bags posed a greater health risk to workers creating the bags, than producing “regular” coffee bags. But it's also important not to turn an interesting laboratory study into a headline it doesn't support. This was not a study showing that compostable coffee bags are poisoning people, nor was it evidence that workers manufacturing compostable packaging are being harmed. It was an in-vitro study examining extractable chemicals from a relatively small selection of plastic products.
The reasonable takeaway isn't "compostable plastic is toxic." It's that changing the source material doesn't magically eliminate every environmental or chemical concern associated with packaging. I think we still need better materials, better additives, better testing, better manufacturing, and better waste systems.
And with the current trend of our political and geo-political landscape, it’s not looking great as environmentally friendly manufacturing is having to step aside to increase the production of fossil fuels, deforestation, and over-mining critical resources.
And I don’t say “we” lightly. Understandably, there’s only so much an individual can do. But a city, a neighborhood, and a community and a city can do a lot! They can influence others to follow in their footsteps… which leads me to my next point.
Why are we switching back to compostable bags?
The infrastructure isn't perfect, the life-cycle analysis is complicated, some compostable materials can produce methane in landfills and there are still unanswered questions about the chemistry… But after looking at this almost entirely through the lens of measurable environmental impact, I realized there was another part of sustainability I wasn't giving enough weight to:
Intentionality. And, maybe more importantly, participation.
There is a difference between evaluating the environmental footprint of the world as it exists today and deciding what kind of system we want to help build for tomorrow. Sure, right now our composting infrastructure isn't good enough. But if every business waits until industrial composting is universally available before using compostable materials, there isn't much incentive for composting infrastructure to expand. But if consumers and businesses create demands for better composting infrastructure, history tells us that these trends will take root as entrepreneurs, capitalists, and corporations will see the value in composting.
One important thing to note: more often than not, recycling, composting, and upcycling are not profitable. It costs money. If there was money to be made from these things, big corporations would’ve been all over it a long time ago. I believe as a specie we have to invest in systems for composting, recycling, and upcycling. The short term monetary effect greatly outweighs the long-term effect. All the money in the world won’t save generations to come from a planet that is uninhabitable.
Climate change is a “we” problem
One of the things I've become increasingly uncomfortable with is the idea that climate change can be solved entirely through individual consumer choices. Climate change is an enormous structural problem involving energy production, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, buildings, land use and government policy. Which the IPCC has been pretty explicit about.
Individual behavior by itself is insufficient to solve climate change. But the IPCC also finds that individual behavior, social norms, businesses, infrastructure and institutions all interact with one another. Coordinated changes between those systems can create much larger shifts in emissions and behavior than any one action can accomplish alone.
But that doesn't mean small actions are meaningless. The visible choices businesses and individuals make can help establish social norms about what we consider normal, responsible or expected. A recent Nature Climate Change review examining social influence and climate action reached a similar conclusion: people and groups influence one another's climate attitudes and behaviors, and those social effects can be an important part of broader climate action.
You can see this phenomenon in the adoption of things like residential solar panels. Research has found that people are more likely to install solar when they see neighbors doing it, particularly when those installations are visible. Part of sustainability adoption is technological. Part of it is economic. And part of it is simply watching another person do something and thinking, “We do that now.”
That idea has stuck with me. Maybe the value of compostable packaging isn't just what happens to one individual coffee bag. Maybe part of its value is helping make composting itself more normal.
I'm definitely not suggesting that a compostable bag of Motown Espresso is going to single-handedly inspire the next generation to solve climate change. That would be a hell of a bag. But I do think culture is built through thousands of small, visible choices.
So, long story short, my intention to create sustainability and be environmentally friendly only works if Craig’s Coffee can be a steward in making it happen. Part of switching back means I also need to do a better job educating customers about what the bag actually is and what to do with it.
So if you’re curious, check with your local composting provider and make sure they accept the certification listed on the bag.
In Metro Detroit, commercial services such as My Green Michigan accept BPI-certified compostable products. Other municipal or community composting programs may have completely different rules. When in doubt, ask. And this is an area where I'm going to continue working with our bag manufacturer and composting partners as the packaging rolls out.
Sustainability at Craig's Coffee
Packaging is also only one very small piece of the environmental footprint of running a coffee company. Coffee travels thousands of miles before it arrives at our roastery. It is grown using land, water and labor. It has to be processed, dried, milled, bagged and transported. Then I roast it using a machine that consumes energy.
We use electricity. We use water. We manufacture packaging. We make deliveries. All of that matters considerably more than whether I can put a green leaf icon on a coffee bag. That's why I'm trying to look at sustainability across the entire business rather than treating packaging as a standalone solution.
We already commercially compost food waste and compostable materials at the roastery. We use compostable packaging throughout the cafe. I'm working with DTE on options for converting some of our electricity use to solar. I’m hounding my landlord for more sustainable heating and cooling solutions for my space. We're continually making changes to the roaster and production systems to reduce emissions and improve efficiency.
And now we're returning to compostable coffee bags. Not because I think compostable packaging has been perfected, it hasn't. Sustainability cannot only mean optimizing for the world exactly as it operates today. Sometimes it also means helping create demand for the world we want to operate tomorrow.
Continuing to make sustainable decisions with the information we have
When I originally moved away from compostable bags, I did it because I wanted to follow the evidence rather than the marketing. And weirdly, following that evidence even further is part of what brought me back. I understand the limitations much better now. I know that compostable does not mean magically biodegradable anywhere. Manufacturing impacts are complicated. Composting infrastructure desperately needs improvement. A compostable bag sent to the wrong waste stream can lose many of the benefits it was designed to provide.
But I also know that infrastructure doesn't improve in a vacuum. Markets change because people participate in them. Technology improves because people demand better versions of it. Waste systems expand because communities use them. And social expectations change when enough people start behaving differently.
I think we need to be willing to participate in that imperfect system. Maybe five years from now, technology will have shifted and everything can be composted (haha). Maybe it won’t.
Thanks for nerding out with me.
And please compost your bean juice bags.