Once composted, this organic material is intended to be used on land. Macklin says, even though the stickers are tiny in tonnage terms, “they are problematic because they’re attached to food, which is more and more going into kerbside food and garden organic compost bins that are being rolled out in many states across Australia.” Jennifer Macklin is a senior waste and circular economy researcher at Monash University’s Monash Sustainable Development Institute. Their small size and cute, colourful designs belies the stickers’ troublesome nature in both home and commercial composting facilities. Though large in quantity, the stickers are small as a share of overall plastic waste. The vast majority of stickers are plastic, made from polyethylene. “We are hoping that in the near or distant future fruit stickers will be banned altogether or biodegradable so they are better for the environment” Indi, Winters Flat Primary School Care for Environment Leader It’s not only fruit stickers mixed in with our compost – they’re everywhere!” “The stickers don’t break down for hundreds of years. So far only a few have written back.Ĭare for Environment Leader and Grade 5 student, Aurora says “our school started working on a campaign against fruit stickers when I was in Grade 3 because we went through our school compost and found many fruit stickers in it. Students have been putting up handmade posters in local green grocers and writing to local, state and federal governments, supermarkets and fruit industry representatives. And at the other end when they were sifting composting for garden classes”. Winters Flat teacher and garden specialist Terry Willis says the pesky fruit sticker campaign “was a tactile issue that students saw every day in their lunch box. The school’s Care for Environment Leaders have been campaigning for plastic produce labels to be banned or replaced by biodegradable or edible alternatives since finding “hundreds and hundreds” of them in their school kitchen garden compost. Students from Winters Flat Primary School in Castlemaine, Victoria are hoping Australia will follow New Zealand’s lead in banning plastic fruit stickers.
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