Three ways
home.
Roseco is a starch based bioplastic, compounded from cassava root grown in Thailand. Because the carbon in it came from a crop rather than from oil, it can return to the ground instead of lasting in it.
There are three ways it does that, and they are not interchangeable. Which one is right depends on where your product actually ends up, not on which certificate looks best on a specification sheet. Choosing the wrong one is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category.
Home compostable
The harder of the two composting standards, and our cassava base carries it. Selected Roseco grades are certified home compostable by DIN CERTCO for home and garden composting.
Home composting is harder than industrial because it has none of the advantages. No managed facility, no elevated temperature, no controlled humidity, no one turning the heap. A garden compost pile in an ordinary back garden runs cool and slow, and most compostable plastics that pass the industrial standard will simply sit in it. In laboratory testing under home composting conditions, our sample had fully disintegrated by day 70.
This is the route that matters when the person disposing of your product is a household rather than a waste contractor. It is also the specification that several European markets are converging on for biowaste collection bags, where the bag has to break down in the same stream as the food waste it carries.
Industrial compostable
Certified industrial compostable to EN 13432 by DIN CERTCO and by TUV Austria, carrying the Seedling mark.
Industrial composting happens in a managed facility that holds temperature and humidity deliberately high, which is why material breaks down faster and more predictably there than anywhere else. EN 13432 is the European benchmark, and it tests four things: disintegration, biodegradation, the absence of heavy metals and harmful substances, and that the resulting compost will still grow a plant.
This is the right route wherever your product is collected commercially and reaches an organics stream: food service, catering, events, hospitals, anywhere waste is handled in bulk by someone whose job it is. The Seedling mark on the pack is what tells the waste handler it belongs there.
Soil biodegradable
For film that is never collected at all, because it is meant to stay in the field. Soil biodegradable mulch film tills straight into the ground at the end of the season.
Conventional mulch film has to be lifted, rolled and carried away, which costs a grower labour at the busiest point of the year, and leaves fragments behind however carefully it is done. Those fragments accumulate season after season. Film designed to break down in soil removes both problems at once: the retrieval labour disappears, and so does the residue.
Soil is a slower and colder environment than either compost route, so this is a different specification rather than an easier one. EN 17033 is the European standard for biodegradable mulch film, and our agricultural grade is in field trials with growers in Japan and Korea, working toward it.
Follow the product, not the certificate.
A certificate describes a laboratory. Your product ends up somewhere real, in a home bin, in a contractor's organics stream, or in a field it was never meant to leave. Start with where it lands and the right material chooses itself.