PLU Stickers! (short for Price Look Up stickers) You know those glossy tiny stickers with the 4 to 5 digits on them describing in a standardized way the type of produce they are stickened upon. Before getting into their compostability let’s learn! (since I just learned myself)

paraphrased from: earthfriendly.com

When it’s just 4 digits they are conventionally grown. When it’s 5 digits and starts with a 9 they are organically grown. When it has a 5 digit code and starts with an 8 – genetically modified.

So they’re on every piece of produce, and those happen to be some super compostable household items. I know I’ve thrown countless stickers into my compost bin, but I’ve also seen those countless stickers in what would be brown composted material. Why aren’t they breaking down?

Half of the PLU stickers in the US come from the same company. When asked about the material components of those stickers they are a “water-resistant polyethylene” aka, not compostable.

My suggestion, peel ‘em off and throw ‘em away. Or else you’ll be picking them out of your compost so you can have pretty garden soil. Worms won’t touch them too, but they won’t hurt them either. So it comes down to an appeal question, do you care about little red yellow glossy stickers in your garden?

Posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 1:35 pm under Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.