North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Mar 11, 2005, at 7:09 AM, Jim Fruth wrote:

> >     On March 10th, Mark Wessel asked, "Does anyone know if there is a
> > biodegradable tape you can use with the
> > Max Tapener??"
>
>     Contact Mary Jo Thaden at mdtgrow@juno.com
>
> Jim Fruth
> Pequot Lakes, MN

I don't know what she has available; but depending on your degree of 
concern about this, you may want to double check what it biodegrades 
into. A lot of "biodegradable" materials on the market break down into 
bits, but the bits may be long-term persistent, and/or the compounds 
that make up the material may include various materials you don't want. 
Whether you're going to wind up with enough to be a problem from a 
tapener is another question. But I don't know whether you want the tape 
biodegradable for organic certification purposes (if so, check with 
your certifier), or if you just don't want to have to cut it back off 
before it girdles.

Some years ago there was a "biodegradable" plastic mulch on the market 
(it may still be around, I don't know). I asked to see the studies; it 
turned out that they had been able to get about 5% or 10% breakdown 
annually by keeping the material in greenhouse temperature conditions 
and stirring extra microbes into the soil. It came apart into little 
pieces a lot faster than that, of course -- those are the figures for 
disintegration into molecular components; but that's what they were 
advertising it as doing.  And to top that, the study wasn't even done 
on the material they were selling, but on a "similar" material (what 
the differences were, they didn't say).

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly