I use those cornstarch compost bags to make our compost pail a bit easier to clean, but I'm not convinced they are actually compostable. Maybe it's my horrible non-cooking compost, but this bag has been in the pile for quite some time and seems to be in pretty good shape. I fear that it's not going to break down for another year or two. I suppose that's better than the hundreds of years that some scientists think it would take for plastic to degrade.
Someone sent me a book in biodegradable bubble wrap last May and I dutifully brought it (the bubble wrap, not the textbook) home from work and threw it on the compost. I found it, in pristine shape, last week when I redid my compost. I'm afraid the manufacturers of bio plastic worry too much about performance and not enough about degradability. Which reminds me of a great book, Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which describes how long all our crap would continue mucking up the earth if human beings disappeared tomorrow. Highly recommended.
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