Composting Nitrile Gloves

I wear nitrile gloves mostly to keep the skin on my hands intact.  I make an effective barrier cream type lotion but still sometimes need the gloves, which I wear and re-wear until they tear or are contaminated.  I wear them under my leather work gloves as well as on their own.

I needed to replace my box, and there in the hardware store, I found a box marked “biodegradable”.  

Say what?!!

I read every word on the box and decided they would be worth a try.  They’re not going to be worse than the regular nitrile gloves.

“Accelerated biodegradation in biologically active landfill”.

Doesn’t that sound like composting?

I wore the first ones today, and they feel good, seem to be the same glove….

So for now I’m looking for where to create my biologically active environment.

I think I will try to encourage a fungal rich pile of sticks and leaves, and inoculate with various rotting branches, soil, leaves, samples collected from all around, including compost… I need one any way.  We seem to be having an open winter, so although it’s scary to think about the coming summer, it won’t be too hard to gather organism rich substances.

And I will be collecting my  used glove fragments.

I wonder, does anyone feel inclined to join this experiment, or care to venture any theories or guesses how to enhance and accelerate the decomposition of my nitrile gloves?

These gloves have piqued my interest so I did a little digging.

The company Showa claims that the gloves break down in between one to five years in an "active landfill" instead of a hundred years that a normal nitrile glove would take.

My first question is what is an active landfill?

From my scrolling, an active landfill might also be known as a bioreactor landfill. This is a solid waste landfill where liquid is introduced to encourage bacteria to breakdown materials. These kind of landfills prioritize breaking down organic/biodegradable waste. Some of these landfills will also introduce air into the system to help speed of the process. Bioreactor landfills can utilize processes that are aerobic, anaerobic, or a hybrid of the two.

I'm hoping to find some literature on the tests used on the gloves to measure their biodegradability but having no luck so far.

Thanks, Tim.  A whole new set of things to think about.  That process sounds more like industrial processing than composting.  Now I am wondering if that is how those “compostable” plastic cutlery and cups are broken down.  I would have preferred a new word for a process like that


I have been wondering if it would speed the start of the decomposition if I devised a way to expose the used gloves to sunlight.  It’s pretty intense in these high elevation arid conditions.

I think the word 'biodegradable' that the packaging uses is misleading.
Doesn't that mean they just break down into smaller and smaller particles not really decompose?

Hi Judith,

That is my question. Plastic will break down…into smaller pieces of plastic.  

I too was curious so I ask Mr. Google who said,

but some newer "biodegradable nitrile gloves" use additives to speed up breakdown in landfills, though they still degrade into microplastics, not fully disappear.

Ach!  You think the nitrile doesn’t do anything but break into smaller bits of nitrile?  I thought it was going to separate into component molecules or compounds ready to be re-utilized by some other organism.  I thought that’s what biodegradable means!?

Where can I find out more about that?

I see “mr google” was consulted, but isn’t that “AI”?  AI has been shown to “hallucinate”, or fabricate erroneous information, and as a search engine, google has deteriorated significantly in the last 10 years.  IMO.

All it takes is for some bloggers or influencers to utilize “biodegradable” to mean this new thing, and AI will quote or utilize it as such, and the word  becomes the new version of itself.  

I would be very discouraged if “biodegradable” has come to mean just turning in to microscopic particles of the same substance.

And, if that is so, what’s the new word we can use to communicate the meaning “biodegradable” used to carry:   Restoring carbon compounds to molecular components utilizable by other living organisms in their life processes?  Or have we reached the point we no longer need or want to communicate about that specific idea?

Wow, it’s going to take some time for me to assimilate this new (to me) further degradation of our language, and restore my optimism and positive attitude!  Disillusionment can be so painful.

Maybe I need to head over to the aging homesteader thread…. commiserate with fellow seniors who also are experiencing the mounting losses of this life stage.

Since it has an ASTM standard listed, one can look it up here:

https://store.astm.org/d5526-12.html

Of note, they use an anaerobic testing, and the percentage on the box simply shows how much carbon escaped/degraded into gas by the end of the test.

1.3 This test method is designed to produce partially degraded mixtures of municipal solid waste and plastics that can be used to assess the ecotoxicological risks associated with the anaerobic degradation of plastics after various stages of anaerobic biodegradation in a landfill.

1.2 This test method is designed to yield a percentage of conversion of carbon in the sample to carbon in the gaseous form under conditions that resemble landfill conditions.

Edit to add: So your proposed definition "Restoring carbon compounds to molecular components utilizable by living organisms in their life processes" probably works in this case if the material degrades to CO2. At least 82% of the glove.

Wow, George, that was fast!

I might be ready to abandon this project.  If I expose the material to sunlight, will that make it unavailable to the anaerobic process?  Too hard to read all the variables.

Weeding and dreaming, or chopping wood or observing the animal behavior of my mixed species barn yard community is so much more supportive of my health than confronting these processes. 🙏