Unfortunately, one of my family members is allergic/asthmatic and this comes with enormous consumption of paper tissues.
We're very conscious of the fact that this is an unnecessary strain on the environment.
We already stay away from the small packs, and only opt for tissues made of recycled paper and packed in easily recyclable packaging, but that's still a lot of trash.
So I started looking at the degradation times for tissues, and on ecowarriors.it page I've found the following list (I've sorted it according to time):
Average waste natural degradation time in the soil:
Waste material | Time to degrade |
---|---|
A cardboard box | 2 months |
An apple core | 3 months |
Paper tissues and napkins | 3 months |
Matches | 6 months |
Newspapers | 6 months |
A cotton or woollen garment | 1 year |
A milk or juice carton | 1 year |
A cigarette end | 1-2 years |
Chewing-gum | 5 years |
Magazines | over 10 years |
An aluminium can for drinks | 10-100 years |
Telephone and top-ups cards | over 100 years |
A glass bottle | about 400 years |
A disposable diaper | circa 400 years |
A plastic bottle or bag | 100-1000 years |
Plastic dishes and cutlery | 100-1000 years |
A polystyrene case | over 1000 years |
I think the colours are pretty self-explanatory.
And since tissues land in 3 months green category, we've decided to place them simply into our compost box.
As my husband said: "We'll return our bacteria to the environment ;)"
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