How long does it take for paper bags to decompose?

Question

How long does it take for paper bags to decompose?

Answer 1

Correct answer is nobody actually knows...ten thousand years or more, possibly.

Plastics started to be made back in the 1930's.  97% of the plastic EVER made still exsists  on the earth today, as plastic.  What happened to the other 3%?  It was insinerated.

Otherwise every single molecule of plastic that has EVER been created still exsists today.  It's just that much of it has broken down to be too small for the human eye to see....so people assume it has decomposed.  In fact it has not.

When things decompose, the decomposition proccess actually changes the molecular make-up of the item.  So something like a leaf, or a road kill animal breaks down into all of the eliments that made it up.  It is no longer the same item it was before decomposition.

Plastic on the other hand is EXACTLY the same item...it just continues to break up into small and smaller particles that are still the original plastic that it first was.

Why is this a big deal?  Because most life that keeps the earth healthy, vibrant, and thriving is not what we can see walking, flying or swimming around.  It's at the microscopic level.  Without these microscopic organisms life on earth as we know it would completely cease to be.....and these microscopic organisms are eating the microscopic bits of plastic....and it bloocks them up so they die.

Click on this link, and scroll down to Chapt 9 (Polymers are forever!).

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/toc.html

The author Alan Weisman has graciously allowed people to read that chapeter for free....it is really eye opening.

~Garnet

Homesteading/Farming over 20 years

P.S.  Please remember, just because you can no longer see something, does not mean it is no longer there.  You cannot see the cold and flu germs that make you ill....you cannot see gravity, yet if you jumped out of a tree do you think gravity would fail to affect you just because it is invisible?

P.P.S.  I completely failed  in reading!!!!  ~sheesh~  I read your word "paper" as "plastic."  I'm still going to leave this answer up, since people need to know about plastics.  However to answer your question about PAPER, properly, the answer is "it depends."  

Do you live in a damp area, and is the bag exposed to the eliments, including sunlight, and rain?  In the Pacific Northwest, I've seen PAPER bags decompose and slime away in about a week, in the well Falls they have there.  Burried underground, like in a landfill?  Paper can last a shockingly long time.  They can go to old landfills, and dig up newspapers from World War I (one) which are still readable!

Lack of oxygen and proper bacterial growth to break the paper down in those places.  Still, paper is paper, it will eventually break down and is not harmful to the environment, unlike plastics.

Answer 2

if you are talking about the big paper bags that you can use for leaves or other yard waste about 4 months in an active compost pile.Buy keeping the pile moist and actively turning it the bags compost about the same length of time as other organic matter