http://www.nyccompost.org/how/materials.html#materials

These folks call it a green.

Mine are white. vbg etc.

Here is a link that might be useful: curious link - has cornstarch in

I figured that the bio-peanuts should fall into the same category as old pasta/bread/rice. (Right?) So I looked those up and, wouldn't you know it, I found conflicting information! (Thanks Google. Grrr!) The FAQ for this forum does not seem to mention pasta/rice.

Falling back on my high school biology, I have to agree with Alfie here. Starches are complex carbohydrates, i.e. carbon and hydrogen. I'm calling it for Team BROWN!

It’s a carbon rich brown

I know this is an old thread but for unrelated reasons, been thinking about this too.

My answer - or my hypothesis anyway - is that 'dietary' (human diet) carbohydrates (sugars, pastas, some breads, etc) are mostly being lumped in as 'greens' even when they don't fit the strict C:N framework yard waste is generally looked at in. And I think that's because these starches and sugars are so easily digested that they cause a burst of microbial activity (who mostly bring their own nitrogen i.e. proteins to the party and reproduce like mad, get eaten, return their proteins to the pile as urea, etc). So even if pouring straight sugar onto your compost pile doesn't directly add any nitrogen, it acts more like a green.

And if you look at the ways compost manuals talk about the C, it's focussed much more on the cellulose and lignin. The carbs we eat just behave differently (I think part of it is their relative solubility but out of my area of expertise).

Or in a dietary comparison: the 'starches' are not the relevant C, but the dietary fibre - the parts human digestive systems mostly can't directly break down, that's the analogue to the 'compost C.' Let's call it compost fibre, since it's not so much the elemental C that impacts how different materials act in a normal compost pile.

Caveats: some foods like breads do have more protein in them than we tend to think. It'll depend on what the 'biodegradable things' are actually made of.

Other part of this hypothesis might be that because more soluble, they don't keep any structure in pile and act like a lot of the wet greens too, most of which break down faster.

Starches are just polymerized sugars. They break down rather easily - which is why if you chew something starchy a little longer, it will start to taste sweet. Enzymes in your saliva are already doing the job.

Generally 'food waste' is considered green overall, but I don't know why anyone would consider pure starch a green. Now, some starchy foods do have some protein. For example, whole grain does. Wheat gluten is just protein. Proteins contain nitrogen. But it's a bit of a stretch IMO.

Data sources say rice is about 5-10% protein by weight, and whole wheat is more like 12-13%. So there's some. I don't know what the C:N ratios are though. But if I was putting a cup of rice into my compost bin it wouldn't be enough to matter either way.