I really didn't know that peanuts are now biodegradable. They melt when water hits them, so if this is the kind you are using, they won't do what you expect. I used some inside of planting sleeves around my grapevines last year to help insulate them from the heat, and when the water hit them, they melted!! I had no clue they are now biodegradable! Read that post here in this forum about the SWC from Mexico. Those folks put leaves and grass cuttings in the container, and it makes it much lighter, and the dirt doesn't sift down into that. They don't use a drain on the bottom, but put a drain on the side, so there is a water reservoir that gives humidity to the pot. I think it's pretty interesting as a concept. Suzi

the corn starch ones look like a corn curl chip(cheese puff). The plastic ones look like an S. I can't say I have ever seen a plastic one that looks like a cheese puff. If I am not sure I will put them in a bucket and pour water over them. If they melt it goes into the compost. They have been out for years, I am thinking the first time I seen them was around 13 years ago when we were at Disney. The kids were making sculptures out of them, wet a dot and it will stick to the next one. Was tons of fun. Sandy

The cornstarch ones are usually tubular, not S shaped and tend to not snap when you break them. They also tend to flatten when you squish them, instead of compressing and springing to their original shape.

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.