Mostly on Mastodon, but trying out Lemmy and enjoying it a lot.
Thank God you’re not super nitpicky.
It’s a fact published in dozens of websites included official websites of trash management services and companies.
This is not my area of expertise and I won’t look up anything else, but do feel free to do it and inform all those websites about your findings
I first heard this number at a conference by a PhD expert who studies these issues. But I never went looking for the exact origin, because I didn’t find it so hard to believe (given the context).
Certainly there are some specific conditions that freeze that decomposition and that might not always be present. This article mentions the lignin effect, that delays decomposition in anaerobic conditions, but no specific reference to lettuce. Can’t open other articles that seem more directly related.
Hard to believe was what was being asked 😅 the number is present in many websites about trash or composting, but I don’t know it’s exact origin. But I guess at some moment someone digged on a 25 year old landfill and found remains of a lettuce.
Even if this is exaggerating, the moral of the story is that it’s such a waste to send organics to landfills at a time where we’re losing soils at record pace. Food waste should be composted and returned to the soil.
But it’s possible that that lettuce was a fresh and plastic wrapped thrown to the landfill like that, because that does happen as well. And maybe that created optimal conditions to prevent decomposition.
Lettuces in landfills take up to 25 years to decompose.
Can you prove the 8 weeks in landfill claim? With a proper study, I’ll take nothing less after this talk.