Produce Stickers - A small but mighty problem

Plastic produce stickers are ubiquitous. Used on a variety of produce, the stickers are helpful at checkout because they carry important information: price look-up codes, or PLU codes. The International Federation for Produce Standards determines these PLU codes, which have been in use since 1990, with 1400+ codes assigned. 

While most PLU stickers are about the size of a quarter, these little plastic stickers pose a huge issue for composters processing food waste.

Produce stickers are also a very common contaminant in the residential food waste stream, since consumers may not remember to remove them from peels and skins. Many composters choose to continuously remind consumers to remove them.

Because produce stickers are small, they cannot be removed with the equipment that is often used to remove other types of contaminants, such as Trommel screens or depackaging equipment. In some cases, composters dedicate staff resources to manually remove items with stickers. When plastic produce stickers end up in the finished compost, they are both a visual contaminant and a microplastic.