Part 2 of Marion Vigot’s Interview
In Part 2 of our conversation with sustainability trailblazer Marion Vigot, we dive deeper into what drives her mission. She shares why impact entrepreneurship is at the heart of her work, her passion for developing compostable packaging, and why she believes composting is one of the most important pillars of sustainability.
Marion and her partner Alexis are “Regentrepreneurs on the road leading the Compost Revolution”. Regentrepreneurs are entrepreneurs that care about regenerative development and regenerative sustainability, also known as impact entrepreneurs. They are travelling Australia in a converted bus, meeting with cafes and sharing their story, their certified home compostable packaging solutions, and advocating for reuse via Responsible Cafes. Marion’s dedication shines through as she explains how small changes, like rethinking packaging and embracing composting, can make a big difference for the planet.
In this post we will talk all about compostable packaging, impact entrepreneurship, go over what happens to compostable items in landfill and are how commercially compostable items work, as well as touch on compost types.
Also don’t forget to check out Part 1 of our interview where we talk about how Compostable Alternative’s started, Marion’s story, the compostable packaging products themselves and the bus journey.
Podcast Interview Marion Vigot Part 2 – Video & Audio Version
But First, What is Impact Entrepreneurship?
Impact entrepreneurship is the practice of building a business that exists not just to generate profit, but to create measurable, positive outcomes for society and for the environment. It’s about using your business to address urgent global challenges such as addressing plastic waste, or innovative ideas to do with regenerative sustainability.
Unlike traditional business models, which often view financial return as the primary measure of success, impact entrepreneurship redefines what success looks like. Sure, financial sustainability is important as we want a business to survive and grow, but it sits alongside equally important measures such as reducing carbon emissions, supporting community livelihoods, improving wellbeing, and advancing sustainable alternatives.
What makes impact entrepreneurship particularly powerful is its ripple effect. These businesses can often inspire shifts across entire industries, influencing consumer behaviour, encouraging sustainable supply chains, and setting new standards for corporate social responsibility. They also play a role in empowering people, by educating customers and other businesses on more sustainable choices.
Impact entrepreneurship is about reimagining business as a force for good. It challenges the old model of profit at any cost and replaces it with a more future focused approach. By aligning financial sustainability with social responsibility and environmental stewardship, impact entrepreneurs show that business can be part of the solution.
For Marion, it is at the heart of everything she does. Founding Compostable Alternatives and championing Responsible Cafes, her work demonstrates how purpose driven businesses can reduce waste, challenge the way we see packaging, and inspire others to see composting as a vital part of building a sustainable future.
About Marion and Her Compostable Packaging
Marion Vigot is a passionate impact entrepreneur whose mission is to make sustainability practical, accessible, and inspiring. With her partner Alexis and their business, Compostable Alternatives, she provides compostable packaging solutions that reduce reliance on single use coffee cups and other packaging, and helps cafes transition towards greener practices.
Compostable Alternatives has all their products certified home compostable and they break down in a matter of weeks in your home compost bin. They have coffee cups and lids, gloves, straws, paper bags, bin liners, napkins, carry trays, and take away food containers. You can also order a customised ink pad so that you don’t have to use stickers anymore.
For Marion, compostable packaging is not just a product, it’s part of a much bigger vision of creating a circular economy where waste is minimised and resources are given back to the earth.
She believes that packaging should never outlive its purpose, and that businesses have a responsibility to consider the end of life of every product they use. By offering packaging that is certified home compostable and breaks down naturally and returns to the soil, Marion empowers cafés, restaurants, and organisations to make choices that align with their values.
Her approach is as much about education as it is about products, as she works closely with communities and business owners to spread awareness of how simple changes can have a powerful impact.
While Marion’s work with Responsible Cafes and Compostable Alternatives encourages reuse and home composting, it also highlights an important reality: not all compostable packaging ends up where it should.
It is important to understand the end of life of all the products we use, if they can be recycled, and if they can be composted; and generally what happens to things after we throw them away. Most coffee cups cannot be recycled in Australia, and end up in landfill. This is true of most other packaging. Some items are labelled as compostable, but still end up in landfill. Read more about all of this in Part 1 of our interview with Marion.
Understanding what happens to compostable packaging in landfill is crucial too, because even the most eco-friendly materials can have limited impact if they aren’t disposed of correctly. By exploring this, we can see why initiatives that promote proper composting, both at home and in businesses, are essential for reducing waste and protecting the environment.
What Happens to Compostable Items in Landfill?
Marion told us what happens to compostable items in landfill, but before we can understand how that works, first we need to understand the difference between compost, composting and biodegradation.
Composting means that a material is going to be transformed into compost through a mix of oxygen, moisture and a range of different microbial activity. This decomposition process turns compostable stuff (like food scraps, garden waste, and home compostable coffee cups), into compost. Compost is a soil-like material that is full of nutrients, it is sometimes called humus and it is like gold for your garden. Learn more about compost and composting in our composting facts blog here.
Biodegradation is the natural process where microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi break down materials into water, carbon dioxide, and organic matter. Everything in life biodegrades and breaks down over time. Not all materials, even though they may biodegrade over time, are environmentally friendly, like plastic. So ‘biodegradable’ just means ‘it will break down’.
Composting, on the other hand, is a specific form of biodegradation that happens under controlled conditions, where the balance of oxygen, moisture, and heat is managed to turn food scraps, garden waste, and other compostable items into nutrient-rich soil. In other words, all composting is biodegradation, but not all biodegradation is composting. The difference lies in the fact that composting is intentional and creates a valuable end product that improves soil health and supports sustainability.
So what happens to compostable items in landfill? A landfill site is basically a hole in the ground, and everything just goes in: household waste, wood, metal, rusty things, anything, and there’s basically no microbial activity in that setup at all. There is no oxygen or moisture either, so the conditions are just not there for a product to become compost. Landfill is made for storage, not breakdown.
Everything in a landfill site (and everything in life) will all biodegrade over time, and in a thousand years there will probably be a reduction of what has been put in the landfill site, but it won’t become compost. But the specific word composting means that a product will biodegrade over a very specific timeframe, usually a matter of months. Biodegradation on the other hand can take a thousand years.
Every time you see a product that says biodegradable on it, you have to remember that everything is biodegradable in life. People trick us by writing stuff like that, it’s marketing, making us believe that it will break down quickly, but it won’t, and writing “biodegradable” on there doesn’t mean that it’s a good product.
So compostable items in landfill will biodegrade over time, but they will not become compost. And you’re not going to be able to reuse that compost in order to create new value either, which is the main purpose of compostable packaging and products.
If you dispose of compostable items in landfill, and compare that to a plastic product in landfill, yes the biodegradation time is probably going to be shorter. But that is not the point, compostable products have been created to be composted. If they are not composted, we are missing the point, because they are not being transformed into compost therefore you can’t use the compost to grow food or to garden.
What About Commercially Compostable Items?
Marion told us that commercially compostable items are technically compostable, but they require a specific set of conditions, and need a special facility, and unfortunately these cannot be found everywhere in Australia. Only about 10% of councils in Australia have access to a composting facility that will accept compostable packaging.
There are many composting facilities in Australia, the problem is most of them accept either only garden waste, or garden waste and food waste. There are very few that accept garden waste, food waste and compostable packaging.
So just to be clear, a product that is certified home compostable, has to be certified commercially compostable first. The home composting certification is a level higher than the commercially compostable certification. So if there is an industrial facility that accepts commercially compostable items, they will also accept home compostable items.
There are many reasons for this, one is the time frame of the biodegradation process, another is the possible presence of contaminants and there are many other reasons. But the point is very few of them accept compostable packaging in Australia, and the fact that we see so much compostable packaging being sold out there that requires those special industrial facilities in order to become compost means that we have kind of missed the point.
We have launched products that are not suited for all environments and we have given a solution that could not be processed throughout Australia. So some people think it’s a good solution but they don’t realise that it’s only a good solution if it’s processed in the right facility.
If no one is collecting those containers, and taking them to the special facilities, and instead just putting them in a landfill bin, then they are going to landfill.
It should be the responsibility of the people selling those products to make sure that they have an end of life option, and a pathway to becoming compost, which is easily accessible for people who want to purchase those products.
This is what Marion and Alexis are trying to do with our roadshow, we are making sure that the cafes we are speaking to have access to composting to be able to compost our home compostable packaging. Whether this is home composting, or if they are in a location with access to a commercial composting facility. We always make sure they know where the products can go at their end of life. For more info on this, make sure to check out Marion’s blog about understanding compostable packaging here.
Many brands don’t do that side of the education, they just sell an “eco friendly” product, without specifying anything about how to make sure that it’s safely disposed of and how to make sure it becomes compost in the end. Which is another problem of the economy of scale, which is the goal to grow a business, sell as many products as possible, and get as many customers as possible. Once the product is sold, it’s not the business’s problem anymore, and the onus falls on the consumer to find the right end of life, and most of us don’t even realise this.
Can My Home Compostable Items Go In The Green Bin?
Many councils in Australia, especially rural ones, don’t even have a green bin, but if you do have a green bin, you need to check with your specific council to know if your home compostable coffee cups or other home compostable packaging can go in there.
There are very few councils that accept compostable packaging in the green bins, and if they can’t go in the green bin, then they have to go to landfill, which defeats the purpose of buying home compostable packaging. But the home compostable packaging can be composted in your own compost bin, which is the main idea and the name of the game!
The main idea is that either at home or at work (if your work does composting), you can safely put Marion’s home compostable packaging sold at Compostable Alternatives right in the compost bin or worm farm. Within 10 to 24 weeks, the products will be completely composted. It is very empowering for people as they get to see how it works, they drink their coffee, they get home or get to their local community garden that does composting and they dispose of their cup in the compost.
They come back a few days or a few weeks later, and they get to see that product completely breaking down. Then they can use the compost to grow tomatoes for the season for example. How empowering to feel that you’ve broken down your own waste and reused it to grow something new.
Compost Types For You To Choose From
When people use Marion’s compostable packaging products, she wants them to feel that home composting is achievable, easy, accessible, and anyone can do it, no matter where they live in Australia. And no matter what set up you have as well, because there are a lot of different compost types that might be near you. Check out Marion’s blog about compost types here to get you started.
There are many different ways that home composting can be done. Compost types or choices may include doing composting in your own garden, say a compost heap, bin, tumbler or worm farm.
If you don’t have access to a garden, say you’re in an apartment, and have a balcony, you can compost in a garden bed system. It’s off the ground and you can compost in there and grow little herbs for your kitchen needs. You can also use bokashi composting, which is a bucket that ferments your food waste. With the addition of a special bacteria, you will create bokashi juice, a highly concentrated fertiliser.
You can also jump onto the Share Waste app, which is an app that links people that have compost, with people that want to compost. There are thousands of users, and lots of people that are accepting waste from their neighbours and creating a local ecosystem.
The other option is simply burying your food waste in soil, which is also called direct burial, which is what Marion is currently doing on the bus. As she is travelling and staying at a lot of national parts and out in nature, it makes sense. The waste composts within the same time frame because the microbial activity, moisture and oxygen are there in the ground. On the bus they don’t have space to have a composting system and it is complicated for them to deal with waste.
So whenever Marion stops the bus in an environment that has soil, which is pretty much everywhere, she can bury their food waste and organic waste, and it will compost right there in the soil. That’s the thing with home compostable packaging products, and any home compost in general, they don’t require a lot of processes. You just have to make sure the nitrogen and carbon ratio is similar. You don’t have to take care of it every day, it’s a natural process, it’s what happens every day in nature.
Like when you go on a hike and you see tree leaves falling down, there might be dead animals, the composting process is very similar, nature does it on its own. So it’s actually pretty easy to make sure that your products are going to compost with direct burial.
Worm farming is very contained and accessible as well, whether you have a garden or not. Marion is looking to do this on the bus one day. On the bus, making a worm farm that works on the road in Marion’s personal project. They have such a small space on the bus, and there are times that they are not in nature and can’t do direct burial so there are times it can be difficult to manage organic waste properly.
Marion hasn’t seen a composting system on the market that is small enough to fit in such a small space and still be efficient. She is looking to build a worm farm that would suit the two of them. Maybe this idea would help a lot of travellers, as many travellers find that composting is in the too hard basket.
Many people don’t dare to do direct burial, as it can feel a bit strange, digging a hole to put your organic waste in. If anyone sees you doing it they don’t know what kind of waste you are burying. And you wouldn’t do it in a city park; there are only some locations where you can do it, such as a large national park.
They decided not to have composting toilets in the bus as well, mainly for space reasons. Because they are living and working in the bus they needed to proritise the space. The other reason is maintenance, there are things you need to add in there and chemicals, and managing it and emptying it. It was too much of a burden and in Australia there is a lot of access to public toilets, so a composting toilet was unnecessary.
In part 3 of her interview, we will go through her work with Responsible Cafes and the importance of reuse culture. In part 1, we talked about how Compostable Alternatives started, Marion’s story, the compostable packaging products themselves and the bus journey.
