What+is+Biodegradable

Rate of breakdown may not be as important as what the product breaks down into. The ideal final products of any complex product of Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen would be Carbon Dioxide(CO2) and Water (H2O). A majority of products are made mostly of these three elements. The previously mentioned piece of bread is made mostly of these, and after breaking down from complex sugars to simpler sugars, will eventually degrade to CO2 and H2O. This process would be accelerated if we ate the bread and our body would break it down and use it as energy, until only CO2 and H2O are left. In a perfect would all products would break down to CO2 and H2O. It gets more complicated with different chemicals. The banned pesticide DDT, is hazardous and toxic in its own right. It does biodegrade, rather slowly. The problem is that its breakdown products of DDD and DDE are even more toxic and dangerous than the original DDT.
 * T**he claim biodegradable is often associated with environmentally friendly products. What exactly does this mean? I would define it as being able to be broken down by natural processes, into more basic components. Products are usually broken down by bacteria, fungi or other simple organisms. By this definition, most chemicals are biodegradable; the only thing differing would be the amount of time it takes to break down. A piece of bread will break down rather quickly, whereas a piece of plastic will take decades and beyond.

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Biodegradable

'Bio' means life, as in biology is the scientific study of life, and degradable means to break down. So basically Biodegradable means to break down naturally. You can also break something down chemically, with acidic substances, but that isn't biodegrading because doing it with man-made chemicals is breaking something down in a way that isn't natural. The way biodegrading works is that, if you for example bury an apple core in your backyard, the bacteria eats away at the core until there is nothing left. This can also work with cardboard and plants. Those things are biodegradable. But some things that are not biodegradable is plastic. It is man-made and cannot be broken down. That is part of the reason that plastic is so enviromentally un-friendly.