Sustainability Blog
We Should Rethink the Concept of “Waste”
When you throw something away, where is "away"?
By Contributing Writer, 9-04-09
Composting. The word conjures memories of my childhood in McCall and the habits of a neighborhood family who ate strange all-natural peanut butter and raised rabbits. I was a Jif kid. (My theory that you can determine much about a person by knowing what kind of peanut butter they ate as a child we’ll discuss some other time.)
Boise now has a city-wide recycling program which has eased the burden on our throwaway society by giving us two simple options - put your trash in the grey bin, recyclables in the blue. Idaho is still behind the progress curve, but many kudos to city leadership for making this happen.
Back in 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that 23 percent of U.S. municipal solid waste is composed of yard clippings and food waste. With every paradigm shift (the industrial revolution, computers, and now the green movement) opportunities arise in unlikely places. Many businesses are hiring private companies to haul compostable material away from offices where it is processed and sold for other uses. More progressive companies are devising ways to compost materials onsite, reaping the benefits and cost savings of a closed loop system.
In his book “Cradle to Cradle” William McDonough argues that we must rethink the entire concept of “waste.” His contention is that waste = food, meaning our waste should provide food (input) to either the natural biological cycle or the industrial cycle. The problem is that many products we throw away cannot be easily recycled in either.
During a lecture last spring in Boise, McDonough was asked what individuals can do to change the world. McDonough’s answer: “everyone should compost.”
Not only does composting ease the burden on our over-burdened landfills, but it awakens a new consciousness crucial to our culture. As I hiked in the Sawtooth National Forest last weekend, I came across litter on the trail. At first, I was upset that someone would litter in such a pristine place.
But soon after, my disappointment shifted from the “litterer” to the litter itself. Why do we need a candy wrapper that lasts 500 hundred years? Business school teaches us we need plastic candy wrappers because they create a higher profit margin, which in turn increases shareholder wealth. Increase the cost of the packaging, and the business will lose profit margin. The problem created is a lack of financial incentives for the business to develop an environmentally friendly package. In many cases I’m a strong advocate against mandates and regulation but sometimes they can be an effective mechanism for change when time is a critical factor and industries have little incentive to innovate.
Our country needs a National Packaging Standard that mandates businesses to use biodegradable packaging within five years on both domestic and imported goods. Since ALL businesses would absorb the cost increase, there is no competitive disadvantage to changing. Over time, businesses might save money by being forced to re-think their packaging with financial incentives to use less. Imagine hiking in the woods and being able to throw that candy wrapper on the trail knowing in 10 days it’s gone; eaten by the ants, grubs, and flies. Waste = food.
Our future prosperity as a society will likely depend on our ability to come into balance with the Earth’s natural cycles. We should buy “things” that can be naturally returned to the Earth’s biosphere whenever possible. As you make the change, you might find a funny addiction to seeing how quickly you can fill the compost bin in the backyard.
Restaurants in Boise could lead the way, if they created partnerships to buy biodegradable to-go products in bulk (i.e. straws, forks, plates, to-go containers) so there would be no competitive disadvantage to changing. Over time, the price of the products would go down as economies of scale kicked in. Let’s rally Boise businesses to get rid of the Styrofoam coffee cup and the plastic fork at lunch! No more bottled water! Be that annoying person who keeps asking for real utensils and cups at restaurants even if you know they don’t have them. Most importantly, let’s teach our children about the Earth’s natural cycles by composting.
Ask yourself this: when you throw something away, where is “away”?
Pete Pearson lives in Boise, Idaho and has an MBA in sustainable business from Green Mountain College in Vermont.
Food packaging is a reflection of food safety as litigated by consumers who were harmed by inadequate food protections as spelled out in law, rules, and regulations. Recalls, class action lawsuits, closed plants, all come at great societal cost. How about the users, the consumers, repackaging their food for wilderness adventure? Leave the packaging at home, and have your own re-useable containers and bags.
An upscale grocer, Roth's, in the mid Willamette Valley, each spring sells truck loads of $28 big old plastic composting bins. You get there early and stand in line, and buy one of them, which usually cost more than $60. And then I looked at mine for months. Finally, I set it up and went about using it. I am almost a year into putting my kitchen scraps, all but meat, into the thing. I saves about a can of garbage every other week. I put all the lawn clippings in it. My thinning and pruning and whatever in the flower and vegetable gardens. I put stuff in the damned thing every day. I fill it to the brim. Two days later, I open it and it is down to two thirds full. If I don't mow my unwatered lawn, it goes down more. And there some flowers wane, or I harvest some rhubarb, and those elephant ears and trimmings, spent dahlias, whatever, and it is full again. And I have yet to remove any compost. So where does the damned stuff go?
I looked in it last week, and I had put some rhubarb leaves in it, and the leaves were moving and burbling up and down, and it was all moving. I was afraid to look further. This week I saw giant worms eating a corn cob. Yellow and black maggots of some kind, on it to where it almost looked like replacement kernels of corn. And it was down to just above half full again. And I have still yet to recover any compost.
There are no flies or visible insects hovering around it. I see a robin picking something living out of the air slits in the side. Out of nowhere a giant tomato plant has volunteered. And still the contents just melt into the universe. So I asked a knowing person, my farm agronomist, what goes on in there. He said that most of the stuff is water, and that is in the ground, and the rest of carbon dioxide that is drifting away on the vespers daily. Which brought to mine the question: should I just have the trashman haul my garbage to the landfill, where the same process can occur, or an anaerobic one, and the methane captured and burned to make renewable energy? Is my composter just another source of greenhouse gas that makes us all feel good?
Sincerely, Mystery Compost Man....
It is nice to see a young man thinking about the idiocy of our packaging processes; but tragic to hear such negativity from bearbait.
For the first time in a long time I am thinking positively about the future.
Jay: the packaging process is a result of OUR idiocy. WE demand food safety. YOU are as much of the problem as anyone. And, you only look at the dark side of packaging. The bright side is food safety. Who is being negative?
Bear Bait is not NEGATIVE on composting. I just have observed that all that stuff disappears, and I really do not know where it goes. If I make more greenhouse gases, and thus kill polar bears and make Al Gore richer, I shouldn't be doing it. None who have commented say that is not true.
Does composting impact the airshed? I know it removes bulk from the waste stream, and I am quite content to do that. I now have two composters. The second is devoted to fall leaves. The ones from across the street that kill my lawn, and I must rake and dispose of. So I compost them, or will.
The debris of life, and there is a lot of it, has to go somewhere. We use fossil fuels, which are nothing more than composted biology from eons ago. There has to be a dynamic to all of this, and it should be explained to people. Debris, trash, call it LeRoy, makes no difference. We need food safety, we trash collection, we need recycling. For aesthetic and health reasons if there are not any better answers. My question results from my not being an organic chemist. What happens to all those food scraps and garden trimmings in that composting bin? What is produced, and is it good for the environment? I trust someone can explain the process and the pluses and minuses.
People are implored to "compost", and all I ask is what is the net environmental result. I am NOT being negative. I am being curious. I am asking the teacher a question, and hoping there is a suitable answer, and not just dogma. Obviously, the Obamabright deem to call that being a "wingnut rightwinger." I guess there is nothing but lockstep obeisance to their ideological masters from the other side of the parliamentary aisle. That ain't gonna move the world forward.
Our society is under control of corporate capitalism. Denying that is negative to my way of thinking, bearbait. To accept as a given that our current methods of disposal are acceptable is to me the height of negativity.
Our societal lives are devoted to comfort and convenience. To assume that is the good life is as much a failure as the nearly universal acceptance of the political reality which existed from 2001 to the present.
Slow down their Bearbait. I don't know why Jay's dwelling on the negative, but I hear the questions you're asking, and they're good ones.
What an adventure we're on, eh? It's all happening right there in your back yard and if you get over that squeamishness, you can see it for yourself.
At our place, we've never bothered with a plastic bin, content to make a big heap and turn it very occasionally, give it a little water in the driest part of summer. It sounds like the better aeration from binning it speeds things up, but we're not in a hurry.
I don't know all the biology, but the hand-waving part of my answer is to point out that plants create complex cellular structures for their sun-powered factories, and when microorganisms deconstruct those, they remove the space and the water, and so most of the volume.
As far as the net carbon cycle, it's balanced. The plants took up CO2 to build their leaves, and the deconstructors respire CO2 back out as they work their magic. You can't stop the rain.
When you DO get down to the good stuff at the bottom, unless something is strange and wrong about your community (which I doubt), it will express its goodness directly to your senses: smells, feels, looks good. Added back to the garden, the plants you grow in it will feel the love, and show you they do.
As for packaging, "all things in moderation." Where municipal water supplies provide ample potable water, putting the stuff in bottles is crazy, for example. From water containers to contained in water, as a polymer slurry spinning around in the N. Pacific Gyre... not forever, since it'll come back in the food chain before then.
You are what you eat.
I like the snacks that come out of the ceramic cookie jar, and the bulk bins at the supermarket, and the ones in the produce section that come in their own wrappers, some of which are conveniently edible (and the others go into the compost, of course).
Methane is a much more potent (at least 20x) greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide and not all landfill methane is captured. Composting organics on site (homes or businesses) also saves energy since the material does not need to be transported to the landfill. Plus you end up with something useful and valuable that can support more plant growth (taking carbon out of the air).
Comment By bearbait, 9-05-09Van Alten: space. I never would have thought about that. Let the air and water out of the stuff, and it reduces by half or more.
And I suppose gravity adds to that by compressing the stuff. When I use the tool that you push into the gunk, and it has wings come out when you pull on it, to mix the stuff, I do see stuff that looks a lot like ash or incomplete burning. Maybe that is like the terra prieta (sp?) pyrolized (sp?) organic matter that science is finding where there were native American agricultural successes thousands of years ago. Us farmer types have seen that in our soils in riparian areas where you find obsidian points, beads, and stone tools. We thought is was the crapper spot of old. But a compost pile might also be the same. The idea of using charcoal to make those aluminum based soils of the tropical American rainforest provident is revealing. Some are saying we need to do that to American soils now absent biology and only sustained by chemicals from past bomb making (NKP), that were used as fertilzers. Swords to ploughshares, as it were. Ammonia nitrate, phosphorous, and potassium nitrates growing crops instead of blowing up buildings and people.
Space and water, and gas cycling. That I can understand. Makes sense. But I am not going to wait forever to get more than a couple of scoop shovels full of finished compost. Or am I?
One can buy compost, bare, or one can do as Ruth Stout did.
Buy and use straw as mulch. Throw your carbon based refuse upon the straw and let it compost naturally. Ruth's gardens were amazing and she did not add compost--ever.
...I am not going to wait forever to get more than a couple of scoop shovels full of finished compost. Or am I?
I don't know how long you'll have to wait, because I don't have experience with the bin/mixer setup you have, and because I don't know how much stuff you're disposing of.
But it's "free disposal." That may not be that big a deal with the relatively low cost (and relatively unmetered) trash infrastructure most of us have, but it's a righteous thing to do nonetheless. Getting back to your roots.
What I do know is that for us, it's a steady-state process. The yard waste "goes away" and we have as much compost as we need to enhance the soil in our yard, on an ongoing basis.
I live in one of those rule-obsessed neighborhoods where composting is not allowed unless you have a bin that is completely hidden from view - in the garage, for example. (There is also a no-clotheslines rule. I need to gear up and challenge these silly things.) But we do have a little hidden corner where I've flung stuff this year and done absolutely nothing to it, and it's looking great.
Composting and clotheslines are apparently only for the riffraff. I'm betting that this sort of thing is going to be challenged in neighborhoods more and more. Let's hope so.
Composting and clotheslines are apparently only for the riffraff.It won't be long before these bozoes will be wanting to raise chickens..! Comment By Tom von Alten, 9-06-09
It would be nice to get a definitive dismissal of definitively stupid forms of subdivision covenants.
We don't actually use an outdoor clothesline either, a couple of wood drying racks on the patio, and spreading bigger stuff out in the backyard get the job done. (We do have some line in the basement for a little added capacity in the indoor drying months.)
We also have never known the joy of an actual homeowner's association to enforce what is on the record for our sub. Local "government" is not necessarily better from the stories I hear.
I got a few chickens and because of space contraints, I basically put the coop in the same enclosure as the compost bins. Chickens are terrific at composting! It's so dry here that my compost never really broke down very well, but add chicken shit, and chickens to dig around in it, and it's amazing how quickly those critters make great compost. They also eat everything, including meat scraps (which the books say you shouldn't compost). So, I get garden and kitchen scrap disposal, and compost boosting, and six to seven eggs a day. A perfect system so far ....
Comment By jay, 9-11-09Fowl are probably the finest composting containers one can own.
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