Wasting Compost

I have attended my fair share of sustainability events throughout my life, and an event is not never complete without food. And as always, I crack a smile when the silverware, plates, and napkins are biodegradable and compostable. However, my smile fades a little when I realize (again) that 99.99% of these biodegradable and compostable materials at this particular event will end up in a landfill, many miles away from where I was currently scoping appetizers into my mouth.

In the meantime, in a land not so far away, San Fransciscians are happily eating off their compostable plates that will actually be composted. 

San Francisco was one of the first cities in the United states with curbside composting in 1996 when a study found that more than one third of the city’s landfill waste could be compostable. Today, the city diverts nearly 78% of it’s landfill waste through recycling and composting services.  Most Americans can recognize the black bin for trash, and the blue bin for recycles, but only the privileged can roll out their green compost bins for curbside pickup. The city provides residents with green wheel-able bins with lids to increase the ease of moving bins from the house to the curb. Information is scattered through neighborhoods with flyers in English, Spanish, and Chinese (know your audience!), that explains what items can and cannot go into the green bins, and perhaps  suggest the recycling bin, waste bin, or electronic recyclable center.  The city even has an educational component introducing the Food to Flowers program in schools that encourages students to compost their school lunches. Ultimately San Francisco is striving for a zero-waste goal by 2020. 

So if San Francisco can do curbside recycling, divert over three quarters of their waste from landfills, save valuable money and space, and still want to be zero-waste in less than ten years, why is it so difficult for all other major cities in the country to do the same thing? Well, it hasn’t been that hard.  Nearly 100 cities in the United States now have curbside composing including Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, and Boulder, CO.  But there are still many cities that do not offer curbside composting.

Why?

Politics (Surprised?). Politics is not the only answer, but a pretty dominant reason why.  The trash hauling industry, mostly led by the Waste Management company, makes a lot of money. The garbage company make $3.46 billion in revenue just in their second quarter of 2012. And how do these people make money? By hauling away as much trash as they can humanly possible haul away. The more the merrier. And with all these billions of dollars in revenue, the least Waste Management can do is give money to state politicians, who happen to lobby to keep yard wastes and recyclables  in landfills. Of course, Waste Management has argued that their business model is NOT about “the more the merrier”, and points to their methane capture systems can be one of the ways to best use organicmaterials in landfills. However, such methane capture systems are not active until several years after recyclables and compostable materials have already began building up- wasted years food scrapes and yard clippings that could have been composted and returned back to the soil from the very beginning. 

But have no fear. Even if your city does not offer curbside composting, composting is relatively simple to do indoors and outdoors. Most residents with limited spaces can buy plastic bins, and fill the bin up with newspaper, food scrapes, and worms. Even New Yorkers can do it in their miniscule apartments! For those who are financially endowed,  Nature Mill’s line of automatic bins look phenomenal. For the price of $250- $400, the compost bin heats, aerates, and turns an upper chamber. The compost is then dumped into a lower chamber where any individual can pull out a tray full of nutritious fertilizer. Now the question is what to do with all that fertilizer!

Composting needs to be viewed as the norm in most cities and states in the country, which is unlikely to happen because curbside recycling isn’t even available in all major cities. But that doesn’t stop people from recycling. The same should go for composting. After all, compostable plates should be composted, not tossed as Frisbees onto towering landfills.