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. 

I have a bike!

Okay- so I cheated a tiny bit. Instead of rummaging around through the array of parts from the community bike project, the very generous Amber volunteered to give me her bike to play with. She was going to donate it to the bike project, but instead I decided I should give it a home with all its limbs before someone at the project disassembled all its parts.

It’s very different from the bike I’ve been ‘practicing’ on. This bike is a road bike, as opposed to the mountain bike I was riding earlier in the summer. This means, the tires are tiny (how in the world are those tires going to balance my entire body??), and the handle bars are more narrow to create a more streamline feel (I’m going to pretend I’m a piece of paper refusing to fly away with the wind).

Other than getting used to riding a new bike, there are a few things that  need to be done. The bike only has a front brake, and I need a back brake. I’m already working tremendously hard to learn how to brake accurately (bias the back brake over the front brake, completely stop before dismounting, etc), so it’ll be nice to get those back stoppers.  The bike is also in a fixed gear, and I have the option to mount a derailleur (or two) and give a little more oompf when I need to get on those hills. Other than that, there is nothing I absolutely have to do on the bike. I’m just excited to start biking around the city.

And 4 days later…

I rode my bike to school! I had anticipated to work on the bike after classes at the Bloomington Bike Community and I reckoned it was necessary to actually have the bike when I did the work that needed to be done. So after my helmet was strapped on, Scott and I began the trip NOT on tenth street. I only live about 1.5 miles east of SPEA on 10^th, but there is nothing more reassuring to hear that there are paths I can ride that do not involve crossing the bypass and construction haven. I ventured through the ‘hills’ of Bloomington, the zooming cyclists (without helmets!), and the slight bumps on the road that seem to appear just when I’m a foot away  and aren’t so slight  when I have to go over it. However, I did manage to follow stop signs and hit a couple of posts to avoid crashing into people or the ground, but other than that, I remained unscathed. And I feel pretty good about it.

I did not make it to the bike project today but I will be there on Wednesday (and probably subsequent Wednesdays), as I have been in the last couple of weeks. Find me there!

Inspirations

Billboards in NYC for the launch of BikeNYC.org in July 2012

Day 1: Volunteering

On Wednesday afternoon, I dove right into the bike community project by disassembling my first bike. Their mentality: if you can take apart a bike, you can build it back together again. So wheels were taken apart. Wrenches were turned and dropped (thankfully not on feet). Time was spent looking for the fitting hex keys. Various other tools used to turn, crank, and jiggle to disassemble the bike to its bare frame. Success was measured through bike grease smeared all over my hands at the end of the day.

I will attempt to volunteer at the shop weekly to pick up as much bike knowledge as possibly before assembling my bike.  But I’m still going to do my homework before then. I turned nuts but why was that nut attached to that bolt? That cable came from where? Hopefully I can get a solid bike background before I go back and really understand what I’m disassembling. Until next time, bike grease. 

Personal Project: Becoming a Biker

Whenever someone asks me where I’m from, I can proudly say I’m from New York City. But growing up in the city meant that I walked everywhere… and biked nowhere. “Hi, my name is Mary and I’m from NYC, and I don’t know how to ride a bike.” So as my personal project, I will learn how to ride the bike, and to get there, I will be apart of the Bloomington Community Bike Project.

If the Statue of Liberty can ride her bike, so can I

I have ridden a bike before in my life. I biked for fun when I was about ten years ago, and then I stopped. The last time I got on a bike was actually in May to see if I can incorporate another form of exercising. Yes, it has been about 13 years since I’ve sat on a bike seat, but it can’t be that difficult. Like everyone says: “It’s like riding a bike”. Well, for me, it was NOT like riding a bike. I fell off. Multiple times. Scars to prove it. I was running out of knee skin.

But now I’m back and more determined than ever to become a biker.  First stop, the Bloomington Community Bike Project. The project is a completely non-profit, volunteer run organization that allows anyone to ‘Earn-A-Bike’ through volunteering, or ‘Buy-A-Bike’. I will attempt to earn a bike by putting in a minimum of three volunteer hours in the shop, while learning everything bike-related, and at the end of those hours, I will get to build my own bike! There is a lot of anticipation to actually build a structure that can transport a person from one place to another. So I’m very excited to start learning and putting pieces together. Now just to get past the fear of getting back on the bike…. I am and will be as resilient as those little kids with the training wheels and kneepads. Except I won’t have a 4-wheel bike and I will be more than 3 feet off the ground. But I will be resilient. Stay tuned for the bike learning, building, and riding, and not falling!