A Toast To Compost (Working Title)
In the 2008 Pixar film, WALL-E, a sweet little robot trash compactor learns about life, love, and personal responsibility on an Earth which has become uninhabitable because of all the trash humans had created, causing them to flee the planet. Aboard the vessel originally meant to carry Earthlings for a mere seven years while the trash-compacting robots do the dirty work, the Axiom, WALL-E learns that the viability of Earth as a home for living things depends on the people who live on it—they are responsible for its condition, and should serve as stewards to the land if they intend to live off of it. While there is roughly a 20 to 50 year span between now and a landfill crisis in the United States alone, what impact human consumption and the subsequent waste created have on the planet is a legitimate concern (Weeks, 2011). More important, though, is what society intends to do about it. It is incumbent on individuals to try to keep their carbon footprints as minimal as possible by significantly reducing the solid waste they send to landfills, and one of the easiest, most effective ways to do that is by composting their organic (food scraps and food-soiled paper) waste, removing it from the total volume of waste ending up in landfills, and ultimately providing a readily available means of enriching the local soil. Composting is easy to do, with a number of resources for individuals to get information on how to start. The process of composting creates humus, a highly potent soil enrichment material, which will benefit anyone with a front lawn, or anyone who wants to garden as well (Journal of Environmental Health, 1995). Composting is also a way of reducing the total volume of solid waste which ends up in landfills, and it benefits areas, like Hennepin County, which have waste-to-energy plants (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). Like any other morally-encouraged change to people’s everyday lives (especially regarding response to and mitigation of climate change), there is some resistance to composting, and there are difficulties, as well as challenges to its validity. However, composting is a small, manageable part of a greater movement toward greener living for Americans generally. Finally, composting is an act of ownership in one’s own community, and everyone should know how to do it. It makes a real difference in the quality of the soil in the local area, and it forms habits which are a part of a more globally-important green lifestyle.
Composting is an easy way to get people involved in going green. In fact, it might be one of the easiest ways. Per an interview with Carolyn Collopy-Steinhorst, Waste Reduction and Recycling Specialist at Hennepin County, composting is something so easy that children can get involved in it (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). Food waste in households comprises about 20-30% of the total volume of waste, which means a significant decrease in what goes into landfills, which could result in a significant reduction in volume if more households participated in it (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). In addition to building environmentally conscious habits early on (maybe a reason why people are so hesitant to begin practices like composting is because they are not exposed to them early on, when the greatest chance for impressions and habits to be formed. It is very difficult to make huge switches in people’s lives and routines, like only purchasing clothing from merchants who use exclusively organic materials in their goods, getting every appliance in their houses swapped for high-efficiency models, and growing their own produce in their backyards. Composting, however, can be done at home, without spending large amounts of money. This means that it’s something everyone can participate in, regardless of economic status, which is something important to a lot of people in the current economic environment. It is also an easy change to make because it is something that can be added on to normal residential curbside waste pickup. In San Francisco, there is a color-coded three-sort system of waste pickup—black for trash, blue for recycling, and green for compost (Swartz, 2002). According to Collopy-Steinhorst, the primary hurdle to getting individuals to recycle or do things to reduce their solid trash waste is convenience—how easy it is for them to make the switch (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). Keeping the pickup close to home also gives people an easy way to dispose of their organic waste to a local place which will be cycled back into the local lawns and gardens, even farms. There’s another benefit to keeping the composting local, too—in addition to being a great soil conditioner for local growers, composting locally cuts down on roughly a third of the fossil fuels used in organic farming, the use of which is increased when the compost used to enrich the soil is shipped in from long distances (Glazer, 2007).
Humus, the product of composting, was defined in the Encyclopaedia Britannica “ nonliving, finely divided organic matter in soil, derived from microbial decomposition of plant and animal substances (Encyclopaedia Britannica)”. Humus’s benefits cannot be simulated artificially, which means that composting organic waste is the only way to obtain it in a useful way (Hermann et al, 2011. Per an Environmental Protection Agency, it is mentioned that humus increases the moisture in soil, and helps plants grown in it avoid disease and infestation (EPA, updated 3 Nov, 2011). In the same web page, the EPA claims that compost helps clean up contaminated soil, which is helpful in areas looking to replenish the quality of the dirt (EPA, updated 3 Nov, 2011).
In waste-to energy plants, solid waste picked up by trash collectors is fed in, and it is burned to generate electric power (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). In fact, there is enough energy generated to power about 20,000 to 25,000 homes in a year at the Hennepin County facility, at which a thousand tons of waste per day are used to generate power—in fact, all of the trash from Minneapolis is taken to this facility (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). Unfortunately, since organic material is so laden with water, it is more difficult to burn off for energy than non-organic waste. If recycling and compost are removed from the total volume of waste sent to the waste-to-energy plant, it yields significantly higher efficiency in generating electricity (Consonni, Vigano, 2011).
Challenges to composting are primarily ones of getting it started (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). As with recycling, it is a matter of not knowing what can go into a composting bin, and so people just sort of end up stopping at that point—they’re willing to do it, but not if it requires any significant effort (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011). Also, not every community has curbside composting pickup. In Minneapolis, the neighborhood of Longfellow has compost pickup, but in the city of St. Paul, the neighborhood of Highland does not. This can be problematic to encouraging people to compost at home, because there is no easy way for individuals to dispose of their organic waste. They would need to spend money on the fuel to haul their own organic waste, spend time to do it, and it does cost money even to have it picked up curbside—and because there are so many collectors, the exact cost is variable, and arbitrary, for any kind of waste to be picked up (Collopy-Steinhorst, 2011).
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, Thomas Friedman claims that “when we act with sustainable values we make it more likely that our natural world and the institutions and companies that undergird our lives and improve our standards of living will also stick around (Friedman, p. 54).” A powerful call to green responsibility as not only a moral act, but one that inspires people out of a pragmatic, self-aware sense of reality,
What goes into compost, and how to do it at home (still undeveloped):
“As of 2007, San Francisco haulers were collecting over 300 tons of organic wastes every day from some 2,100 businesses and 75,000 homes. Trucks take the materials from a downtown processing center to two composting facilities about an hour away. There the waste is ground, mixed and stored for several months until natural decomposition processes turn it into compost. The resulting blends, including a mix called Four Course Compost that is approved for use on organic soils, are sent to local vineyards, small farms and landscaping suppliers. San Francisco also holds a yearly free compost giveaway for residents (Weeks, 2007).”
Works Cited
M.K. Patel, et al. “To Compost or Not To Compost: Carbon and Energy Foorprints of Biodegradable Materials’ Waste Treatment.” Polymer Degredaton & Stablity96.6 (2011): 1159-1171. EBSCO MegaFILE. Web. 5 Nov. 2011.
This article is about the chemical benefits of humus, and I used it for information about humus as a material. I was only able to access the abstract, so I was unable to get the full article and get the specific chemical compounds which are important to farming and gardening.
Glazer, Sarah. "Slow Food Movement." CQ Researcher 26 Jan. 2007: 73-96. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.
This article contained some information about the potential drawbacks of organic farming, vis a vis the cost of shipping compost across long distances, which not only makes the end product more expensive, but also sort of defeats the purpose of locally grown organic produce.
Billitteri, Thomas J. "Reducing Your Carbon Footprint." CQ Researcher 5 Dec. 2008: 985-1008. Web. 3 Nov. 2011.
This article was about how to make a difference in one’s environmental impact, and how people are going about it. I used it for a couple of statistics about how interested people are in managing their carbon footprints, and what they know about how to do it.
Weeks, Jennifer. "Future of Recycling." CQ Researcher 14 Dec. 2007: 1033-60. Web. 3 Nov. 2011.:
The amount of landfill space isn’t the issue, per a 2007 article in CQ Researcher; there isn’t really a lot to worry about generally for the next 20 to 50 years for the United States. But just having the space available doesn’t mean there is no sense of urgency toward making the change to be more conscious of households’ carbon footprints. This article also contained info about how composting has factored in the past, and some statistics about how to compost, and how San Francisco does it.
Swartz, Nikki. “The San Francisco Feat.” Waste Age. April 2002. Web. 3 Nov. 2011.
This article contained information about the recent composting and recycling efforts in San Francisco, and it was used for the statistics of how much of total waste could be diverted from landfills.
“Home Composting goes Mainstream.” Journal of Environmental Health 57.9 (1995):36. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Nov. 2011.
This article contained information about how to get started in at-home composting, and referred the reader to the EHMI website and recycling page.
Consonni, Stefano, and Federico Vigano. “Material And Energy Recovery In Integrated Waste Management Systems: The Potential For Energy Recovery.” Waste Management31.9/10 (2011): 2074-2084. EBSCO MegaFILE. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.
In this article, an Italian study about the waste-to-energy process discusses the statistics surrounding efficiency of differing levels of sorted waste; the authors mention how much more efficient the waste-to-energy process is after materials which can be composted or recycled are removed.
Interview with Carolyn Collopy-Steinhorst. Conducted by Catherine E. Larson. In person. 31 Nov. 2011.
In this interview, I asked Collopy-Steinhorst about her position within Hennepin County, and about issues surrounding getting people to recycle and compost. She provided some very interesting statistics about how much people actually do do those things, and what Minneapolis and Hennepin County have to do with how that gets enforced.
Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America. Release 2.0: Updated and Expanded. Picador/Ferrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 2009.
Thomas Friedman is a famous environmentalist and political mind, and I wanted something from this book as a call to action in this essay, because I find him supremely interesting and inspiring. I hope the quotes I use from this book are powerful and convincing.
No comments:
Post a Comment