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Should Composting Be Mandatory In US Cities?
Hugh Pickens writes "After San Francisco enacted the nation's strictest regulations on composting in 2009, the city has increased the amount of food scraps and plant cuttings it composts to more than 600 tons per day, more than any other city in North America, and recently celebrated the collection one million tons of organic materials. Other cities have been watching as Seattle passed a similar mandate in 2010 diverting about 90,000 tons of organic waste from landfills in the first year and New York City is trying to figure out how to implement this type of program for its 8 million residents. The impact is potentially huge in terms of reducing the load on landfills as a study by San Francisco's Department of Environment shows that more than one third of all waste entering landfills could be composted instead. 'We want to see composting be a standard for everybody,' says Michael Virga, executive director of the U.S. Composting Council. 'Urban, suburban, it doesn't really matter where you are.' Although composting initially costs more than land-filling, over the long-term, the benefits will outweigh the costs. 'We can reduce a large source of landfill-generated greenhouse gases, extend the life of our landfill, and generate a valuable resource for the community in the form of premium soil and mulch,' writes Shanon Boase. 'What's more, this industry generates additional jobs.'"
For all non-negative values of X the answer is:
No
So recycling is mandatory, but people in the US go without healthcare? No offense intended guys and gals in the US, but the priorities of your lawmakers seem a little skewed.
Silly question... if it is headed to a landfill, isn't it being 'composted' anyway? We are burying it, after all.
Aside the fact much of this Green Waste will decompose over time, releasing hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, which could be harvested in a properly designed and maintained natural gas generating landfill, much of farm land is being depleted of minerals in topsoil, where this compost should be placed back.
Mandatory? No, people should be doing this because it makes good business sense.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If it's a City service, then the costs are shared among the taxpayers, so the associated responsibilities are also shared. If you pay for your trash service independently, then you have a point.
In my town, you pay a base fee to cover the trucks coming around, and you also have to buy special town-issued trash bags (which are expensive), which covers the cost of processing the trash. Recycling is free. If you want to throw away your recyclables, then at least in my town, you do pay for it yourself. With the old tax-supported system, when you didn't recycle, I paid for it.
Not a relevant comparison - if you are hiring a licensed waste disposal company, they will either require you to sort the waste and charge you a penalty for failing to do so, or the cost of their doing the sorting will be included in their upfront fee. Final disposal will be carried out as required by local ordinance. You won't notice the difference. If you take the waste to the landfill yourself, you'll be required to sort it out per local regulations and you'll just _wish_ you had sorted it out properly at home.
And no, it's not your right to dispose of your waste as you like; this is a classic tragedy of the commons, arguably precisely the sort of problem humanity developed the concept of government to cope with.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
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The recycle rules in Nova Scotia are pretty strict, trash must be separated and almost all organic waste must be composted (the exception is animal fats because they attract animals). I travel up there frequently enough that it was initially a major pain in the ass but I've found myself more aware of the trash I generate. I try to buy things that have less packaging and also try to buy commonly used household items more in bulk.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
The 9% of Americans who are unemployed, for starters.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Not trying to troll, I'm legitimately unfamiliar. Doesn't organic waste biodegrade in a landfill anyway? The article mentions reducing the carbon released by landfills- aren't we just shifting that carbon to a different facility?
The high-quality soil produced does seem like a sweet plus, but the "jobs created" claim seems silly (wouldn't it destroy an equal number of landfill jobs?)
I have been backyard composting for a while now. I put vegetable scraps in a small stainless steel bucket under my sink. When the bucket is full, I take it out (every four days or so) and dump it in the compost bin. My area also has curb side food scraps collection, which would be easy enough to use, but I prefer to compost myself, so that I can feed my garden each spring. Besides getting a nice garden, one of the main benefits has been that my garbage is much cleaner. In fact, besides a few bones, most of my garbage consists of unrecycleable plastic bags and containers. When I take my garbage out, it is a plastic bag full of plastic bags.
The main work consists of turning the compost outside every once in a while (which wouldn't be necessary for curb side collection), and in cleaning the compost bucket under the sink, which is easy since it is stainless steel. The garbage bin is less stinky, which is nice, and I don't get the drippy bags of garbage that I used to get when I put food scraps in the regular garbage. In other words, I have found composting to be relatively easy, and I suspect most people would have a similar experience once they got started.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
But if it makes financial sense to do it, they should offer service to pick it up for a cheaper rate than the service to take it to a landfill.
For the early replies I am reading, saying it's my trash, I'll do what I want - are you serious?
Everyone has a responsibility toward the social compact.
What really burns me is why environmentalism, basic stewardship and common sense have been co-opted by the left, when if anything, *conserv*atives should be the ones owning this issue. Stewardship over the land - it's in the friggin' Bible.
At the end of the day, isn't preserving the planetary resources in everyone's best interest?
This is the main reason why I am a GDI.
If you want X to be provided as a tax-supported service, as rubbish removal is for residents in much of the USA, then it is completely appropriate for the government to regulate the use of X.
This can be done in a variety of ways, ranging from strict requirements to creating financial incentives (such as where you have to pay for each bag of trash, but not for recycling or composting, which is how it works in my town).
The amount of time it takes is dramatically different. Biodegradeable substances don't degrade quickly at all in landfills. Managed composting, on the other hand, can turn vegetable matter into soil in a couple months. (Casual home composting is rather slower, but still lightning-fast compared to landfills.)
Absolutely, make it mandatory. Then when millions of compost heaps go neglected (because, by the way, composting correctly is a process and a lot of work), we'll be buried under rat-infested garbage heaps, spreading disease, stink and illness throughout the nation.
But, really, go ahead and make it mandatory. It'll give the toxic cleanup industry just the shot in the arm it needs.
Neglected compost becomes soil eventually. If proper compost bins are used, rats are not an issue. This article is referring to curb side food scraps collection, where the city collects the scraps and brings them to a large facility. I can promise you that such facilities will turn those scraps into compost quite quickly. They won't be "toxic".
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I've never really understood the practice of bagging up your lawn clippings, or raking up your leaves and throwing them in bags as if it was all waste products to be disposed of. Mulching everything with a mulching lawnmower is less effort, better for your yard, and better for the city since it saves money in collection costs.
Leaves in particular once ground up are wonderful soil amendments for a garden. They're not particularly high in nutrients, but when the leaves break down, they turn into hummus, which both retains moisture, and improves drainage.
AccountKiller
"And as for healthcare, no one goes without treatment, even if they don't pay for it themselves, like myself and most of us do."
Dead wrong. Nobody goes without urgent care if they show up to an ER. Anything short of that... unless you're (a) very poor, (b) over 65, (c) a veteran, (d) under 18 and poor but not very poor, or (e) have a job which provides health insurance, or (f) married to or the (25 year old) child of someone in category e.
That sounds like everybody, but its far from it. This is just for "body" care -- dentistry and health care coverage gaps in America are massive, often even for the so-called insured. Even if you are in one of those categories, you're not guaranteed care... it all depends on what ails you, who declares it a pre-existing condition, whether or not the best treatment is the lowest cost treatment, whether or not you want a second opinion or a specialist, if you can afford the co-pays for therapeutic treatment or medication which pile up week after week, etc. etc.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Its not a broken window fallacy if its actual useful work that can be done and adds value to society.
But what if you reframe the question as "Should X be a condition for Y service?" then it gets harder to answer, and also much more interesting to think about.
"Should composting be mandatory?" Absolutely not.
"Should composting be a required condition for using municipal garbage service?" Maybe. And that's what the real discussion should be about.
A lot of seemingly left-vs-right authoritarian-vs-libertarian flamewars could probably be avoided by looking at things in a quid-pro-quo "not just abstract social contract but a tangible you-see-it-in-action every day contract" perspective.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Your rights end when you start crapping in my yard.
So, yes.
Industry dumping deadly chemicals, your Hummer, the crap that leads to the algee blooms in the ocean, all of it has a direct impact on me. And thus, yes, I and the rest of the world get to tell you to stop shitting in the nest.
Check your premises.
To quote Buckminster Fuller, "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." The fact that you apparently take great pride in your ignorance is not as disturbing as the fact that there are millions of people just like you, people who think it's their right to throw paint and used motor oil into "properly managed landfills." You're deluding yourself and poisoning the rest of us.
When we talk about "mandatory" recycling or composting we are talking about one more bin to throw things in that the trash people will pick up. Is it really such and incredible #$%&ing inconvenience for you to throw plastic bottles into one container and food waste into another? Are you really that incredibly unfathomably unconscionably lazy or are you just too incompetent to properly sort your waste into three different categories or is it just that you are so ridiculously self-centered that you really think having to sort the waste you dump into your local community is some kind of violation of your human rights?
I met people like you at the hobby shop where I used to work when I put out a recycling bin. Some of the teenagers actually refused to throw their cans in the bin claiming I was forcing my hippy environmentalist beliefs on them and it was their right to not have to throw an aluminum can into a separate #$%&ing bin. I don't believe this is about civil rights, it's about an absurd over-inflated sense of entitlement. My stereotype of people who think like you is that you live in a rural community or sprawling suburb. Luckily, people who live in the city understand there are small inconveniences, like throwing food into a separate bin to reduce strains on overflowing landfills, that we accept to make life easier for all of us.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Not necessarily.
In the first place, labor is required to make all the things needed to produce food, and to produce food, and ship food, and prepare food. Compostable waste is then thrown away (destroyed).
Now, by collecting this waste, composting it, and reusing it as a nutrient source, some of the labor required to make the things to produce food (notably the food and feed fertilizers) is replaced by labor to reprocess waste food. This is simply collecting and stockpiling trash, mainly (and adding water, occasionally turning, very simple stuff). The raw materials that made the original fertilizers are still in this compost--the cost of mining, of processing, of purifying, and all associated labor--and thus a large amount of labor (and raw material) is saved. Further arguments can be made for capture and burning of released hydrocarbons (methane) in the process as a power source.
Thus, soil nutrients being required, and less labor being required to obtain these nutrients, the cost of growing food is reduced. Thus more food can be grown, or other stock for biofuel, and thus more labor can be employed for that purpose, and the industries supported by it (trickle down economics). Thus as well the cost of food itself should be reduced (speculation and complacency affect this, and food costs may not run down in our system; they should, but...), leaving more money in the hands of individuals to support other industries, thus supporting new labor and more jobs (trickle up economics).
Thus we have avoided destruction, and created profit.
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But it should be made SO EASY and the benefits made SO VISIBLE that peer pressure alone would compel people to participate.
The same goes for recycling.
Actually, it really doesn't decay very well in a landfill. I think somebody went digging in a NYC landfill and found intact newspapers from WWII. Those same papers would compost in a large-scale compost pile in weeks! As for the greenhouse output, no. In a landfill, the decay is anaerobic and results in methane (CH4). In a (properly maintained and aerated) compost pile, the gasses released are mostly CO2. So while, more or less, you end up with the same amount of carbon, CH4 contributes to global warming 25 times more than an equal amount of CO2. (That's why methane reclamation is quite helpful at a landfill, even though you're just burning that CH4 into CO2).
As for the jobs, if you are really cutting down on garbage a lot, then you'll lose some garbage truck drivers in exchange for the gain in compost truck drivers, but there should still be more. And you shouldn't lose any jobs at the landfill itself unless you completely eliminate garbage. Because even if your garbage output is halved, that just means the landfill fills slower and they move on less often. You'll still need employees at the landfill and at the compost piles.
Where I live we now have garbage, recycling, and compost trucks driving around. I don't recall any talk of lost landfill or garbage truck driver jobs.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Trouble is that especially in lower-populated areas multiple cities' trash goes into one landfill. Arguably it should be at least a state-level decision.
At this point nobody's saying there should be a federal mandate /anyway/, and with the Republicans doubling down on "LA LA LA YOU'RE NOT A RICH DONOR I CAN'T HEAR YOU" it's not likely to get anywhere in Congress.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
IIRC some brand-new towns designed their sewer system and waste treatment plants to handle large quantities of food waste, and then required all houses to install dispose-alls in the sinks. (and banned dumping food waste into trash, I think). Dunno how successful they were, but I gotta say the concept is much neater, simpler, and more efficient than setting up a whole separate compostables pick-up system.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Yes. When compacted and sealed in the earth, it is entirely anaerobic decomposition, which produces methane. In a properly aerated compost pile, it's mostly aerobic decomposition, which produces CO2. While you more or less get the same number of tonnes of carbon gasses, methane is 25 better at absorbing infrared than CO2 is.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
"What's more, this industry generates additional jobs.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
Decades ago there was concern in Michigan regarding the recycling of two litre bottles, what would they do with this recovered plastic? Oh, the taxpayer would suffer an immense burden with having to recover and figure out how to recycle, reuse, whatever, a mountain of plastic. Then some clever engineer found this plastic could inexpensively be used to produce polyester fibres and offered to take all the bottles off the recovery agency's hands - no charge. A nice arrangement, right? Well, another company decided they wanted the plastic too, so a small bidding war broke out for these bottles - which ultimately went to the original source of the material - pre-bottle, driving up the market price of the PET raw material.
Who would have foreseen it, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In the last year i've thrown out less than two grocery bags of trash. (And i'm not some hermit, i race bikes, buy various electronic gadgets, etc..)
Composting is a HUGE way to reduce waste, and am glad my city (Victoria, BC) is finally getting curbside composting as well (Jan 2013.) The last few places i've lived in didn't compost, so i found a neighbour who did, and dropped off compost there instead.
The next biggest step is to reduce consumption - avoid plastic bags and twist ties at the grocery store (i write the #'s on my hand), reuse baggies, etc (wash them!) Go with the bulk section of food stores to reduce packaging.
And finally, recycling - don't just depend on what's picked up at your curb, look into other options. There's a program here called Pacific Mobile Depots, and they recycle nearly everything - styrofoam, electronics and appliances, soft plastic, hard plastic, even tetra paks and foil wrappers from energy bars, etc.. This one runs every Saturday, and sets up different drop off points around the community (my nearest is the 4th Saturday each month).
When you take advantage of all the services that are available to you, it's pretty surprising just how much you can reduce your impact!
An ancillary benefit is that the compost can be used to support and improve agriculture. It may seem like a big black pile of organic matter, but that's gold to anyone that wants plants to thrive. It makes about as much sense to bury it in landfills as it does to bury nearly-pure aluminum and steel cans.
I think Fuller was wrong in that quote.
(1) Some pollution is composed of resources we have failed to make use of. But CO2 pollution, for example, is not really a resource we are failing to collect. The cost of collecting it far exceeds the utility of the resource, so there is no economic argument for collecting excess CO2 if we only consider the utility of the captured CO2.
Aside from the opportunity cost of not collecting pollutants for their resource value, pollutants actually cost us by causing damage once they're released. Bucky's statement ignores this cost, which is the root of why government regulation is required to force polluters to internalize the public costs of pollution.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The government could just refuse to pay for picking up waste that is compostable unless it is separated.
And we could then vote them out at the next election.
You underestimate how this could be spun in campaign ads: "[Rattle off five neighboring areas] raised taxes in the past few years, but we didn't follow their lead. Instead, our city council cut the waste out of waste disposal spending, saving $x per household and providing high-quality compost to nearby farms."
Because some of those moderately healthy people will still suffer from disease or injury that will incur large healthcare costs. The whole point of insurance is that it spreads those costs around. While you may be lucky enough to not find that you have a congenital heart defect that costs $100,000 in surgery to correct, your premium helps pay for that one guy out of 100,000 that does. And it means that the public doesn't have to pay your healthcare costs if you do suffer from an illness that carries catastrophic healthcare costs.
Spot on. And I want to stress the congenital part there—a lot of congenital conditions go undetected until a person hits their late 20s or early 30s, just because they were otherwise healthy and asymptomatic. So just after they've been trained or educated and they're entering their prime work and childrearing years, a previously hidden health condition catches up with them and saddles them with unbearable financial burdens for the rest of their lives.
Anybody who thinks they are one of these proverbial "young healthy people who don't need insurance" doesn't really know it. And basically, they're choosing to opt out of the only sort of system that could protect them from that.
Are you adequate?
Right from the text, that says that the States can make composting mandatory, since the Constitution doesn't prohibit them from doing so. Likewise states can choose to let cities make it mandatory if they wish, or prevent them from doing so as they see fit.
I take it you spend more time tossing about the tenth amendment than actually reading it.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
We are not running out of land to build them. And the current area devoted to landfills is miniscule.
Greenhouse gasses can be collected by landfills. They methane can be harvested. I doubt a compost heap will do that; you need a cover.
This sounds like an boondoggle.
You have to transport all that garbage to the Sahara (that's a lot of diesel), make sure it gets into the ground, and that it stays there. Then you have to worry about sandstorms burying your equipment and blowing garbage everywhere.
It's a lot better overall to reduce the amount of stuff that goes into a landfill.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I think people just don't understand what composting is. Education is necessary. Example:
I just moved into a new neighborhood and everyone here has a small bit of land and trees. The houses are nearby to woods. I am shocked to find that everyone rakes their leaves and throws them away in the Monday yard waste pick-up. What are they doing!?!?!?!? Do people not realize that you are throwing away your soil when you do this? So one Sunday evening I got up and took all my neighbors nicely bagged leaves and composted them in the woods behind my house. My yard has trees, but it barely grows grass. The ground is clay about an inch below the surface. The tree roots are sticking up from the ground from years of losing topsoil. Some of the neighbors use Chemlawn. Why would you throw away your fertile soil, then pay someone to spray it with an artificial version? The only reason I can figure is that they just don't understand what they are doing.
At least it doesn't go out with the trash. I think the county lets you get free bags of compost in the summer, so maybe the smart ones can at least get their own land back once they wise up.
As someone that recycles a bunch, and has spent a fair amount of time around transfer stations and landfills, I can tell you that even if we skip right past the Reduction and Reuse components of the 3 Rs, if the following were recyclable at the curbside in every area rather than just in some areas, and if recycling was made compulsory, landfill usage would shrink by around 80%:
.I see so many bags of grass, tree branches, etc. that the front-end loaders have difficulty piling it up.
Cardboard On any given day this material alone counts for roughly 20% of my local transfer station's haul.
Landscaping refuse
Paperboard This is the majority of food packaging, and covers most junk mail that isn't 'crumple-able'.
Food The amount of food we waste in the U.S. is staggering. Before my own family made conscious changes were were wasting 25-30% of everything we brought home. Thanks to variable work hours, even with careful planning we still waste 5-10% each week. If you think of the total mass of food you consume in a week, this quickly adds up across your local population. In restaurant-laden areas like San Francisco, especially with all of the buffets in Chinatown, the food waste is exponentially higher (did you see the Dirty Jobs episode where Mike spent a shift with the garbage collectors? Sheesh.)
Appliances (you'd be surprised by how many of these hit the transfer station every day. The workers line them up along the edge of the property, because their company sells the items to recyclers).
Since we reduced the amount of stuff we bring to the house, learned how to reuse a lot of stuff (such as composting), and learned how and where to recycle the rest, our 95-gallon trash bin only goes to the curb two or three times a year (and that's mostly due to shipping styrofoam and combination materials that cannot be recycled).