Should Composting Be Mandatory In US Cities? 861
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.'"
Composting Makes Garbage Cleanner (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why is municipal composting better than landfil (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
No, a landfill is an anaerobic environment. Organic material in a landfill barely decays at all once it has been covered and sealed.
Why do people bag yard waste? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:The old broken window fallacy... (Score:5, Informative)
Its not a broken window fallacy if its actual useful work that can be done and adds value to society.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
....Considering I pay the city for trash pick up (and where I am, we actually pay private firms.. the city does not provide trash pick up) they should be the ones to sort it, in my opinion. If I can pay more and not do my own sorting, I'm all for it. Everywhere I have been that makes you sort recyclables has been way too picky about what can and can't be recycled. "Plastic, but not this type, paper not including newspaper, x glass but not y glass". Pain in the ass.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
When I'm done with it...it is trash and I pay to have it hauled away. Once they have it...feel free to do with it as you please, but I don't have room around my place for sorting the shit out nor for creating and maintaining a compost heap for organic stuff.
That's the problem -- trash is not always "trash" - there are different types of trash, and not all of it should be sitting in a landfill for the next 1000 years because there are better ways to dispose of it.
No one is asking you to maintain a compost heap, just dump your compostables into a different bin. I live in a small urban apartment in the USA and have no problem finding a place to store my compostables, recyclables and landfill materials. I've been part of a municipal compost program for years, and it's just not that hard.
My girlfriend and I lived in a *tiny* apartment in Tokyo for 2 years and had no problem storing our burnable trash and two kinds of recyclable trash.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
My city doesnt enforce recycling at the curb level. All garabage gets hauled to a regional seperation facility. There the trash gets seperated by machines paper, plastics, metals, etc by doing it that way you pay slightly more but you dont need 6 different bins on the curb of every home getting blown around by storms.
Of course my city also does leaf and tree pickup for free too. That stuff gets mulched/ composted, etc.
Like power plants and eater treatment somethings are better done on a massive scale
Re:Why do people bag yard waste? (Score:4, Informative)
Now I will mulch as much as I can but it still leaves me a huge pile of.. leaves.. that I put out in front of my house for the city to pick up.
I agree with you on grass clippings, I've owned my home for 7 years and have never bagged any clippings (and I have one of the nicest looking lawns in the area).
The nice thing about my town is that we have a separate dump/landfill for organic material. Any resident can take stuff there for free. The city will also collect leaves in November and branches throughout the year. They mulch it all up and take it to the dump. Local nurseries and lawnscaping businesses then pay the city for access to the compost/mulch that is created.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem of plastics is simply a case of "does it have the recycling symbol on it, or not". Even that seems to be moot these days (I'm assuming someone passed a law to say that all plastics containers must be able to be recycled, because I haven't seen a non-recyclable bit of plastic for years).
To be honest though, even with the councils previous "sort everything" system, I never found it to be too hard. Just collect your recycling in a single box, and sort it when you put it into the bins. It takes what, 2 minutes at most? Not exactly a high price to pay to keep it from being buried in the countryside....
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:4, Informative)
Or more likely, just refuse to collect garbage with substantial compostable materials.
We have a composing program here and it works fine. As a Canadian, the standard selfish American "fuck that shit" response to this kind of stuff is always humorous. I mean my god.. when you eat a banana, you toss the peel into a different bin. Tiny bit of effort, huge benifits to everyone! American response: "HAWR I PAY TAXES WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO THAT SHIT!!"
Sadly, the American way of disposing of rubbish, the sanitation department won't take or will charge to collect, is to put it in your auto and drive to some empty road, abandoned neighborhood or ravine near a road and give it a heave. Too damn much of that going on already.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the problem is that landfills are actually *made* to handle toxic substances, so filling them up with things that don't belong there wastes *lots* of money and time. They usually put landfills in empty rock quarries, so that the waste doesn't leach into the soil and water system. In addition, they are usually treated in such a way as to encourage it *not* to break down, and therefore it is less of a hazard. If you spend all of that landfill area on stuff that *could* be composted away, you are just wasting valuable space.
Re:Why is municipal composting better than landfil (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Question about the greenhouse gases (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:4, Informative)
As an American, I'm impressed with your keen understanding that he speaks for all 310,000,000 of us.
As an American, I'd say he comes pretty close to the sentiment of a significant portion of our population. He did forget to include some liberal bashing and failed to toss around the word "socialism" but otherwise I think he got the general tone right.
Re:Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
And as for healthcare, no one goes without treatment
I'm sorry, but that's a right-wing myth with no basis in fact whatever. You have to be treated in an emergency room, but only the truly indigent get it free.
My best friend, who I'd known since we were teenagers, had a job with no health benefits. He caught appendicitis and was treated in the ER. It destroyed his credit and impoverished him and his family, and took most of a decade to clear.
The next time he had symptoms that one should tale to the ER, he died.
Because of this I'd probably flame you if I wasn't sure you're simply misinformed.
Re:The old broken window fallacy... (Score:4, Informative)
"What's more, this industry generates additional jobs.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy [wikipedia.org]
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?
You'd be surprised how much you can reduce waste.. (Score:4, Informative)
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!
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
No, i am right. It "barely decays" like I said, but it does not compost(verb). To compost, it would have to transform into a rich and productive organic soil. It does not.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:1, Informative)
Give it time.
Let me fill you in on one of the real reasons recycling happens. Environmentally, recycling anything besides metal is not always all that green [thegogreenblog.com]. For instance, recycling paper often involves a lot more power than making new paper, not to mention all of the nasty detergents and chemicals that can end up leaking into the water table.
Financially, recycling is fantastic. First, your city will either need to make a contract with an existing plant or just outright build a large new one. This results in huge contracts going to big companies (who don't mind a little financial tit-for-tat). Politicians look good by creating jobs in the area (either because an existing plant has to hire new people, or a new plant has to be built).
Secondly, I've found some people under the impression that if your recyclables are incorrectly sorted they will just not get picked up by the truck. This is how it works in many places, but a few cities (such as my own, Newark, NJ) have done something altogether more insidious. Sanitation men will cut open garbage bags with a knife and inspect the contents. If they find even *one* recyclable in there - an errant plastic spoon or bottle, a coke can, the comics page - a red sticker gets slapped on the bag and your house gets noted in a log. You're now fined $500 for garbage that's left in front of your house (whether or not you put it there, leaving the onus on the homeowner to make sure his neighbors aren't dumping on their property) and the bag is also left there as a final insult. I've had to be somewhat draconian with my friends who throw a soda can or something in the garbage out of habit (because they live in an area that doesn't recycle).
You think it's bad now? Wait until your city enacts this and really pushes for the sanitation guys to start bringing in some money. No matter how good you are at sorting beforehand, you will get caught by that odd piece of metal or plastic that somehow ended up in the garbage.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:4, Informative)
The county where my parents live uses prisoners to sort trash into recyclables and non-recyclables. Don't assume that just because there is no bin that there is not recycling.
Spot on. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember that episode. They failed to take into account the benefit of less shit making it's way into landfills, meaning that they don't get full as much, and last longer.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:4, Informative)
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit! on recycling a few years ago. Their conclusion was that aluminum recycling (and some other scrap metals) was the only economical form of recycling (which was why you saw so many people dumpster-diving for cans). Every other form is just a money-pit. With most of this stuff, it costs more to recycle it than to make it new. It's just a feel-good thing for the most part. It's why no one will pay you for your used glass, plastic, and paper--but will for aluminum and some other metals.
I guess that's why their show is called "Bullshit." Link [popularmechanics.com]
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:5, Informative)
Let me fill you in on one of the real reasons recycling happens. Environmentally, recycling anything besides metal is not always all that green. For instance, recycling paper often involves a lot more power than making new paper, not to mention all of the nasty detergents and chemicals that can end up leaking into the water table.
A blog post written by a fifth grader is not a citation. Try this citation [popularmechanics.com] instead. And to your point about paper, even the juvenile essay you cited states that processing virgin wood pulp releases more toxic chemicals than recycled paper.
People don't understand composting (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Should X be mandatory? (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're overestimating the amount of time / work / brain power segregating waste will take.
After a couple of weeks to a month, it'll be second nature to you. You don't waste time thinking about which shoe goes to your left foot do you?
As for a compelling reason, you'd have to search that one out for yourself. For me, I just see it as something sensible thing to do - it's efficient.
Anyways, a city ordinance would be a great compelling reason. :P