greenliving
Clean
D
Composting
Turning Waste into an Asset
by Brita Belli
iscarded vegetable ends, egg- shells, coffee grounds and lawn clippings… most of us throw away a huge amount of compostable material. What could be a significant environmental asset, if transformed into nutritious garden soil, has become in- stead a major environmental problem. The U.S. Environmental Protec- tion Agency reports that yard trimmings and food residuals together account for 26 percent of our total municipal solid waste stream. Also, unnecessary food waste doesn’t just happen at home—it’s a fact of life for most restaurants, stadiums, convention centers, hotels, schools and anywhere else people gather to eat.
Choosing to turn scraps into rich fertile soil, courtesy of beneficial bacte- ria and fungi, has multiple advantages. It creates rich humus for high-yield crops, works to suppress plant diseases and pests and limits the need for chemi- cal fertilizers. Those same organic scraps have a devastating effect on the
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environment when they are trapped in oxygen-starved landfills. Due to their highly compacted nature, organic waste is not able to fully decompose and releases methane—a global warm- ing gas that’s 25 times more damaging to air quality than carbon dioxide. Part of the challenge is that there’s no widespread collection system in place to encourage or require munici- pal composting. Unlike the bottles and cans we place in handy curbside bins, or the newspapers and cardboard we tie and separate for recycling trucks, food waste doesn’t yet have designated places to be taken to. A few cities are changing that model, but others are slow to follow. Seattle was the first to require
households to compost food waste; San Francisco was the first to add businesses and restaurants. These progressive cities provide green compost carts for food scraps, including meat, bones, seafood and dairy plus soiled paper, like tea bags, coffee filters and greasy pizza boxes;
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