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Everyone needs to start composting
by sudden_dystopia 5y ago
Everyone needs to start composting
- maerF0x0 5y agoand add chickens + vermicomposting too! That being said, I think organic waste separation of trash is a better idea than everyone composting (from a pest, disease, and efficiency of economy perspective)
- 6d6b73 5y agoWhy waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location when you can have it "processed" and used locally?
- ceejayoz 5y agoBecause it's more likely to actually happen that way. I've tried composting, and don't have the patience for it. Lots of folks live in apartments or places with HOAs that forbid it. There's also the benefit that industrial composting can process things like dairy and meat safely that can't be home-composted.
- 6d6b73 5y agoIf you don't have patience to dump organic waste in a one spot outside of your house, how do you plan on doing the same with the waste bin provided by your city? Yes, I understand that this will not be possible everywhere, but let's just start doing this where possible, before we look for expensive and complex solutions to simple problems.
- bluGill 5y agoWhat I'd like is an automatic waste sorter. Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables... We have made progress in that for recycling, but there are two trucks that come by my house.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables... Cardboard, at the very least, would generally be immediately ruined and rendered non-recylcable doing this.
- jcranmer 5y agoCardboard itself is only barely recyclable in the first place. My understanding of the recycling process for paper is that basically you're required to go a grade down in the process, and cardboard itself is basically the end of that process. I suspect you'd environmentally gain more from improved recovery of more useful materials from single-stream waste than you'd lose from no longer recycling cardboard products. (Especially since a large amount of dedicated cardboard recycling is itself going to be spoiled by the inclusion of greasy pizza boxes in that stream).
- maxerickson 5y agoCorrugated cardboard recycling is pretty big because of the volume of material used in manufacturing and commerce. There are facilities that sort the entire stream, partly because diverting material away from the landfill saves cost there.
- swarnie 5y agoDoesn't a heap need tending to in some way? I'm happy to put my food waste in a little box and have the government come round with a truck once per week, at the very least its rotting somewhere miles away from me. I don't think i have the space or knowledge to do it myself
- chucksta 5y agoI'm not sure where you are located, but in Philadelphia there is a service, you sign up and they give you a bucket to put out for collection once a week. https://www.bennettcompost.com/weekly-composting https://www.bennettcompost.com/weekly-composting
- swarnie 5y agoI'm in the UK. No signing up here, you just put the correct boxes out on the correct day and some chap picks it up. Its slightly frustrating having six different bins and having to keep a schedule pinned to the fridge but it kinda works.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoHonestly I just bury compostables and let the natural processes happen. This takes very little work. Not so easy to do in an apartment though.
- maerF0x0 5y agoThat doesn't work well and it creates a lot of excess methane. See: How current landfills work
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoIt’s in a few inches of soil. I assume soil organisms, insects, and earthworms will take care of it.
- morelisp 5y agoThis is a ridiculous view of composting. Even if you assume everyone's organic waste is appropriate for a no-worm no-turn pile (hint: it isn't), it still won't work in the winter in most of the world, lots of people simply don't have the space, and everything will be fucked up the first time a raccoon finds your pile.
- spelunker 5y agoOur city collects organic matter to compost. I have a garden and I don't compost myself because 1) I wouldn't want to compost things that would attract animals, and 2) composting takes up space, and takes forever. It's really not that hard to fill up the compost bin and then put it out with the trash and recycling every week. Municipal composting is great IMO.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI would never trust compost from a municipal source. Too much chance for random toxic waste to get introduced by unscrupulous dumpers.
- boringg 5y agoMore cost-effective to do it at a centrally processed location + you can capture methane and utilize it either as renewable natural gas or process it into fuel cell grade hydrogen. As well more people opt-in since not everyone has to learn how to properly compost all they need to do is source-separate.
- 6d6b73 5y agoI'm not sure how it is more effective to drive horribly ineffective diesel trucks to gather that waste and to dump it somewhere else, build a thousands of facilities to process this and utilize the methane safely instead of simply having a compost pile behind your house (where possible).
- boringg 5y agoThat's easy to solve - use Hydrogen trucks or EV trucks for the heavy duty load. Not yet in the commercial market - coming in quickly.
- 6d6b73 5y agoHow is that easy if there are currently on H-powered garbage trucks on the market and it will take billions of dollars to replace all of them?
- boringg 5y agoIt costs billions of dollars to replace the fleet anyways so its already a sunk cost - instead of replacing with diesel your replacing with H2 or EV at the end of their life. You are just substituting out one product for another - that is relatively easy.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYeah but it will take years for this to happen, and just replacing the trucks is only part of the cost - you still need to build new infrastructure to either charge with electricity or fuel with hydrogen. But wait! There is more - you need to pay millions to get rid of all the old infrastructure like gas stations that cities have, with old fuel tanks, distributors etc. In the current economic climate, I don't see how most of the cities could afford to do all of this.
- bluGill 5y agobecause compost piles attract rats, mice, and other undesirables.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYou can go to Central Park and see rats everywhere, and I don't see any compost piles there.
- wil421 5y agoYou can get free compost in my county. They take all of those tall brown paper bags that are used for yard waste and compost them. Where i live now it’s a private company moving the recycle stuff but where I lived before the county picked them up with a suction machine. You could put leaves and grass clippings at the curb and they would suck it up every Monday.
- rdtwo 5y agoIt’s expensive to setup your own hot compost process. It’s both complicated and requires a volume of material most don’t have. Composting should be done at scale really
- maerF0x0 5y ago> Why waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location The point of this whole post is Fertilizer. You eventually have to collect the distributed waste (or compost fertilizer) to a a centralized place. Caveated that the resulting mass could be decreased, but also lose the opportunity to make compost tea, feeding any edible mass to animals, or vermicomposting to get even richer output. Also lets not discount the distributed cost to teach millions of people how to properly blend (mix grass with food waste etc), turn (else you can either cause fires or create methane), harvest (when's it done), and then redistribute the output. Yes we could all become home gardeners, but then expect to see our GDP to decline as Software engineers, Lawyers, architects et al. star doing "farm work" and labor.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYou really don't need much time to become a home gardener, and believe me that spending time outside digging in the dirt is a very health way to spend time away from the computer.
- zahma 5y agoAgreed. I wish there was a tax credit for farmers who don’t use fertilizer, even if that’s only imported, so as to encourage composting. Right now it’s pretty easy to externalize agricultural waste on the public’s dime or health. I’m thinking about the hog waste lagoons in NC for example. What if some portion of that vast expanse of pig shit could be reused?
- bluGill 5y agoMostly it is reused. However shipping is expensive and you can apply too much and cause problems. there is way too much manure in some places, and not enough in others. It isn't exactly safe either. There is a lot of diseases in that manure. You need to take more care when applying it than some fertilizers. (though not nearly as much as anhydrous ammonia)
- wyager 5y agoThis reminds me of Mao's efforts to get people to smelt steel in their backyards. It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
- analyte123 5y agoWhile you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.
- Auracle 5y agoI live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
- cwkoss 5y agoPermaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
- asdff 5y agoIt takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.
- wahnfrieden 5y agoThe neoliberal response
- swarnie 5y agoGreat ideology, im not sure why so many fear it?
- throwaway2048 5y agoBecause it favors aesthetic nonsense over real action
- daenz 5y ago>fear Criticism of something is not necessarily an expression of fear. This reaction primarily serves to make critics feel ashamed for speaking out against something, as in "oh you're just afraid of my-good-idea-X"
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- dustymcp 5y agoAlot of us already are, i use my leafdrops and all vegetable trash to grow my garden most of the summer and fall we dont need to buy any, but it takes alot of work..
- r00fus 5y agos/Everyone/municipalities/ An individual mandate (esp. an unfunded mandate) to resolve systemic issues is definitely an anti-pattern.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'm a bit tired of this argument. We're all buying the wrong stuff, our mass is part of the system. I'm not judging consumers, I'm just saying everybody living differently will change the system. Wouldn't word of mouth, follower effect kick a stronger longer response to the top-down policies ?
- UncleOxidant 5y agoSewage treatment plants need to start creating fertilizer. Example: https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/ https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/