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Why waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location when you can have it "processed" and used locally?
by 6d6b73 5y ago
Why 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.