Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
My muni in Md recently began weekly collection of compostables for a population of 1M. 10,000 households initially signed up, and received a distinctive collection bin. It seems in my locality many missed the announcement and now having seen the operation want to sign up. Greater uptake is likely.
Gummint first ran a trial, and on the basis of an average collection of 5.5 lbs per household decided to expand countywide. We, a two person outfit, contribute closer to 10lbs a week. You can buy compostable bin liners of various sizes. The small 3 gallon ones I bought ran about $0.20 each. Gummint provided a list of 8-10 acceptable liner producers.
Back in the late 80's before I had moved to the US, there was a very heated debate in Germany and beyond about a proposed new packaging law that was eventually introduced in 1991. It was first in the world to create the concept of EPR, Extended Producer Responsibility. That law was amended many times and replaced in 2017.
This overview of the German law gives some idea of how far behind the curve the US is.
Coincidently with yesterday's post, today.....
From Grist...
Quote:
Boston residents will soon be able to put their food scraps to good use, diverting them from landfills and incinerators.
A new curbside composting program announced by Mayor Michelle Wu last month will offer Boston residents free weekly pickups for leftover food, paper towels, newspapers, tissues, and other compostable items. Through the program, eligible materials will be sent to nearby processing facilities to be converted into nutrient-rich fertilizer or biogas, which will be burned to produce electricity.
According to city officials, food waste accounts for one-third of Boston’s entire waste stream. When landfilled or incinerated, this waste releases greenhouse gases that can warm the planet and other pollution that can harm nearby communities. Curbside collection is intended to prevent these impacts, slashing climate pollution while also taking advantage of a resource that otherwise would have gone to waste.
“The benefits of food scrap recycling are undeniable,” Tyler Frank, president and founder of the composting company Garbage to Garden — which is partnering with Boston for the city funded program — said in a statement. According to the nonprofit Project Drawdown, a global expansion of composting could preempt the equivalent of up to 3.1 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions from landfills by 2050 — about five times Canada’s greenhouse emissions in 2020.
Boston already provides several food waste services to its 690,000 residents, including a drop-off program with locations at Boston farmers markets, community gardens, and a growing number of additional 24-hour sites scattered throughout the city. The city’s new program is intended to make it even more convenient for Bostonians to compost their food scraps. There’s no cost to participate, and anyone living in a building with six units or fewer is eligible to apply. Open enrollment began last week, with service scheduled to begin on August 1.
A press release from the city says that 10,000 households will be accepted for the first year of the program, and that 10,000 more may be added in each subsequent year.
^^^
Composting kitchen scraps is one of those feel-good-activities that doesn't really amount to much, unless you waste a really large amount of food each day....A mass population program like that may actually be detrimental if you count all the extra energy spent in collecting and dstributing the stuff.
Composting your scraps may help nourish your two pots of Boston Fern & Coleus plants in your hip urban apartment, but if you have a suburban garden of several hundred sq ft, it won't do much...I suppose collecting scraps from a half million Bostonians may add up, but still won't go very far on a commercial farm-->
Commercial farmers add specific nutrients according to soil tests, and Nitrogen is the one most needed-- Composted material won't be concentrated enough to meet their needs ...Half the world's ag production depends on artificially produced N fertiizer. There's just not enough manure (or compost) in the world to take its place.
Manure, the traditonal fertilizer of the under-developed regions, is actually a lousy fertilizer. It's low in N and most of that is lost to the atm before the bacteria can get hold of it. N is eliminated from animals via the kidneys, not the bowels. Manure does return a certain amount of minerals to the soil, but it's main value is in improving the soil characteristics by virtue of it's fibrous nature...Same for compost.
It's smarter/more efficient to burn the stuff (along with plastic) to power generators. Such fsacilites are amazingly clean and efficient, but face the NIMBY problem as the elites wrinkes their noses and usually reject the proposals....I worked with a county board member in a Chicago collar county 40 y/a on such a proposal that would have saved the county $millions, but it was rejected. Nobody wanted to live near a "garbage incinerator."
BTW- your citation claims the program will prevent 3B tons of co2 from going to the landfills....The C will still be there, and it will still all get turned to co2...So preventing it from coming out of a landfill somehow better than it coming out of the fields where the compost is used? ....They really think we're stupid.
^^^^^
Times have changed, calculations have changed. My compost goes into a separate section of the truck coming down the street anyway to pick up the yard waste.
Like most businesses it is not expected to be profitable from day one, so no need for you to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Nice! Most cities including the one I used to live in of Taipei found that they ended up saving the city quite a bit of money overall--NYC's system though was a mess. I think part of it likely an extension of the mess that the sanitation department and its contractors are in where the routes for the pickup of refuse in general (not just compost) are a mess with weird little fiefdoms carved out by private contractors. However, it's apparently the outlier as a lot of other cities have found similar results.
^^^
Composting kitchen scraps is one of those feel-good-activities that doesn't really amount to much, unless you waste a really large amount of food each day....A mass population program like that may actually be detrimental if you count all the extra energy spent in collecting and dstributing the stuff.
Composting your scraps may help nourish your two pots of Boston Fern & Coleus plants in your hip urban apartment, but if you have a suburban garden of several hundred sq ft, it won't do much...I suppose collecting scraps from a half million Bostonians may add up, but still won't go very far on a commercial farm-->
Commercial farmers add specific nutrients according to soil tests, and Nitrogen is the one most needed-- Composted material won't be concentrated enough to meet their needs ...Half the world's ag production depends on artificially produced N fertiizer. There's just not enough manure (or compost) in the world to take its place.
Manure, the traditonal fertilizer of the under-developed regions, is actually a lousy fertilizer. It's low in N and most of that is lost to the atm before the bacteria can get hold of it. N is eliminated from animals via the kidneys, not the bowels. Manure does return a certain amount of minerals to the soil, but it's main value is in improving the soil characteristics by virtue of it's fibrous nature...Same for compost.
It's smarter/more efficient to burn the stuff (along with plastic) to power generators. Such fsacilites are amazingly clean and efficient, but face the NIMBY problem as the elites wrinkes their noses and usually reject the proposals....I worked with a county board member in a Chicago collar county 40 y/a on such a proposal that would have saved the county $millions, but it was rejected. Nobody wanted to live near a "garbage incinerator."
BTW- your citation claims the program will prevent 3B tons of co2 from going to the landfills....The C will still be there, and it will still all get turned to co2...So preventing it from coming out of a landfill somehow better than it coming out of the fields where the compost is used? ....They really think we're stupid.
I don't know kitchen composting and the details of it in comparison to what I know about the engineering and physics behind energy systems and vehicles, but I know at least in the latter you're routinely wrong and doing so without much apparent knowledge in engineering, physics, and large systems. You got a lot of basic calculations wrong in previous posts in those regards. I could have just chalked that up to something like you made simple errors or maybe a strong personal preference and nostalgia for cars you've driven in the past, but this topic isn't even related to that. How is it that you end up coming up on the side of trying to argue against most measures to try to do things better in a more reasonable or ecologically friendly way? What has been ingrained in you so far that in such disparate topics, and with one that I know very well and can very explicitly explain where your thinking is completely at odds with engineering and physical reality, you invariably want to come out against such? I understand that people can be a bit overcome by what they wish to see and I've seen that with people who are overly optimistic about certain green technologies or take something that's a very early laboratory experiment and prematurely extrapolate that to The Greatest Thing Ever, and that's just as faulty as inaccurately saying something *won't* work, but to some degree I can at least understand the fervor in terms of something that seems good. You on the other hand get things wrong *and* it's like you're always hoping for things to fail or for them to be awful.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-08-2022 at 03:34 PM..
My point is that composting is a lousy source of fertilizer. Even when your compost pile consists mostly of manure, it doesn't amount to much-- usually less thssn 2% N and often contiang too much K & P. https://vric.ucdavis.edu/events/2009...5b%20Hartz.pdf Pay particular attention to pp 3& 4.
While collecting table scraps from a large number of households may give us a total accumulation of many tons of N, P, K etc, it's too dilute to be of much value in commerical ag programs.
For example, my two horses gave me ~50 lb of manure each day. Collected for a whole year, with table scraps run thru the chickens first, then added, I had enough compost to spread about an inch deep over <1000 sq ft of garden-- not much at all, and even less when you consider I had a 5000 sq ft garden.
Page 11 of the cite above says that it would take 5 tons of composted manure to provide 200 lb of N to an acre...Corn requires about 200 lb of N per acre. The average farm raising corn is more than 400 ac....
If 1M people in 250,000 households collect 1 lb of scraps each day (6 oz is more realisitic) for a year, and we say it''s 50% water (70% is more realistic), then it will dry down to 40M lb of compost (!!)-- 20,000 tons-- enough for 4000 ac of corn....IA alone plants 13.5 M ac of corn each year....Just to put mass composting into perspective.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
