The importance of organics composting

People have been composting at home for ages, but city-wide organics collection is a fairly new part of waste management. The concept is pretty new to me too, but I've been learning a lot about it; I've been working toward introducing organics collection at my university for the past few months, and I have a summer internship focused on community outreach about recycling and composting.

And I've realized that composting is not just a new trend, but an essential part of waste management that can combat climate change and bring us toward zero-waste.

Composting is how we can keep organic materials (anything that comes from a plant or animal) from going into a landfill or the ocean, or being burned in an incinerator and polluting the air. This covers all food waste (preventable table scraps as well as non-preventable waste like apples cores, banana peels, etc) and non-recyclable paper products like napkins and paper towels.

You might notice that these are things that break down quickly-- a lot quicker than plastic waste, for instance. So why is it important that organics don't end up in a landfill?

When a bunch of organic matter is in a landfill, it's been compacted together and buried under tons of other waste, and usually sealed with plastic above and below. This is a lot different than just throwing an apple core into the woods.

When organics decompose in a landfill, they decompose anaerobically -- without oxygen. Whereas all decomposition produces carbon dioxide, anaerobic decomposition also produces methane: a greenhouse gas that's actually 20 times more potent than CO2.

And it's not an insignificant amount of methane: Landfills are the number one anthropogenic source of methane emissions.

Additionally, anaerobic conditions can produce leachate, a toxic sludge, that can leak into the groundwater and soil from a landfill. It's bad stuff.

Okay, so what about when food gets into the rivers and oceans, such as through a garbage disposal? (That's where it goes when you wash it down the drain by the way!) Well, that just adds phosphorous and nitrogen to water, which cause algal blooms and dead-zones.

While burning organic waste isn't as bad as these other options, it's still a pollutant and incinerators are usually located in poor neighborhoods, leading to asthma and other respiratory ailments. And I'll remind you, food scraps and paper are not the only things being burned here.

The bottom line is: This stuff shouldn't be waste! We can turn it into a useful and valuable product to use to grow more food. Of course, the value of the compost depends on inputs and the process: compost consisting mostly of food scraps is more nutrient-dense than compost consisting mostly of napkins for instance -- vermicomposting (using worms) produces the most valuable compost out there.

City-collected compost may not yield the most valuable end result, but it still creates a usable product -- and most of all, it reduces waste, combats climate change and pollution. Whether or not there's a ton of economic value in this should be secondary to that.