I’ve heard it all. Someone once told me that landfills need food scraps because it helps with the breakdown process. As if a banana peel is just what plastic cutlery need in order to break down. A more common view is that organic materials break down in a landfill without consequence or lost opportunity. Now, in light of our energy crisis, some are advocating for organics to go into landfills in the spirit of renewable energy production.

About half of states have a ban on yard waste in landfills. Recently, the Florida legislature voted to lift a decades long ban on landfilling yard waste. The goal was to divert the organic waste to landfills where methane gas would be produced from the fraction of organics that do break down. Some of this methane gas can be captured and used as an energy source. Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the bill in the spirit of Florida’s recycling goals. We are likely to see more of this kind of debate.

The timely May 2010 BioCycle magazine cover article, Putting The Landfill Energy Myth To Rest, explains why we should avoid organics in landfills. In short, the author Sally Brown, states “Landfills are best suited as a place to throw stuff away rather than to optimize the carbon, energy and nutrient values of organics”.

If you want to revisit some chemistry explained in clear and sometimes humorous ways, download the pdf of this article (BioCycle is making this available to non-subscribers for free). If not, read on. I’ll do my best to give some summary points.

Brown clearly explores the three potential uses for [no longer wanted] organic materials. The first is energy production, which is sparking this debate in the first place. Organics placed in landfills produce some methane, but not all organics are breaking down and not all of the energy from decomposing organics is captured. On the other hand, anaerobic digesters, which are designed for energy capture, are more efficient. Sorry folks, but straight up composting, although sometimes hot, is typically not an energy source for anything external to the pile.

The second potential function for organics is carbon sequestration, meaning keeping carbon in living things like trees or adding it to the soil rather than letting it go into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Depositing organics that don’t decompose well in landfills (e.g., wood) is another form of carbon sequestration, although not wise from a resource management perspective. In contrast, the resulting product from digesters and composting can be added to soil. This not only sequesters carbon in the soil in the form of organic matter, but also supports plant growth which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s bonus!

Last, there are the nutrients contained in organic materials. The nutrients tossed in landfills in the form of organic matter are lost for good, never to recycle as a plant or animal again. Digesters and composting, on the other hand, preserve and concentrate nutrients such that the end product can be used to fertilize plants. Again, more plants and less carbon dioxide!

To sum it up, landfills are a good place to put stuff we don’t want and can’t be used for something else. Unlike landfills, composting and anaerobic digestion both conserve the majority of the nutrients and a portion of the carbon from the original material, which in turn improves soil conditions and increases plant yield. Anaerobic digestion has the added benefit of energy production.

As resources become limited and harder to access, our focus needs to turn away from throwing stuff away and move towards wisely managing our resources for the long haul. This means less dumping and more digesting and composting.

I’ve got a big decision to make. I’ve been growing my hair for months, perhaps years to donate 10-inches of it to Locks of Love, an organization that makes hairpieces for children with long-term hair loss. But then I heard about Matter of Trust, a non-profit with a mission of using surplus materials for the good of the environment. They are currently busy making hair booms to lessen the impacts of the massive oil leak in the Gulf.

The oil leak is a hard reminder that technology sometimes fails us. It turns out that low-tech may in fact save the day (or at least part of it). There is quite a surplus or hair and fur out there from salons and pet groomers. Usually hair and fur are landfilled, but they could be so much more.

Hair can be used as a soil amendment, but right now we need hair to soak up oil as it approaches land and wildlife. Hair loves oil. This is why most of us wash our hair every day. The oil clings to the hair inside the hair boom, reducing the amount finding its way into fragile habitats. Apparently hair and fur from living beings works better than the fiberglass and petroleum-based products typically used for clean up. It kind of makes sense too. Why clean up oil with an oil-based product?

But it gets even better. The oily hair is then composted. Matter of Trust has used two methods for composting oil-spill clean-up materials that would normally be incinerated. The first is thermophillic (hot) composting followed by vermicomposting (composting with worms). The second method uses mushrooms to break down the oily hair. Mycelium (mushroom roots) produce enzymes that break down wood (this is why you see mushrooms on dead trees). Since petroleum and wood share similar molecular bonds, mushrooms seem to be the key composting ingredient. The result is a landscape-grade compost.

Back to the big question. What should I do with my hair? I’ve been carrying it around for quite a while, imagining it bringing some well-deserved joy to someone else. But then I see photos of dead birds from oil spills past and I’m truly torn.

Luckily, I’ve got connections. I’ll hit up my friend who works in a salon for all those less than 10-inch pieces of unwanted hair. If that doesn’t work (and even if it does) I’ve got fiber animals out in the barn without the same hair-donating ambitions that I have, likely just glad to be rid of their locks as the warm weather approaches.

Locks of Love, you can have the 10 inches. Matter of Trust, you get everything else. If you have hair, fur or wool to donate, visit the Matter of Trust website.

I recently heard someone say “Waste is a not a noun, waste is a verb”. This came up during a discussion about the semantics of food scraps and other organic materials that can be composted. Referring to them as waste implies they are of little or no value. If we find another name for them, well, folks might be more likely to find an appropriate place for them.

How do we move away from referring to organic matter as something without value or even a lability? Disassociating organic materials from words like waste, rubbish, trash, and garbage is a start. But then what do we call it?

Scraps (as in food scraps) – This word doesn’t imply something of value, but rather the remnants from some other process. This concept isn’t highly regarded in our society. For example, in my house the dinner leftovers (that nobody wants to eat but knows they should) are affectionately called scraps. Scraps does not express the real potential for these materials.

Nutrients – While compost does provide nutrients, it also provides organic matter and improves soil structure. The word nutrients doesn’t capture all the benefits of turning organic matter into compost.

Organics – To many, the word “organic” means something like “grown without pesticide”, but when we talk about organics in composting we mean a substance containing carbon-carbon bonds that is is capable of being broken down by microbes. There’s too much potential confusion here given that the former “organic” is a household word.

Compostables – This would be ok by me, but some people confuse “compostable” with “combustable”. Trust me, it happens. Besides, not all materials need to be composted to be useful to another plant or animal. The chicken, pig, and dog owners out there can attest to this.

Resources – Although not specific to composting, this word suggests we best utilize what we have to achieve some benefit. This one gets to the heart of the matter. Last year, the EPA Office of Solid Waste changed its name to the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery. Hopefully this one will catch.

Sending our resources to the landfill is not a way to get rid of waste (noun). Rather, it is is the process of wasting (verb) something that could be used by someone or something else.

With all its triumphs and sorrows, it isn’t unusual for me to shed a tear during the Olympics games. This year, though, there was an unusual setting for my tears — a commercial. That’s right, there were tears of joy when I saw the SunChips spot. A chips bag composting to some great music right there on national TV.

The compostable bag, made from a corn plastic called polylactic acid (PLA), was scheduled to come out for Earth Day, so I was pleasantly surprised to find them in my local grocery store in mid-March. The SunChips website is largely dedicated to the new bag, including composting information and a description of their own special composter with a glass wall so they could visually document biodegradation of the bag (the basis for their touching commercial).

I got a little worried because the website doesn’t mention anything about documenting the lack of toxic residue, the other critical piece of compostability (in addition to biodegradability). There wasn’t any information about third party testing either. An email from the SunChips Brand Manager clarified that the entire bag (not just the PLA part but the inks and glues too) is certified compostable by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI). She went on to say “Our package leaves behind nothing harmful in the soil and does not change the natural mineral composition of the soil when composted.” The next round of packaging will wear the BPI logo.

Next I visited the SunChips Facebook page to see what others think about the new bags. Most people thought it was a good idea and congratulated SunChips on their innovation, but there were complaints about the bag being too noisy (true – perhaps not good for midnight snackers) and some dissatisfaction with a chip company forcing an eco-agenda on the rest of the country. Favorite flavors were declared and there was some discussion about the use of artificial colors and GMO corn, but nobody was actually talking about composting the bag! Tired of hearing me ruminate over this, my sister-in-law posed the question.

Throughout this process my family devoured numerous SunChips, and the resulting bags are in several of my compost piles and bins. Being bags, I gave them a second life as a compost crock liner. That’s a pretty good life for my bags, but where are all the other bags going? The SunChips website clearly says the bags don’t compost in a landfill. They need compost piles to complete their lifecycle. The good news is that they do appear to break down fairly quickly in a home compost pile under ideal conditions (according to SunChips). On the flip side, not everybody composts or has access to a commercial or municipal composting facility.

In my communications with SunChips, they indicated that they are working on promoting composting awareness. I believe they already have, but of course there is more work to be done. I say, let’s not forget the need to improve composting infrastructure, so that people can do something with all that awareness. Still, it is a huge step in the right direction. Way to go SunChips.

Mountains of compost at a commercial composting facility.

What comes to mind when you hear the word infrastructure? Perhaps emergency systems such as fire, police, a working 911 system, and ambulance service ranks high on your list. We are comforted knowing we can rely on these services during a time of acute need.

You might be thinking of the electrical grid, telephone (land line and cell), and internet as critical infrastructure. While not usually a matter of life or death, our world is a different place without these services. There can be a lot to lose: business operations, a teenagers ability to text, and ice cream.

Public water and sewer systems in non-rural areas are a critical and under-appreciated part of our critical infrastructure. I’ve never heard of a politician attaching his or her name to a sewer project, yet sanitation is public health’s greatest achievement.

Trash and increasingly recycling pick-up might also come to mind. Think about how much trash and recycling you could easily store in your home before it started to take over, and you quickly realize how critical this really is in today’s throw-away world.

What about organics recycling (composting) infrastructure? This one is patchwork at best. Enter your zip code on fndacomposter.com and many of you will not find a composting facility within a reasonable distance from your home. This is particularly true in rural areas with low population density. True, many of these folks have the space to compost, but many choose not to so organics go to the landfill.

What separates organic recycling infrastructure from the other previously mentioned components of infrastructure is the immediacy of the consequences. If we send our organics to the landfill with our trash, no one loses their home in a fire, has their business operations paralyzed or gets cholera as a result.

The consequences are important though, particularly in the long run. Currently we have a quick fix for our declining soils – synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They aren’t a true fix though, as they often leave our soils worse off, lacking life, organic matter and good soil structure. In the meantime, they contribute to pollution of our waterways.

Composting infrastructure takes on new significance when we consider healthy soil as critical for life. All life above the soil depends on life within the soil. Together with the sun, air, and water our soils support plant and thus animal life. As the aboveground life forms (in particular the upright two-legged ones) continue to put pressure on earth’s systems, we might be wise to take care of what lie beneath us.

There is a certain irony to the produce section of my grocery store. I’ve noticed that the organic produce are more packaged than their conventional counterparts. Here, the purest of the produce are surrounded by plastic, not of the compostable kind.

Every week I ask myself: Organic bananas in plastic or conventional bananas without plastic? I’ve been favoring the naked conventional bananas, but if there was an option for plastic-less organic bananas I’d go for those. Each week I wonder, why are the organic bananas in plastic?

One of my theories is that packaging suggests to the consumer that the product is more valuable. Organic produce costs more than conventional produce. Perhaps the packaging helps consumers swallow the price.

I don’t see packaging as making a product more valuable. In fact, I see it as a liability and so does my municipality. Once it comes home with me I need to find a way to get it out of the house again, either by placing it in the trash or the recycle bin. Once I bring it to my municipal solid waste district, they need to either landfill it or recycle it. The latter isn’t always as easy as it may seem. So, I’ll take the plastic-free bananas.

I usually pass on plastic produce bags too for the same reason. Produce bags usually have a recycling symbol on them, but how many people have a place where they can actually take plastic bags for recycling? My grocery store accepts them, but my guess is that not everyone has that option so, of course, they end up in the landfill.

Now that my paper towel dream has come true, at least at one store, I’m dreaming about compostable produce bags. They exist, but they are more expensive than their conventional plastic counterparts, so you don’t see them much. Anyway, in my dreams all the grocery stores have them and everyone who takes them uses them to line their compost crock. Then they all get composted along with all those food scraps that everybody is composting (this is my dream, so everybody is composting everything that can be composted). The bags are an asset because they are useful after their original task of holding produce is finished. They are a convenient way to carry food scraps out to the composter and nobody has to wash slime out of the compost crock. Best of all, they rot, just like what they are designed to hold.

At nearly every public, school and workplace restroom, I’m used to seeing this:

Some sort of container lined with a plastic bag filled with paper towels, each briefly utilized for the sole purpose of drying hands. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for washing and drying hands after using the bathroom. It just always seems to me these paper towels could have some sort of afterlife.

You can imagine my surprise (and delight) when I saw this on the waste receptacle beneath the paper towel dispenser at our local garden center:

It was like a dream come true.

I realize composting paper towels from bathrooms is not as easy as it may seem. Sometimes there is other bathroom trash that you don’t want in a compost pile, so each bathroom would need to have a regular trash bin too. Inevitably, mistakes will be made. This is always the problem when collecting compostables in public settings: trash finds its way in.

Collecting paper towels for composting won’t have many of the drawbacks of collecting other compostables in public settings. There is no food sitting around perhaps a bit too long creating an odor and looking attractive to fruit flies. These paper towels are clean; after all, people are using them after they wash their hands. Finally, unlike bioplastics, paper towels can be composted anywhere. Since they contribute primarily carbon, they are a great addition to compost piles that contain mostly nitrogen-containing materials such as food scraps.

Having a compost bin in public bathrooms will take some getting used to, but we could start making the shift in some more controlled environments. I’m going to start with my kids’ preschool. I have never seen anything else but paper towels in the bathroom waste bins. Preschoolers just don’t have a lot of other trash. Plus, this population really gets it, and isn’t too stuck in their ways of throwing all their waste in the same bin. Other prime locations might be small workplaces where everyone understands the two-bin (trash and compostables) bathroom waste management system

I figure people probably use, on average, 5 paper towels for drying hands per day. That’s 25 paper towels per week and 1200 paper towels per person per year if you figure in vacations and holidays. For a workplace or a school with 100 people, that’s a decent amount of compostables.

We can do better than trapping a bunch of perfectly-good compostables in a plastic bag and considering them trash. The landfill doesn’t need them; our soils do.

Holiday travel can make me weak and yield to the pressure of just-off-the-highway fast food. My kids, who are both four, are already shouting out “Old MacDonalds” (as in the song) when they see the golden arches. How do kids know to do this so early in life?

Usually I resist in favor or a diner or a packed lunch, but this time it was a rushed Christmas Eve and we were traveling with a feline. He’s a well mannered cat, but it isn’t like you can tell him to please use the kitty box before getting into the carrier. Plus, it was cold outside so I caved in to McDonalds as our fastest lunch option in the best interest of the family cat.

When I do land in a fast food restaurant, I try to avoid the toy. It is always some landfill-bound mean-looking guy that gets my boys all revved up. But now they are old enough to really lay on the begging and their father has a soft spot — perhaps for the plastic light-up man, I’m not sure – so the happy meals get ordered while I’m in the ladies room.

Fast food figurines ready for action on a snow-covered wood pile.

Mind you, it is hard enough for me to eat at fast food restaurants because I can’t stop thinking about all the food scraps not being composted and the packaging generated by my own meal. Then I consider the number of people who eat at that McDonalds per day times the number of McDonalds in the country — no, the world — and I just flat out loose my appetite. Now that my children know how to nag my husband into submission, I need to imagine all the kids’ meal toys in landfills too.

The problem with kids’ toys is that kids really love them for about a half hour, then it lives out the rest of its “useful” life on the backseat floor of the car. Perhaps it makes it into the house and serves mostly to clutter the kitchen counter, but they all ultimately end up in the trash.

Why, then, are kids toys made from a material that will last hundreds of years when kids’ interest in the toys is much shorter, by a magnitude of about a million? It would make a lot more sense to make toys that are compostable (ok, my bias) or recyclable. Or, how about if the companies supplying the toys institute a take-back program? They could include a self-addressed envelope in the kids’ meal so that the parents could be rid of the toy when the child looses interest. The community wins too since the local landfill doesn’t have to accept yet another piece of plastic and associated parts like lights and batteries. I might actually seek out a restaurant like that.

Our cat was with us on the way back, so I’m sorry to say that we now have Burger King toys around here too. Neither of the toys are played with now, just a few days later. In fact, the boys didn’t even care when I walked out of the house with the toys in order to snap this photo. They just showed me how they worked and said “Bye, mom”. For all they know, I could have chucked them in the woods. I might have, but I don’t want to see them there each spring when the snow melts for the next several hundred years.

Individual action. Photo by Lori Fisher.

With Copenhagen behind us and the results less than what the earth and her species need, local and individual actions take on even greater importance. In my last post, I suggested composting as an activity that anyone can do to address climate change; in this post I explain why.

As the Compostable Organics Out of Landfills by 2012 (COOL 2012) website points out, “as communities work to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the first place to look is in the garbage can.” When food scraps and paper products are landfilled they break down in the absence of oxygen (anaerobically) producing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. When organic materials are composted, carbon is both stored within the compost as humus and released as carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, methane is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

At the community level, diverting paper for recycling and organics (food scraps and yard trimmings) to composting facilities not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also results in useful end products. The resulting compost promotes plant growth including food production, which sequesters carbon dioxide from the air. Compost also reduces reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which on their own are energy intensive and a source of greenhouse gas emissions.

At the individual level, compost yields even more greenhouse gas savings. Backyard and apartment composting prevents the relatively heavy organics (food scraps are largely water) from having to travel from your home to the landfill. If everyone composted their food scraps and yard waste, we’d have about one quarter of the amount of waste to transport further reducing greenhouse gas emissions from trucks.

The Stop Trashing the Climate report states:

Significantly decreasing waste disposed in landfills and incinerators will reduce greenhouse gas emissions the equivalent to closing 21% of U.S. coal-fired power plants. This is comparable to leading climate protection proposals such as improving national vehicle fuel efficiency. Indeed, preventing waste and expanding reuse, recycling, and composting are essential to put us on the path to climate stability.

At the individual level, careful product selection and composting of our organics is something we can all do without world leaders and industry standing in our way. If you are already there, take it to the community level. Think global, act local. The greatest changes start there.

This week the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is bringing light to some of the lesser known strategies needed to address climate change. Composting is getting some well deserved attention.

Snow melting on compost.

The Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) brings to Copenhagen their opinion that the “way to solve the climate change problems caused by humanity is to recapture carbon in the soils of the earth. This can be accomplished by returning all organic waste to the soil as compost.” As they say, soil is the solution.

Many of the strategies to address climate change require complex agreements at the national level, which largely exclude direct involvement by citizens. Composting, on the other hand, can be done by anyone anywhere. Even apartment dwellers can use enclosed systems to make compost. This is one of the solutions we can truly take into our own hands.

The climate crisis will challenge all species for the foreseeable future, but it is the responsibility of our species alone to solve the problem (although we can enlist help from the composting microbes). The global size and scope of the issue requires all hands on the table and implementation of all strategies. This involvement at every level is the way Copenhagen truly becomes Hopenhagen.