One of the benefits of living in New England is the the proximity of mountain, ocean, city, country, farm, four-season recreation, and even Canada. If you like the idea of short road trips or a staycation, this is a pretty good place to live.

On our short trip to the New Hampshire and Maine coasts this year, I was struck by the amount of extruded polystyrene (EPS commonly known as Styrofoam). It started during our continental breakfast in Portsmouth, NH with EPS bowls, plates and cups. There were no recycling bins for the yogurt containers, let alone compost bins. The irony is that this is a town lucky enough to have a startup compost collection company, Eco-Movement. I really hope this movement takes off, starting with the hotel I stayed at.

My next experience with EPS was just hours later at a beachside snack shack where my veggie burger came in a small clam shell. Others had hot dogs in hot-dog shaped EPS. It was 85 degrees out and I carried my meal about 6 feet to a picnic table. Did we really need the EPS?

The tide had come in as we were ready to leave the beach and I found myself picking up plastic. Juice box straw wrappers, plastic cutlery, plastic drinking cups, plastic zipper bags, and various food packaging items. I couldn’t help but pick it up, even though I seemed alone in my efforts. If you need convincing that eating (particularly low-quality processed foods) generates a lot of trash, visit a beach.

Our last night was at a hotel with with another continental breakfast, this one a step up with make-your-own waffles. After getting over the shock of the syrup being offered as a small single-serving container of Mrs. Butterworth “maple syrup” (could this really be happening in New Hampshire?), I began to check out the food service items. Still Styrofoam plates and bowls. Juice cups were plastic. Coffee cups were made from Forest Stewardship Council paper. Some utensils were traditional plastic, but the forks were “Biodegradable”. I appreciate these last few efforts, but again, everything (trash, compostables, and recyclables) went in the same bin – and off to the same place – the landfill.

I wonder, is one of the luxuries of staying in a hotel eating off the cheapest food service items and not having to recycle or compost? I appreciate when hotels give me the option to not have my sheets and towels washed everyday. Doing so it downright wasteful and I’d be willing to be most of us are not doing this at home. It’s about time we have the option to recycle and compost. It would make for a much more relaxing vacation.

A big thank you to my family who pretended not to be embarrassed while I took photos of trash in public.

When the article “Peak Phosphorus” appeared in Foreign Policy, it wasn’t the first time that a connection was made between phosphorus and national security. In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned of decreasing productivity of cropland due to reduced phosphorus in soil and emphasized “the importance of phosphorus not only to agriculture and soil conservation but also to the physical health and economic security of the people of the Nation.”

Why all the fuss? Phosphorus is essential to all living things as it helps to form the backbone of DNA and RNA, our genetic code, and cell membranes. Human and other large animals contain a large amount of phosphorus since it is a major component of bone (so your personal answer to the title of this article should be a definite “Yes!”).

Typically, farmers and home-owners apply phosphorus in the form of fertilizer to their fields and lawns. Phosphorus is lost through soil erosion and runoff, and removed via harvesting crops or by removing lawn clippings. To make up for these losses, phosphorus is reapplied as fertilizer.

While phosphorus is an essential element to both plants and animals, it is relatively rare in the earth’s crust. The phosphorus in most fertilizers is from mined phosphorus, and it is running out. The Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimates that there may not be enough mined phosphorus to meet agricultural demand within 30-40 years.

According to the Foreign Policy article, nearly 90 percent of the world’s phosphorus supply in the from of phosphate rock is in just five countries – Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States. Our most productive mine will be commercially depleted within 20 years. We use so much that we are already an importer, receiving about 10 percent of our phosphorus from Morocco. It is clear to see how this critical element relates to foreign policy. Decreasing crop yield combined with increasing world population is a recipe for serious geopolitical consequences.

Phosphorus is a stable element, so the natural questions is where is all the phosphorus going?

As the recipient of runoff and soil erosion, many lakes, rivers and oceans have too much phosphorus, acting as a phosphorus sink. Influxes of nutrients into bodies of water can result in overgrowth of algae which can be directly harmful to people and animals. The algae use up available oxygen in the water, suffocating fish and other marine wildlife, creating dead zones.

Phosphorus is also removed from soils in the form of edible crops, most of which are consumed by humans or animals. Phosphorus is then excreted in feces, manure and urine.

The current path of phosphorus from phosphate rock to field to waterway is not restorative or sustainable. Most linear systems are not, hence the need to close the loop and truly reuse phosphorus. Unlike oil, phosphorus can (and has been for millions of years) been recycled over and over again.

The Foreign Policy article suggests “a combination of low-tech and high-tech solutions, including preventing soil erosion, development of more targeted methods of fertilizer application, and the creation of new, phosphorus-efficient crops”.

The real trick will be to change our linear system to a cyclical one. Urine, in particular, has high nutrient value. According to several studies, one person’s urine contains 50-100% of the phosphorus requirement to grow food for another person. Composted manures and biosolids are high in phosphorus and surely have a role in nutrient recycling.

When composted, the phosphorus in food scraps and crop residues remains in circulation. If we are running out of phosphorus, it is truly wasteful to be landfilling these organics even if we get a bit of energy from it in the short term. Bone meal, ash, and wool are also valuable sources of phosphorus.

Bodies of water with high nutrient (phosphorus) levels may also have algae overgrowth or invasive species like Eurasian Milfoil. Harvesting and composting unwanted plant or algae growth could actually reverse the linear process, bringing the nutrient from the water back to land.

Its time to give phosphorus some more well-deserved attention. There is so much more to it than just the middle number on the fertilizer bag. If ever there was a reason to P-ee on your compost pile, this is it.

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.