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.