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.