Wanted: Composting Infrastructure

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.

Tags: compost, composting facility, critical infrastructure, healthy soil, infrastructure

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 10:58 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.