Composting and Climate Change

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.

Tags: climate change, compost, global warming, greenhouse gas, zero waste

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 10:48 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.