Why Our Food Waste May Be Our Greatest Asset

You and I are caring people. And caring people care about composting, which is why many of us bemoan the fact that our civic governments do not collect compost. The well-informed among us may even talk fondly of municipal organic waste collection systems, like those started in San Francisco in 1998 and Toronto in 2004.

But let's play these municipal collection systems out a bit. First the city gives every household a pricey new plastic rolling tote. They buy additional trucks and hire more people. Those trucks chug up every single lane in the city until they are full, then they drive somewhere far away and dump the organic waste. Large machines pile and re-pile the organics for a few months until it breaks down into compost. They do this two to four times each month, 12 months of the year, for the rest of time.

There's an obvious environmental cost, and the cash price is none too pretty, either. Take my hometown of Vancouver as an example. The current cost of garbage collection in the Vancouver area is about $15 per tonne. Metro Vancouver collects 1.5 million tonnes of garbage, of which 180,000 tonnes is organic waste.

So the cost of collecting that organic waste, whether in garbage trucks or compost trucks, is $2.7 million every year, plus inflation, wage increases, and fuel surcharges -- and speaking of fuel surcharges, diesel has increased in price by 65 per cent this year. Analysts from the investment bankers Goldman Sachs predict oil could spike to $200 per barrel by winter of 2008.

Landfill potpourri

Cities are going to have an increasingly difficult time paying to move garbage from place to place. Something will give, and solid waste is usually the last thing to get a budget cut -- people get real cranky when the rats are bigger than the cats. Say goodbye to daycares and libraries.

It doesn't help that many cities have landfills already overflowing with packaging, construction debris and built-to-break gadgets, and must resort to increasingly tortuous and expensive ways to dispose of their waste. So far, the "best practices" solution seems to be shipping it overseas or to other jurisdictions by train, barge or truck.

Organic waste is a big part of that problem. We truck enormous amounts of food into our cities; in Canada about 1,000 kilograms per person per year. The waste from that food is mind-boggling. A recent report found the U.K. throws away almost a third of its food -- and that's counting only the food that could be eaten, not the piles of peelings and seeds.

So forget about compost? Of course not. You care. And so you care about compost. Composting returns nutrients to the soil. It is part of closing the loop of nutrients; from the soil to us, from us to the soil. As cities increase food security, reconnect with living systems, and increase affordability through urban agriculture, composting will be a critical part of the urban permaculture.

You also care about climate chaos, and composting reduces greenhouse gas emissions from organics rotting in landfills. Methane, a greenhouse gas 27 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is formed as organic waste decays in airless conditions. Some places burn landfill gas for heat and power generation, but it is not a high-tech system -- a big rubber sheet is spread over the dump to collect whatever leaks out. But the garbage bags are still tied shut -- organics are mixed with mattresses. The system is far from optimized for methane generation.

Local composting: pick your method

Why not build a composting system that does not rely on a constant river of oil, and start saving part of that $15 per tonne -- not to mention lowering our greenhouse gas emissions, cutting down on carcinogenic particulates and reducing the number of noisy trucks waking us in the morning?