Easy Ways to Go Green #4, Compost

Because I have been busy recently, I have not posted in a while. 

Fortunately, though, I found the time to update an essay I wrote last year called “The Case Against Children.” You can find it here.

For this post in the series of easy ways to reduce your carbon footprint, I’m going to discuss the importance of composting. 

Unlike recycling, composting is a little more obscure, though it really shouldn’t be. Given how important it is to compost, it should seriously be considered a public education fraud how little composting, as a practice, is taught and promoted outside of the most elite liberal cities in America. A commonly cited figure in the environment is that a whopping forty percent of landfill matter in America is food that’s been tossed to feed a landfill. (This figure includes the overall food supply chain, a topic that I’ll be covering in future posts.)

But in the meantime, the concept of “food” being “wasted” is a postindustrial bogey. Nature recycles automatically; this is what we were (or should have been) taught in school. Carbon, the base of organic matter, is cycled naturally in something called the carbon cycle. In terms of how this played out in farming times, what you grew turned into what you eat turned into what you grew again. You grew your corn, you harvested it and ate the corn, the corn husks went into the compost, the compost went in the soil; then, after a few months, that soil would sprout fresh crops again. It’s a naturally miraculous, closed loop of ecology that maintains itself. You feed the soil, the soil feeds you, the food feeds the soil, the soil feeds you again.

In the (post) industrial age, however, we’ve disrupted that cycle so much, that now, instead of this closed loop in which nothing organic ever went to “waste,” we drive to the grocery store (because we’ve forgotten how to push a seed into soil and expose it to the sun and water it) and purchase antibiotic-sprayed corn which is often unknown in origin and hauled to us from 300-3,000 miles away. We consume the corn, which, having been grown in unnatural conditions, tastes like nothing (encouraging us to buy meat, which has a stronger taste instead), then toss the husks into the “trash,” which is then hauled away by a gas-guzzling garbage truck. The truck uses more gas to tow this and other “wasted” food products, to a landfill where, instead of taking three months to decompose into rich humus to feed our food and our bodies, it’s mixed with piles of single-use plastic bags, discarded textiles, styrofoam packing pellets, and other assorted products, and not allowed to decompose, for the landfill, by necessity, is sealed off from air and thus imprisons the organic matter. If the landfill is not maintained – a maintenance which, of course, costs even more in industrial materiel– it then leaches toxins, which then find their way, inevitably, into our watersheds and gardens.

We have replaced nature’s system, designed over millennia to nourish and sustain us, with an artificial system that literally poisons us every step of the way.

Ironically, upper-middle-class suburbanites drive to Home Depot to buy a bag of compost at a high premium, which they use to tend to their perfectly manicured monoculture tomato gardens. It always puzzles me how they do not realize they can just toss a banana into the soil outside their window and that would do wonders.

This travesty is made especially insane given how easy composting is to do: toss a banana out into the woods and that banana inevitably becomes food for everyone. Again, it’s sort of a public education fraud, part of the swindling of our minds by the corporate ecosystem that’s replaced our actual ecosystem, our health and our spirit as humans.

If you have municipal compost, you’re in one of the lucky enlightened towns or cities of America (whatever passes for enlightenment in America!), and you should start contributing to it immediately, lest a lack of participation result in a budget cut. The nice thing about composting is, once you start, you can never stop; you can never go back to the mindless attitude of tossing organic nutrients straight into a trash, where you contribute to real waste. You feel good about not ever “wasting” food that you didn’t feel like eating. Because you know that what you throw away into the compost will always come back as food for a plant.

There’s something oddly satisfying about scooping out your coffee grinds into a bin, knowing that you’re not contributing to that ugly, toxic landfill; that these used coffee grinds will support some tree, somewhere, which in turn will support you.

If you don’t have a compost service, I highly recommend you split the cost of a private curbside or other composting service with roommates – which here, in Somerville, MA, amounts to about $3 to $5 a person. Paying $5 a month, the price of a coffee, to never waste any of the food you don’t eat, seems worth it, right? Just think about what else would happen to your “food waste.”

If that’s still too steep or you want to DIY, I recommend vermicomposting, or worm composting, a technique that I’ll explore in a future post. If you’ve got a vegetable garden, yard, or even a patio, you’re in great luck: all you need is a compost bin, or, if you’re adventurous, an open compost pile.

In any case, please: compost, compost, compost.