The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [144]
Methane gas is what is known as a volatile organic compound, or VOC. There are also nonmethane VOCs released from dumps—fumes from things like paint, paint thinners, cleaning supplies, glues, solvents, pesticides, and some building materials. Routine VOC emissions are one reason that living near landfills is dangerous. Common symptoms from exposure to concentrated VOCs include headaches, drowsiness, eye irritation, rashes, and respiratory and sinus problems. Many studies have documented increases in cancer (especially leukemia and bladder cancer) and other health problems in communities adjacent to landfills.85
Waste industry representatives often promote the concept of burning landfill gas as a renewable energy source, which would make landfills eligible for massive governmental subsidies, or carbon-offsetting credits, and grant them some invaluable public relations. They argue that the gas is going to be produced anyway, and burning it to create energy is better than just letting it seep into the atmosphere. The catch is that landfill gas is dirty gas; it contains methane as well as other nasty VOCs and potential contaminants that can form supertoxic dioxin when burned. Burning landfill gas to produce energy is far more polluting than burning natural gas. Nevertheless, the landfill lobby succeeded in having it included in the renewable energy standard in the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate bill, as well as in the Senate’s renewable energy standard.86
Composting
The main source of methane is rotting organics, which are also the source of most of the liquid, aside from rain, that becomes leachate. By simply keeping all organics out of landfills, we could virtually eliminate the methane released from them, significantly reduce leachate, and keep our climate cooler. In many cities, organics—food scraps, yard trimmings, soiled paper—make up a third or more of the municipal waste.87 That means that just by keeping organics out of the trash, we can cut our municipal waste by a third! The best way to do this is to mandate wet-dry separation of garbage at the source—i.e., in our kitchens and everywhere we eat—and then dispose of food remains by composting. This also keeps recyclables from getting gunked up with yesterday’s meals, keeps the organics from getting contaminated with the toxics in consumer products, and creates a valuable additive for soil.
I think composting suffers from an image problem. Mention composting—or worse, worm bins—to most people, and they imagine quaint farmers or hippie throwbacks. But actually, composting is a simple thing we can each do to get our own household’s materials flows in better balance. It isn’t a big political statement. It is a smart, easy, responsible thing to do. Plus, it makes your garden bloom. If you eat, compost. Simple.
Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have curbside collection of organics. Every resident gets a little green bin to keep in our kitchen for food scraps. We dump it into a bigger green bin with our yard trimmings and this gets emptied weekly, along with the recycling and the (shrinking amount of) garbage. In the first large-scale urban food scrap composting program in the country, San Francisco’s residents, restaurants, and other businesses send more than 400 tons of food scraps and other compostable material to be composted rather than landfilled each day.88
If your city doesn’t have a municipal composting program, don’t worry. Organic waste can also be composted at the household or neighborhood level. I like decentralized backyard or neighborhood composting best anyway, because then we’re not using trucks to haul around this material that is mostly water. There are lots of easy systems for backyard composting. I have four tidy little black bins