The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [145]
Of course, you don’t need fancy compost bins to get started. I’ve seen neighborhood composting programs in New Delhi, India, and Quezon City in the Philippines that use old fifty-five-gallon barrels or just long ditches filled with worms into which residents dump their organic waste. In developing countries, composting is even easier since generally their waste contains an even higher portion of organics than in heavily industrialized, consumer-maniac countries, with all our disposable Stuff. From Cairo to Calcutta, community organizations and sometimes forward-thinking municipal officials are setting up composting programs.
While backyard (or garage, laundry room, or front hallway) or neighborhood composting happens at the level of individual households and communities, there are lots of ways government can support it. Where I live, the government waste agency—the Alameda County Waste Management Authority—subsidizes compost bins for residents. These high-end backyard composters or worm bins regularly cost about one hundred dollars if bought in a store. The Waste Management Authority buys them in bulk at a discounted rate, subsidizes part of the remaining cost, and sells them to the public for about forty dollars each. They don’t mind subsidizing the cost because they save so much more money by not having to pick up all that heavy organic waste. Since beginning the program in 1991 (and through July 2009) they have sold more than 72,000 compost and worm bins, which, they estimate, have diverted more than 110,000 tons of organic waste from landfills.89
Government can also get involved in bigger ways. In 1999, the European Union passed a landfill directive that required a steady reduction of organic waste sent to landfills over the next twenty years. In 1998, Nova Scotia, Canada, adopted a complete ban on landfilling or incinerating organics, which spurred the development of an impressive composting infrastructure.90 So far, twenty-one states in the United States have banned landfilling of yard waste,91 which is a good start because once yard waste composting systems are set up, it’s not hard to add kitchen and restaurant scraps too. Any method of composting is less expensive and much smarter than building sanitary landfills or high-tech incinerators.
4. Landfills Waste Resources
How are resources wasted? Let me count the ways. For starters, there’s the hundreds and thousands of acres of perfectly good land taken up with landfills. It’s true that once landfills are filled up, they’re usually covered with dirt and then replanted. After that many of them are turned into parks, parking lots, or shopping malls. But these are ill-fated. Trash settles over time, making the ground unstable, so structures built on top of them often shift and sink. As for the parks, they attract children—and having our kids running around on top of a garbage heap leaching VOCs is just a bad idea.
As Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation, explains, “The moment human efforts cease, nature takes over and disintegration begins: nature has many agents that work to dismantle a landfill: small mammals (mice, moles, voles, woodchucks, prairie dogs, etc.), birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, worms, bacteria, the roots of trees, bushes, and shrubs, plus wind, rain, lightning, freeze-thaw cycles, and soil erosion—all combine to take apart even the most carefully engineered landfill. Eventually a landfill’s contents disperse into the local environment and then move outward from there, often into local water supplies. It may take a decade or it may take 50 years or more before a landfill spills its contents, but nature