Curbside Composting and the Extra Work of Going Halfway

The curbside pickup of organic waste has been in the news lately. Actually, the program, designed to keep food scraps, grease-stained pizza boxes, etc. out of the landfill, has been persistently promoted in local papers since its inception two years ago.

According to data supplied by Sustainable Princeton, the program had 460 participants prior to consolidation, and has reached almost 600 now that the annual cost has been reduced to $65.

Those I know who have signed up for the service express surprise and delight at how much they've been able to reduce their trash production by diverting organics into the little rollout bin. Organics dumped in a landfill produce methane, some of which escapes into the atmosphere where it is a powerful agent of global warming.

COMPOSTING IN THE BACKYARD
Though I prefer to compost in my backyard, I can attest to the convenience of putting food scraps into a little compost bucket on the kitchen counter, and the lack of odor. With recycling and composting, we rarely fill a trash can more than once every two or three weeks.

I've never found it necessary to "turn" a compost pile, but instead let it all decompose of its own accord and in its own time, so there's really no work involved beyond a backyard stroll every couple days to empty the bucket. If the squirrels or the chickens (see PrincetonNatureNotes.org for posts on having chickens in Princeton) help themselves from the small heap, no harm's done as far as I can tell. Some white or brown papers, like greasy portions of pizza boxes, or those "compostible plastic" cups that aren't supposed to go in with the recycling, get thrown in as well.

THE EXTRA WORK OF A VOLUNTARY PROGRAM
In some ways, the curbside program is a good example of how a halfway environmental measure is more work than instituting a bigger change. The voluntary program is a good start, and will hopefully lead in the fullness of time to a mandatory program, but the years-long work of encouraging, signing up, and equipping new participants takes a great deal of staff time. To that extra work is added the inefficiency of a truck driving all over Princeton to service the scattered residents participating. There's really no good reason other than habit and custom for people to be mixing organics in with their trash. Recycling is required, and organics recycling should be also.

DESTINATIONS
One possible holdup is that there's no food composting facility nearby. Currently, the foodwaste is hauled 70 miles down to Wilmington. There had been talk of Princeton teaming up with the university on an odorless compost system to be located on River Road, which sounded promising. The university currently sends all of its food waste to a pig farm. Given the high quality of university food, I'd say the pigs are eating high off the hog.

A PARTIAL ANSWER TO THREE RELATED PROBLEMS

Princeton has three related problems: 1) most foodwaste is going to the landfill, 2) yardwaste makes the streets look trashy except for two months in the winter

(It's particularly paradoxical in the springtime, when one can look up and see beautiful flowering trees,

then look down and see lumps of yardwaste dumped at the curb),

and 3) the town is dependent on imported, climate-destabilizing fuels.To move towards solving these problems, anyone choosing not to compost in their backyard would put organics and yardwaste in a rollout bin (larger than the green composting bins) for weekly, year-round collection. That would keep food out of the landfill, and keep the streets much cleaner, with brush pickup and fall leaf season as exceptions.

Ideally, all these mixed organics would head to a nearby center where the solar energy embedded in them would be turned into fuel, and the remains would become fertilizer. This is being done in some cities, mostly in Europe, where the monetary consequence of burning fossil fuel more closely reflects the environmental consequence.