The Urban Food Revolution by Peter Ladner

Author:Peter Ladner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC055000, ARC010000
ISBN: 9781550924886
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2011-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Urban Food Scrap Composting Has Challenges

So-called food “waste” is a valuable resource in disguise — as is all “waste” when you consider that natural systems have no “waste” that isn’t a resource for another cycle in the system. Food leftovers make up the bulk of the third to half of all household garbage that could be composted back into soil.

Returning composted food leftovers back to the soil is the ultimate “natural” solution, but in urban areas, it’s an endeavor fraught with practical difficulties. It’s hard to pick up food waste house-to-house and keep rats and pests away from it as it sits on the curbside. It’s hard to keep out uncompostable plastics such as plastic bags, containers and other random undesirables that get into it. Food waste takes up a lot of space and can be smelly to process, and the resulting compost can have micro-impurities and other contaminants mixed in. For the purposes of making compost, gathering food waste only from restaurants and institutional kitchens is easier than going house-to-house, and it delivers more predictable content.

In many areas, the volumes of compost created are just too big. Farmers can only use so much. Some states use it to shore up the edges of highways, where it makes good bedding soil for stabilizing vegetation. International Composting Corporation in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, B.C. tried to screen, bag and sell municipal compost in home improvement stores (under the R-Earth brand), but it was too difficult to orchestrate and they had to give up on it. Now they’re doing bulk pickup sales and biogas production.

Some cities, like Modesto, California, have figured out a way to package and sell their compost. In Modesto, you can buy bags of “Mo-gro Pro” and “Mo-gro Magic” at the Senior Citizens Center. The composts include food waste and biosolids and are advertised as suitable for vegetable gardens.

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