Communities partner to make sustainable organics recycling possible
An article in the December issue of MSW Management titled Rethinking Sustainable Organics included a quote from Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture to President Franklin Roosevelt. The quote is:
“[n]ature treats the earth unkindly. Man treats her harshly. He over plows the cropland, overgrazes the pastureland, and overcuts the timberland. He destroys millions of acres completely. He pours fertility year after year into the cities, which in turn pour what they do not use down the sewers into the rivers and the ocean… The public is waking up, and just in time. In another 30 years it might have been too late.”
United States Department of Agriculture’s Soils and Men: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1936
In 1936, we already knew that through unsustainable management of cut trees, shrubs, and spoiled or leftover food we were depleting fertile soil of carbon and other nutrients. These materials can be managed to provide a soil amendment that returns minerals and carbon to the ground so that a piece of land will remain fertile despite years of cultivation that would otherwise depleted it. Bob Shaffer, an agronomist, says that only 10% of the planet has land that is suitable to raise crops and fortunately, over time, compost made from recycled food scraps has been embraced by farmers.
Recology has been working for 15 years with the City of San Francisco to make food scraps recycling possible. Now, 60% of what we at Recology touch in San Francisco stays out of landfills. One way we do this is through advanced composting processes, technology and the knowledge we’ve gained over 15 years. Greg Pryor, manager of Jepson Prairie Organics has mastered the process through testing all kinds of technologies and techniques at the composting facility, which opened in 1996. Jepson Prairie Organics is located among agricultural lands in Northern California, and has created 1,100,000 tons of compost since it opened. The composting processes that Recology has developed have resulted in VOC emissions that are far below state minimum requirements, prevent the creation of methane gas, and create a specially-blended compost and compost teas that are useful to biodynamic farmers.
Closing the loop on sustainable farming is possible when communities that consider sustainability issues as they plan their garbage programs–or resource recovery programs in the case of San Francisco–are willing to partner with companies like Recology in this great experiment of human social and ecological survival. We are glad that more and more cities are catching on.
Return your leftovers to the farm
A friend and I talk alot about “closing the loop”, and how important it is to our future. Talking about it so much though, I take it for granted that everyone knows what closing the loop means.
The closest definition on the internet that I’ve found is:
Completing the recycling cycle by buying products that were made with recycled materials.
Closing the loop is the idea that we can find the next best and highest use for everything we buy by making conscious decisions about where we buy it, where we send it, and the contents of what it is we buy.
Take your groceries for example. Let’s say you don’t really care whether you buy organic or conventionally-farmed oranges and avocados. You just eat them. Well, what do you do with that orange peel or avocado seed once you’ve made orange juice or guacamole? Most people throw those things in the trash, or, if they have a garden, they may put it in their dirt or compost bin to help their garden grow.
Last April, Recology took a major step in shaping the future of the resource recovery industry. The name change is not superficial. We are doing what we’ve always done–for example, we started the organics recycling program in 1996. Changing our name from Norcal Waste Systems to Recology was more than anything another example of our desire to change the way Americans think about their garbage.
The company has been pushing for people like you and me to realize that when we separate our leftovers from our regular trash, they can be composted. The compost can be used by farms throughout the country to grow more food. When you buy and eat food that’s been grown by farmers using compost, and then return your leftovers to them as compost, you have “closed the loop”.
A Fox News blog post about our food waste collection and recycling program nicely illustrates the concept of closing the loop.
Closing the loop is an idea that has to do with thinking systematically in terms of cause and effect. It also has to do with paying attention to the feedback we get from our environment through observation, the news, and data–whether scientific or operational. When we start o ask ourselves what will happen to the things we buy for Thanksgiving dinner, it starts to become clearer that putting food scraps in a landfill doesn’t make sense–not when there are farms out there waiting to fertalize the soil with the compost they need to feed you and me.
*There’s a closing the loop curriculum that the California Integrated Waste Management Board has put together for K-6 graders. Share it with your kids, young friends, or cousins.
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