On Sunday, my blog was featured in an article in The Denver Post. The article talked about my family’s efforts to recycle many items. It also mentioned some statistics about trash. If you saw the paper edition, it included a bar with some statistics about garbage:
- The average American produces 1,606 pounds of garbage annually.
- My three-member household produced 521 pounds of garbage in 2008.
- We gave away or sold 722 pounds of household stuff in 2008.
The article mentions that we average about half a 13-gallon kitchen trash bag per week.
And yet pictured above is our actual trash load for this week. HUGE for someone claiming not to make much trash, right?
What is frustrating is that of those three big bundles of garbage, less than half of the 13-gallon white bag is actually *waste* that isn’t easily recyclable.
The rest is organic matter that could be composted and turned into reusable dirt, if only we had the means.
We have a compost bin, and we use it for our household food waste, our yard trimmings (such as they are — we have a small, somewhat sparse lawn, and we use a push mower, so we don’t have too many clippings, and they stay on the lawn), our shredded paper, etc.
But we simply don’t create enough volume of compost to be able to have bulky items like the ones in the image above — some pruned rose branches and a bag of weeds and old stalks from garden plants, as well as several squash from our CSA share that we never ate this winter, but which now are turning bad — break down in our compost.
The good news, which is not pictured, is that we were getting rid of several rose bushes, too. We put an ad on Craigslist offering them to someone who would dig them out, and within minutes had 10 takers. A man came and dug them out and took them away that afternoon!
What about city composting?
Of course, this would be solved by a municipal compost program. These programs can take larger items, because their greater volume of materials and industrial turning-of-the-compost makes big stuff break down faster.
Many city-based programs make it possible for restaurants to compost their waste, for everyone to compost waxed paperboard (like milk cartons), and even for meat and dairy waste to be composted. (These items are biodegradable, of course, but they break down slowly unless the compost pile is very hot, and they can attract distasteful pests. Wouldn’t it be great to compost them? Sometimes a chicken bone or two is stinky enough to make us prematurely take out a trash bag.)
City programs are possible, but not too common. Read about what the City of Boulder, Colo., is doing if you want some inspiration. Boulder is striving to be a zero-waste city, and composting is an important part of that goal. Also quoted in The Denver Post are some statistics from “The Story of Stuff,” which notes that yard trimmings and food scraps make up about 25 percent of household garbage. If you add wood products and paper and paperboard products (other organic materials) as the EPA’s organic materials Web site does, the total is more than two-thirds of the waste stream! Imagine taking that much stuff out of landfills and converting it to usable fertilizer.
“But doesn’t your city have composting?” you might ask. Yes, Denver does, but the program is on life support. The city rolled out a pilot program for green waste recycling last year. With budget cuts due to the economy, it almost got the axe, but it’s been extended through 2010 for homes in the original area only that pay a yearly fee. After that, who knows?
Wouldn’t green recycling — municipal compost everywhere — be wonderful? When I took out our trash, I looked across the street at our neighbor’s house. They had been working in the yard all day Sunday, too. Typically, they have a trash can with a bag or two in it. This week, they had this:
Probably a lot of that is recyclable, if only we could.
How about your neighborhood?
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Comments ( 9 )
One option for kitchen type organic waste is the in-sink garbage disposal. When we lived in town, most of our kitchen waste went into the disposal and into the sewage stream, which eventually gets turned into fertilizer in this area. Now we bury the compostables in the holler, so to speak, and run the noncompostable stuff through the disposal to help our septic system work better.
Kara added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
11:11 am
WOW, congratulations on the article. It is nice to have your efforts recognized and to know that through mainstream media you can reach more people, possibly even inspiring a few to take action.
When I lived in Denver we used worms to compost some of our food, but there was no way they could eat enough of it to keep us from throwing some away. And also there will always be the meat scraps if you’re a carnivore like us.
Great work and great post!
Everett added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
11:24 am
we also have chickens who eat up a lot of our waste. we have a good city program here in Portland that takes compost and supposedly will soon take kitchen compost. i didn’t check to see if I could click on several things in your poll but i would say we do, in this order as applicable, 1) feed to chickens, 2) put in compost bins (we have 2), 2) put in city bin.
erin added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
1:36 pm
We are very lucky here- we have municipal compost, and the company running it makes enough money I don’t worry about it going away. We also have recycling- which takes our cans, paper board (milk) cartons, bottles- plastic and glass, metal scrap.
Rob added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
6:27 pm
I live in a small city in Massachusetts (full disclosure: I work for the mayor) and we have had municipal compost for at least 10 years. It saves us money because we pay for our solid waste disposal by the ton, but the city handles recycling in-house, so every pound we recycle is a pound we’re not paying someone else to haul away. We only have curbside pickup half the year, but we can drop stuff at the City Yard year-round—and the city even picks up Christmas trees in January. We compost the stuff in the city, and when summer comes we have a big pile of lovely black compost that people can help themselves to. I guess the economics of trash are just different here.
Nonetheless, I have a compost pile in my back yard and most things go in there. I don’t worry too much about big things; I either chop them up or toss them to the side, and they break down eventually. I’m planning to put in raised beds this year, so I’ll toss stuff like that in the bottom and throw compost over it; it’ll break down eventually.
Brigid added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
7:29 pm
I feel like I should add on this survey, that there’s a big difference in my mind between food scraps and yard waste. I can’t stand to throw twigs and such in the trash, but we have a wooded spot nearby we can dump them in. I plan to compost (food) in the future, but we can’t in this rental house.
Lauren added these pithy words on
Apr 21 10 at
8:08 pm
Thanks for all the comments!
@Brigid, we don’t pay for trash removal in my city (not directly, anyway — only through taxes) and so there is no incentive for individual homes to cut down on waste. I think that’s a mistake.
@Lauren, the “big difference” is kind of the opposite for us — we can compost food scraps, but we live on an urban lot and don’t have anywhere we can put yard waste. Some of our neighbors throw away big bags of grass clippings. We can’t practically compost that much “green” matter because we don’t have enough compensating “brown” matter. A large scale would help.
Cheap Like Me added these pithy words on
Apr 22 10 at
8:13 am
My condo association has a lawn service which works a little better for me right now because my city discontinued yard waste pickup due to buget cuts. The lawn service takes yard waste – mostly tree branches from storms – to a their own facility to make compost. For food scraps, I started composting again. I only hope the lawn guys don’t run over this compost bin!
Condo Blues added these pithy words on
Apr 23 10 at
11:06 pm
I was a member of Denver’s much-maligned compost program, and I declined the offer to contine at a price. I have such mixed feelings about it because on the one hand I really wanted to support the program, but really I compost pretty much everything that can be composted so my bin was usually filled with stuff salvaged from my neighbor’s garbage. And while I’m committed to the cause, I’m not committed enough to pay for having my neighbor’s stuff composted!
I also just think the whole think is bass-ackwards! If they want to charge for something, they should charge for dumping garbage, NOT for composting! I mean, really other than the fact that they’ve got the separate infrastructure to support, composting costs the city less than garbage removal because they sell compostable materials and have to pay to put stuff in the landfill.
If it were up to me, I’d cut the garbage collections down to every other week and have compost collections on the off weeks. Problem solved! Unfortunately, they didn’t listen to me.
Soooo, for now, I’ve started a big neighborhood compost bin where my neighbors all put their grass clippings etc. I compost it all and use it for the garden. Then I make sure all of the contributors get a big basket of produce at harvest time!
Loving your blog BTW!
Rebecca added these pithy words on
May 21 10 at
11:00 pm
