The Challenge of Organic Waste
With approximately 55% of the world’s population currently living in urban areas, and nearly 90% of the United States’ population now living in only 50 urban aggregations, we are facing a huge issue that is often glossed over, and that is organic waste. With the UN projecting nearly 70% of the global population to be living in urban environments by 2050, this is a serious issue that must be addressed with finesse and creative thinking.
This issue of waste management looms quite large in many minds, and it presents a multifaceted challenge that demands innovative solutions to approach the diverse array of waste streams generated in large cities especially. Compostable waste in particular is one of the easiest to address, and is currently a major contributor to environmental degradation. If we are, as a society, to find solutions to this challenge, we must explore the pressing need to address this compostable waste in a holistic way.
According to the World Bank, global municipal solid waste proliferation is estimated to reach nearly 3.4 billion tons annually by 2050, with the amount generated in urban environment being the primary contributing factor. There are manifold challenges when considering ways in which we can manage this waste, and the current mass mismanagement of this waste through various logistical challenges and beyond have caused rampant environmental hazards to compound; pollution of land, air, and water, and generally this collective trash heap poses serious threats to public health and ecosystem vitality.
The first step to solving the problem, is to understand the problem. This all begins with the basic scientific fact that organic materials, such as food scraps, yard trimmings, and paper products, can (and should) be processed through composting, leaving the processors with a nutrient-rich soil building block by way of biological processes, completely attuned and inline with how the natural world functions. If one is to examine an urban center generally, factors such as population density, consumption patterns, and a mostly inadequate waste segregation system, have arranged themselves into an ugly amalgamation of factors that contribute to a significant generation of organic waste, and an overall mismanagement of how this material is processed once it enters the waste stream. Much of this is due to an overall lack of education in the public mind. Despite the potential for much of this organic waste to be beneficially reused (even eaten in some cases), sadly most of it ends up in landfills, where it decomposes anaerobically and releases exorbitant amounts of methane and where it leaches harmful and poisonous substances into the soil and the watershed.
If we are to look at one simple solution, composting, it becomes obvious upon introspection that it not only offers benefits in the realm of environmental protection and sustainability, it shows promise of a plethora of economic and social benefits. One may not, at first, think of compost as something beneficial in the areas of economics and society; however, there are many grants and business building opportunities available for those wishing to contribute to a positive shift occurring in the public conscious regarding organic waste, and also the potential of communities to come together and find their own solutions to waste management outside of big business of monopoly control. In the environmental realm, the benefits are quite obvious as well. Composting diverts organic matter from landfills which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, lowers the need for landfills, and slows the rate at which current landfills become overburdened—a challenge many are dealing within their communities currently. Compost is the ultimate organic soil amendment that builds and enriches the soil, promotes biodiversity in the form of microbes and beyond, and composting is, quite plainly, the right thing to do.
Despite the obvious evidence that our society should move toward the adoption of composting writ large, widespread adoption faces an uphill battle. The first challenge we see quite often is inadequate infrastructure available to citizens who wish to compost, and who do not have the will nor the space to do it on their own properties or inside of their living spaces. This has given rise to many collection organizations, but often they use fossil fuels (energy) to do the collection, thus creating a nuanced situation that must be examined closely. Low public awareness has been a huge challenge as well, and through education and concerted efforts, thankfully this can be remedied by way of various beneficial community organizations forming to teach this subject (and others) to the population who is very interested in learning about it.
Regardless of the challenges, pillars of insight and courage have emerged, and cities globally have adopted successful composting programs, showcasing their practicality and efficiency. Seattle's food waste composting program, providing curbside collection, and San Francisco's mandate for separating organic waste have notably decreased landfill waste, offering environmental and economic advantages to both communities. The Radix Center in Albany, New York is a great example as well of a community-based solution, where they use electric bicycles and tricycles charged from their very own solar array to collect food scraps. They also have a drop-off point for individuals to dump their own food scrap pales, where they are first fed to chickens, ducks, and turkeys, before reaching their final processing point in controlled, aerobic composting piles.
Tending to compostable waste in bustling cities is vital for softening our environmental footprint, preserving resources, and even providing the very growing medium for urban farms and gardens to produce more of their own food! Managing organic waste is the first step for most people in becoming good environmental stewards, and helping our species work toward a more sustainable relationship with Earth.
PS—I would like to leave the reader with a quote.
“I don’t think “global thinking” is futile, I think it is impossible. You can’t think about what you don’t know and nobody knows this planet. Some people know a little about a few small parts of it ... The people who think globally do so by abstractly and statistically reducing the globe to quantities. Political tyrants and industrial exploiters have done this most successfully. Their concepts and their greed are abstract and their abstractions lead with terrifying directness and simplicity to acts that are invariably destructive. If you want to do good and preserving acts you must think and act locally. The effort to do good acts gives the global game away. You can’t do a good act that is global ... a good act, to be good, must be acceptable to what Alexander Pope called “the genius of the place.” This calls for local knowledge, local skills, and local love that virtually none of us has, and that none of us can get by thinking globally. We can get it only by a local fidelity that we would have to maintain through several lifetimes ... I don’t wish to be loved by people who don’t know me; if I were a planet I would feel exactly the same way.”
References
Community Compost Initiative. (2023, January 17). The Radix Ecological Sustainability Center. https://radixcenter.org/
68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, says UN | UN DESA | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (n.d.-b). https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html
Hoornweg, Daniel, et al. "What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management." Urban Development Series Knowledge Papers, The World Bank, 2012.
Brunner, Paul H., and Helmut Rechberger. "Waste to Energy—Key Element for Sustainable Waste Management." Waste Management & Research, vol. 27, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3-4.