The Problem with Food Waste

      Lift the lid to your garbage can, ugh! It stinks. The scraps from Monday’s dinner are the culprit. By the end of the week, when it is time to take the can out to the curb, the stench can be difficult to bear.
      Once that trash gets picked up, the smell is no longer your problem; it is gone, far, far away to stink somewhere else. That stinky food waste goes with the rest of your trash to a smelly transfer station and then a stinkier landfill.
Statewide, food waste accounts for more than 15 percent of what is sent to landfill, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board’s (CIWMB) 2008 Waste Characterization Study.
      Sacramento residents sent 73,000 tons of food waste to the landfills last year, Jessica Hess from the Department of Utilities said in an email.
      That is quite a lot of stinky stuff!
      That stink is dangerous.
      That stink is methane.
      Methane is a highly flammable greenhouse gas that is produced during the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it is 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon-dioxide.
Methane has been implicated as the cause for the April 5th explosion of the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia and the April 20th explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While the methane that caused those explosions did not come from food waste, but from deep in the earth, these examples illustrate the volatility of the gas.
      In the 2010 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory Report, released last month, the EPA stated that landfills are the second-highest human-related source of methane, behind enteric fermentation (scientific term for “cow farts”).
      Because of the dangerous, flammable and noxious nature of methane and other landfill gasses (LFG), the EPA requires that landfills have a gas collection system for public safety. The gasses can be burned at a point of exit (“flare” pipes that burn the gasses as they emerge) or the gasses can be piped to an end-user that uses the gasses to make energy. But, according the GHG report, these methods of methane mitigation still produce large amounts of GHGs and are not a sustainable option.

Composting May Hold the Answer to Stinky Landfills
      At all levels of government and waste management, from the federal EPA to the Sacramento Department of Utilities, reducing waste and greenhouse gasses has been a priority.
      According to CalRecycle (the new department that used to be the CIWMB), California surpassed the federally-mandated 50 percent trash diversion goal from landfills in 2004 and by June of 2009, had reached a 68 percent diversion rate.
      In March of 2009, the city of Sacramento ratified a General Plan that included a Zero Waste Goal by 2040. California has had a zero-waste goal since 2001.
      In order to reach that zero-waste goal, Sacramento and California will have to find innovative ways to divert more waste, especially waste that creates greenhouse gasses.
      If the roughly 15 percent of food waste sent to landfills as a rule today, were diverted by residential composting, not only would local topsoil be replenished, gardening encouraged and landfill emissions reduced, but the waste diversion rate would increase to 73 percent for the state   and almost 84 percent for Sacramento!
      Each of these government agencies encourage composting as a method to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills, but it is a quiet support that most residents are unaware of.
      On its website, CalRecycle recommends composting because it “helps to keep the high volume of organic material out of landfills and turns it into a useful product.” But it took several click-throughs and a site search to find CalRecycle’s position on composting.
      The City of Sacramento supports composting by offering discounted BioStack bins to residents after they complete a class or online quiz about proper composting. But Hess said only about 70 -80 bins are sold per year.
      Russell Vreeland is a downtown Sacramento resident who started composting last summer. “When I started composting, I just sort of started a pile in the back corner of the yard...I was worried it might be illegal in the city limits, like keeping chickens, but I went ahead and did it anyway. I guess the city’s cool with it, though, since it was really stinky for a while and no one told us to stop.” (Methane was what made Vreeland’s pile stink.)
      When Vreeland and his roommates started composting at their Alkali Flats home, they thought they were just making better soil for their garden, but since they started their pile, they noticed that they were only needing to put the trash bin out for collection twice a month, rather than every week, and that the smell of the trash was much less offensive.
      “For a while, the trash bin didn’t stink, but the whole backyard smelled rotten,” Vreeland chuckled, as he looked out over his tiny, yet productive, grocery garden and throw-rug-sized lawn. “But look at those healthy, happy plants!”
Vreeland’s 800-square-foot backyard does indeed look green, healthy and happy, and no longer smells like the landfill.
      When Vreeland was informed of the city’s BioStack offer during his interview, he was amazed and slightly offended that he had never heard of it, but vowed to take advantage in the near future.
      Vreeland’s compost pile slowed its production of smelly methane and broke down the food scraps and green waste much faster when more oxygen was able to reach the middle of the pile. “My roommates and I got better about turning the pile and the smell got better,” Vreeland said, “but we’re busy and get lazy, so it still a bit stinky.”

Compost revolution
      Oxygen is the key to preventing methane production and to healthy compost. With enough oxygen, compost can get hot enough to be pasteurized and efficient enough to break down organic matter with no smell in 60 to 90 days.
      Out in Carmichael, a small company called California O2 Compost, could hold the key to fast, easy, no-turn, no-smell, pasteurized, high-quality compost, which has big implications for Sacramento’s food-waste diversion future.
      “When you turn a compost pile, introducing oxygen and feeding the microorganisms that break down the organic matter, that oxygen gets used up within 30 to 45 minutes,” said John Pefley, owner of California O2 Compost (CO2C) in Sacramento, “most people only turn their piles once a week,” which means they are producing methane for all but 45 minutes of that week.
      O2 Compost has a proprietary design for their composting system that uses a small amount of energy to oxygenate the compost 24-hours a day, eliminating the need to turn the pile and cutting the production-time for finished compost down to three months (a quarter of the time finished compost normally takes).
      Currently, O2 Compost focuses sales of their “Macro-Bin” to equestrian centers and horse owners, who constitute the “low-hanging fruit” of organic waste control (since one 1,100-pound horse can create a minimum of 350 pounds of waste per week).
      “The biggest question then,” Pefley said, “is what to do with all that finished compost?”
      In April, CO2C solved that problem for the Los Lagos Equestrian Center in Granite Bay (which uses a Macro-Bin for their horse and landscaping waste), by starting a monthly compost sale.
      At the May 15th sale, CO2C sold more than 30 truck loads of compost created by the Los Lagos Macro-Bin. The next sale is scheduled for June 12th.
      There is definitely a demand for good compost these days. Grocery- or kitchen- gardening is gaining popularity in urban areas where topsoil has been degraded (in places like downtown Sacramento for more than 100 years) and people are needing to build up the soil in order for things to grow. Even the White House’s organic grocery garden used compost, according to the White House website.
      Although the systems CO2C sell today tend more toward farm-size than downtown-backyard-size, they are experimenting with a “Micro-Bin” system that could work for small-scale composting and recently unveiled solar-run options for all their systems.
      Considering that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2007 there were almost 7 million acres of agricultural land fertilized in California and that the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recommends the use of compost as a soil amendment, there is potential for a larger market for high-quality compost in industrial agriculture in California.
      Nutrient cycles are an important function in agricultural growth. In this modern world, however, nutrients (in the form of food) flow from agricultural fields to cities, but those nutrients do not flow back from cities to fields. This explains why fertilizers are so important to farmers, because as nutrients leave their fields as food, those nutrients must be replaced each season, generally with fertilizers that can contaminate groundwater. Those nutrients, in the form of food scraps, could do a lot more good than making methane in landfills.
      In a zero-waste world, “all municipal solid waste materials are sent back into nature or the marketplace in a manner that protects human health and the environment” (from the CIWMB’s 2001 Strategic Plan).
      What better example of sending solid waste back to nature is there than cycling problematic municipal food waste back to where the food came from?