If organic compounds break down in a landfill, they release greenhouse gasses. But the same happens when they break down as compost - something the website forgot to mention.
I support composting because I think it’s good for the planet to save space in landfills for things that need to be buried. But I don’t see how either approach actually helps climate change.
And, in fact, without much study, it seems like landfills are actually sequestering lots of carbon. So if our only focus is on climate change (and it shouldn’t be, to be clear) wouldn’t that be the winning option?
Regarding more potent greenhouse gasses from landfills - I believe most landfills in the US burn (or sell) their waste methane, which just turns it into plain ol’ carbon dioxide.
Also "modern" landfills when filled tend to be "capped" (covered in plastic) so rain doesn't leach though into the groud water. If they have a bottom liner, these landfills are like the worlds largest plastic bags.
To prevent methane building inside the capped landfill, pipes are run and the gas is collected and sometimes "flared" [1]
Having dug into some old old landfills, it was like a time machine of 25+ year old stuff. nothing seems to rot well inside them (no water). papers readable. We found a glass bottle of what appeared to be grape soda.
The CO2 that oil / coal / gas emit is "new" CO2 that the atmosphere never had, while most 'natural' CO2 & methane emissions gets recycled in a 10 year cycle, so it doesn't add to the net CO2 to the atmospheric systems.
On the other hand, agriculture emissions coming from animals and plant decomposition is small amount of agriculture's emissions in general anyway, so sequestering carbon is a bad reason to not compost, because of all the fertilizer benefits it creates, which means less need for artificialy created fertilizer. About %50 of fertilizer is the natural poop & compost kind.
Oil, coal and gas are actually produced from biological sources, plants that lived millions of years ago.
It's even a bit ironic - there was a time when nature hadn't yet learnt how to break down trees, so a lot of trees accumulated (simplified, I think it is more a then new trick of plant cells that had no "natural enemies"). That organic material is what oil, coal and gas are made from. The irony is that from oil we now make plastic, and nature has not yet found a way to break down plastic. Since microbes can now digest trees, no new oil will be created. But maybe if large enough plastic deposits are accumulated, it could happen again?
(Details may be wrong, as I was too lazy to google, but the gist is, fossil fuels are actually made from organic sources).
I believe the idea is that in a landfill those products will release CO2 and methane, whereas when composting they only release CO2. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas, so that's another benefit to composting.
Some gasses will be consumed by plants and fungi. Granted, methane won't be one of them. But CO2 will. Now, when compost is dumped on barren soil, there is nothing to consume the gasses.
A modern landfill where the gas is burned and used as energy source is way way better at reducing green house gases than fungi and microorganisms. The C02 wont go away but most of the rest way worse greenhouse gases.
I'm a worm farmer and micro-composter that takes cafe waste and turns it into organic fertiliser in the form of vermicompost.
I want to make a distinction between anaerobic processes, aerobic composting and the global respiration and carbon cycle.
Anaerobic environments create methane. Aerobic environments create predominantly CO2. One is more harmful than the other in the atmosphere.
Quality composting creates a lot of CO2, but it's a natural part of the respiration of the planet for bacteria to respire CO2 from oxygen and carbon. This happens everywhere there is organic residue breaking down in the natural environment... think leaf matter falling to the forrest floor.
The difference is that it's a "renewable" process, which is why I don't use peat-moss in my worm trenches.
The thing about methane is that it's very often harvested in landfill and burnt as an energy source. However, this may not always be the case, which is why I encourage cafes to take coffee grounds out of landfill and compost them.
Just doing my bit.
CO2 however is released in the natural carbon cycle (of which composting is a part) into the atmosphere... and according to ANU researchers it's responsible for 10-11 times the annual emissions of fossil fuels.
Composting isn't related to our great dinosaur BBQ we have indulged ourselves in for as long as we have been burning fossil fuels, it's actually simply leveraging natural processes to manufacture soil amendments, which means it's a renewable part of the process for generating calories for human consumption.
Basically Composting isn't part of the surplus of carbon entering the atmosphere from fossilised dinosaur bacteria.
It's just the natural respiration and carbon cycle of the planet.
In my city (Italy) composting is mandatory (i.e. you might get fined if you an inspector discovers you put too much of it in generic waste bins). We have separate brown bins for curbside picking. It's simple to separate organic matter from non-organic matter, and reduces how much waste ends up in landfills. You can pick up bags of compost from the municipal utility, and you can then use it as mulch.
Composting is a (1) human-managed (2) aerobic decomposition of organic materials, driven by (3) thermophilic microorganisms (primarily thermophilic bacteria). The result is compost. Anything that doesn't feature all three of the above components isn't composting, it's something else.
Compost is easy to make in your backyard: get enough fencing to create a minimum 1 cubic meter area on the ground (not a paved driveway or something) that you fill with organic material such as leaves and other yard scraps, kitchen scraps, manure, cardboard, dead animals, biochar, etc. It's best to keep wood and large bones out since they won't break down well - you can pyrolysize them instead and then co-compost the resulting biochar. You want air to freely move in and out of the pile, and to keep a thick layer of cover material on top such as dry leaves or hay (best, IMO) to prevent smells. A carbon to nitrogen ratio of around 25:1 works well. Inputs with high CN ratio: dry leaves, cardboard (~450:1), sawdust (500:1), etc. Things with low CN ratio: urine (0.8:1), fresh kitchen scraps (15:1), manure / toilet material, still-green yard scraps, etc. Mixing high and low CN ratio inputs results in a good overall mixture. The compost bin contents must be moist but not wet. I keep a compost thermometer in my pile at all times and currently, my 7-month old pile is around 120F / 48C. This well-above-ambient temperature is the result of thermophilic bacteria creating internal biological heat, a key component that distinguishes compost from other things such as vermiculture. Compost isn't done until it cools to ambient temperature, and then I let it sit for a year.
There are many kinds of decomposition and composting is just one of them. Here are some other kinds:
Combustion: aerobic thermal decomposition, resulting in ash
Pyrolysis: anaerobic thermal decomposition, resulting in biochar
Vermiculture: decomposition via worm digestion, resulting in worm castings, aka worm shit
Thanks for your helpful answer! I have some experience with using vermicompost, though I do daydream about making my own stuff one day.
I've read that vermicultures have a bit of an issue with not neutralizing plant pathogens that you introduce with the worm feed, have you had similar problems with composting, or does the heat usually take care of this issue?
Hey, glad to help. Yes it's true, vermiculture doesn't destroy pathogens to anywhere near the same degree as composting, and the heat is an important factor. Pathogens aren't a concern in composting, they're simply destroyed by the process. Further, composting is superior at degrading or destroying other inputs like pharmaceuticals
- with a few exceptions like certain chemotherapy drugs; gasoline; TNT; insecticides and herbicides and other such poisons, etc. In contrast, red worms have a much smaller range of diet, and again don't produce biological heat. Composting is a powerful process and thermophilic microorganisms are extraordinary little creatures.
That said, vermiculture is also great, and one of the nice things about it is that you can make it inside an apartment like in a container in your closet, while compost is made outside and needs at least 1 cubic meter of material. If I couldn't make compost I'd make worm castings via vermiculture, and I wouldn't worry too much about pathogens.
If anyone is interested in starting composting at home, I can recommend a Hotbin[1][2]. I recently purchased one and have had a good experience with it so far.
Being made entirely out of expanded polypropylene (not polystyrene/EPS/styrofoam), it is well insulated, can come up to 140°F in 3-7 days[3], and hold steady in the thermophilic range of 100°-140°F continuously so long as it is fed regularly. At those temperatures, those things you normally could not compost without horrid smells or pathogen concerns, like meats, fats, or pet wastes, will break down quickly and safely. Per the manufacturer, due to its insulated nature, it can hold those temperatures even in the dead of winter, making it useful year round instead of just a summer thing.
Yes, it's more expensive than other bins at the same capacity. But if you want to divert your kitchen waste stream from the landfill into producing a useful soil amendment for your own or others' gardens, it's worth it, IMO.
Here (Ireland) we have separate (brown) bins for food waste. They are also free, while the black (normal waste) bins are not. We also have green bins for recyclables. It's not perfect, but I do think the brown bin system is a pretty good idea.
Same thing in The Netherlands. Organic matter (brown or green bin) is free, but the bin that ends up on a landfill costs a few € to empty. I like it.
Also we have separate collections for glass, paper, plastic etc. So if you put in some effort, you can go a full year without having to empty your black (landfill) bin.
This system of paying for the amount of trash you produce is not used in all of the Netherlands. Currently roughly 50% of all municipalities do this, with a trend towards broader adoption. The rest have a flat annual taxation based on the number of people in a household (trash is limited to whatever you can fit into the bin).
Separate collection for organic matter, paper, and plastic also differs from municipality to municipality. In mine organic matter and paper has its own bin, but we have no separate plastic bin, and glass goes in public glass recycling containers.
Wouldn't this just incentivize people to put things in the compost / recycling that don't belong there? I believe this is already a problem even in places that don't have such systems.
The Seattle method was to throw all of your random debris into the recycling bin at the end of your lease, because the trash cans are too small to hold anything. That way the next tenants get to deal with a recycling bin full of week-old rotting tilapia. Or maybe that was just us...
Having got offside with my bin man once , it’s completely not worth it. I put some concrete in my bin. The system he used to train me was a few weeks of lifting my bin up 4ish metres then dropping it on my front lawn.
Removing broken window glass (which I was told must go in the bin, not the recycling) and household waste off my lawn each week was not worth it.
I don’t think this is the approved method for getting compliance, but it worked.
I got a hot composting bin (basically in insulated bin with some removable panels to allow harvesting of compost, and a thermometer) and it is so much fun… the hottest I’ve had it is 65c! All our vegetable waste, coffee grounds, as well as guinea pig poops and hay, some cardboard… a few months later you have black crumbly compost!
Cool! And you don’t even need a bin, just start layering dirt with brown and green matter. There are many books about composting if you want more guidance.
I have three piles going now: one from last year, ready to add to the garden; one started after we stopped adding to the first; and an experimental pile with ashes, human urine, and uprooted plants we don’t want propagating as much.
We put food scraps (no meat or bones, but we eat only a little meat anyway, and most animal scraps go to the dog) and paper (without a lot of ink or gloss) in a stainless steel pot and I bring that out to the in-process pile periodically, dumping it and then adding cardboard (tape and labels removed) and soil.
I worked for some time in Utrecht in The Netherlands, which has a somewhat extreme recycling regime, with punishments, if not done correctly. After the first week of me staying in the flat of the guy I was working for he said "Don't even attempt to put things in the bin (of which they were four) - just let me do it"
In the UK you can more or less sneak anything into any bin - of which I currently have three.
when food breaks down in the soil, the compost is integrated into the soil so it's already used. Plants then grow better apparently, I've never had to buy soil from the shop
I highly recommend vermicomposting which involves hundreds of even thousands of little worms. I have a HungryBin and don't even need a green bin anymore, at least not for kitchen waste. What you get is compost which is great for gardening and worm tea which is great fertilizer.
Sorry for picking you specifically ;) there's many of these posts here.
I do have to ask though. You mention it's good for gardening so I gather you have one. You mention vermicomposting which sounds like you specifically bought worms and use them in the HungryBin?
Can you elaborate on why?
Personally I just have a bunch of 2x10s in a corner of the garden and we throw all of or organic waste in a there. In fall I add all of the leaves from the trees. In spring I have compost I spread in the garden. I did literally nothing else except for turning it from time to time. Sometimes it gets hot and smokes. All by itself. I don't do anything special. Lots of worms in there too. All by themselves.
Most of our neighbors put their green bins out every week and in fall they put lots and lots of paper bags with leaves out. Why?
We only have a small garden so I don't have enough brown waste to get to the right ratio of brown to green. I might be wrong though but that's why I think a conventional compost wouldn't work as well. What I like about the worm bin, is that the wormies are perfectly fine with a very high ratio of green waste to brown. I also haven't had any issues with smell, in winter I even have the bin in my garage, a friend of mine has his in the kitchen. At the same time, obviously that's a property of vermicomposting, not of the HungryBin specifically.
> Most of our neighbors put their green bins out every week and in fall they put lots and lots of paper bags with leaves out. Why?
I agree, especially when it's so easy to compost at home with a little bit of space.
Not trying to pick on you here but I bet you would also do well in the garden directly, without the need for a bin, bought worms or doing it indoors. I guess that's more of a 'how to do composting if you don't actually have a garden' technique.
Not sure what conventional composting is, if not 'throw it all onto a pile and let it do its thing' ;) That's how my parents and all our neighbors did it too.
I definitely don't bother with ratios. I only learned about those very recently actually. As mentioned, it sometimes gets hot, sometimes it doesn't. When it does I guess I got the right ratio by 'accident' .
As in, in fall there's a lot of brown matter added from the leaves, in winter it eventually freezes (but I keep piling on the green matter from all the bananas, oranges, potato peels etc.) while most of the immediately 'active' green matter is added during spring and summer and it eventually reaches the perfect ratio as I keep turning the pile and I get periods of 'hot composting'. The worms probably don't like it at all when it starts smoking lol.
In between I bet most of the work is done by the worms that naturally occur in the soil and love feasting on all this organic matter. Naturally occurring fungi will also help I bet. We get lots of different kinds of mushrooms in the lawn at different times of the year.
Composting is nice if there is a dedicated collection of it (like in some part of Italy) and if it is actually used (eg. not landfill/burned anyway).
Doing compost at home for yourself is not working in general because most people live in an apartment:
- People won't know what to do with it and will throw it away.
- A large amount of moisty stuff in a small room with bad ventilation.
That's my experience of seeing city people doing it.
Or don't ignore it. Most of the criticism I read in the comments is actually constructive and true. Just because OP's kid did it doesn't mean the only valid comments are "wow this is great".
How nice of your family to offer to send people free compost bins!
If your daughter or son doesn't mind a usability suggestion, I would get rid of the font-weight: 300. As an experiment I tried overriding this with the default font-weight: 400 and the page became much more readable.
font-weight: 300 is modern and trendy and found in a lot of themes, but it makes text hard to read.
It's a nicely put together site and I congratulate your kid on a job well done.
That said, I don't see the space taken up by landfills as a big problem. Not in the US anyway. If they are done properly (and yes, that is a big if), they shouldn't release toxins or otherwise have downsides comparable to all the other sorts of damage we do to our environment.
Don’t you think it’s unrealistic that all effort is put on #1 topics? What if people genuinely care about problem #3 and #12? I don’t think it’s a wasted effort. Or maybe I’m misreading your comment?
But I hear this argument about landfills a lot (mostly by adults, which I feel a bit freer to criticize, and mostly with regard to regular recycling rather than composting which is essentially a subset of recycling), and I just don't think it as a big problem as people make it out to be.
Things that emit into the atmosphere (greenhouse gasses and other pollutants), and trash that doesn't make it into landfills are big problems. Another big problem is all the space taken up by other human activities. We're cutting down forests to build homes and grow food, and we see that everywhere and it has a huge impact on our planet. Landfills are a relatively tiny use of space.
But yeah, composting is good. As long as the effort you put into it doesn't make you feel that you've "done your part" and discourage you from making more impactful changes in your lifestyle. I don't have an electric car or solar roof yet, for instance, but I happily vote for representatives who will put significant amounts of my tax money into subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels.
Thanks, you're right. He looked into it and he'll probably do it at some point, but when we read together on how to do it, we found that taking money from others is quite complex (I guess for legit reasons, from scammers to people skipping taxes), so he wanted to start sooner and figure it out once he managed to get traction.
> Huge landfills are ruining the Earth because they are taking up a lot of space...The biggest landfill in the United States...is 2,200 acres wide
Ignoring the minor detail that acres are a measurement of area and not width, the contiguous US is 2 _billion_ acres. 2,200 acres is 0.00011% of that. We can easily spare the space.
> The organic materials in these landfills can decay and release greenhouse gasses...when these items go to landfills, they will take much longer to decompose than normal
This appears to contradict your kid's message, because it conveys that landfills reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions.
An acre isn't purely a measurement of area of undefined shape - it also has a defined width and length.
That said I don't know why anyone would be talking about acres when they could more simply say km wide or of area km squared that most people would not intuitively understand.
This website is aimed at people in the United States (note the shipping form), for whom an acre is still the most common unit of land measurement. Most people in suburban/rural areas in the U.S. are likely to have a sense of what an acre is, while few would know what a square kilometer looks like.
Don't Americans run 100 m and 5 km and 10 km distances? I would have thought that would give most people an intuitive understanding of what a km is. Even the US military now uses kms.
> That said I don't know why anyone would be talking about acres when they could more simply say km wide or of area km squared that most people would not intuitively understand.
Ohooo, ohoo, ohohoho. Where I live (continental Europe) it's impossible for people to use km or meters for agricultural or housing land. It's alway acres this or hectares thats. It drives me nuts but I have learned to nod and I google the conversion later.
> An acre isn't purely a measurement of area of undefined shape - it also has a defined width and length.
This is wrong. Acres are defined as the area encompassed by a particular set of lengths, but acres do not have specified widths and lengths because it is a unit of area, not of width or length. Acres can be any shape. They do not have to be rectangular.
The page appears to talking about the Apex Regional landfill near Las Vegas, Nevada, which has an _area_ of 2200 acres. Though you'd never know it because the page has no citations anywhere.
> Originally, an acre was understood as a selion of land sized at forty perches (660 ft, or 1 furlong) long and four perches (66 ft) wide [...]. As a unit of measure, an acre has no prescribed shape; any area of 43,560 square feet is an acre.
"The area of" is important there. If you're going by what wikipedia says, perhaps you could keep reading to the part where it also says "As a unit of measure, an acre has no prescribed shape; any area of 43,560 square feet is an acre."
Right but when someone specifically says 'width' for acre then what do you do? Assume they mean the width of a traditional acre, or claim you have no idea what they mean?
If you read more carefully this is mostly explained.
Decay in landfills is anaerobic and produces methane, which has a higher impact on warming than CO2.
Also, composting has a bunch of other no-brainer benefits. Compost reduces demand for fertilizer, can substantially reduce the waste steam, and improves soil quality.
> If you read more carefully this is mostly explained.
> Decay in landfills is anaerobic and produces methane, which has a higher impact on warming than CO2.
It's not clear to me where you're getting that from. The page neither mentions the word anaerobic nor say that composting doesn't also release the exact same gasses just somewhere else. At best it leans on the reader feeling an emotional difference between the words "decompose" and "decay".
Landfills generally burn off their methane, which turns it into carbon dioxide.
So, yes, they’re roughly equivalent. And things decay faster as compost, so you’d actually be increasing climate change by composting all organic waste.
Methane is mostly a problem when it can’t be captured and burned (ex: cow farts, a serious problem in preventing climate change).
Note that I still support composting. I just don’t think it can be argued from a climate change perspective.
Some landfills now harvest methane and inject it back into the natural gas grid. If this were done more widely, landfills could actually help solve climate change by reducing demand for natural gas.
Composte decomposing in a landfill does nobody any good. I compost my scraps along with lawn clippings and leaves in my yard so that I can use it in my little garden. I splurged and got a tumbler for composting rather than just piles in the yard. Each spring, I use the compost through out my garden beds/pots. I had enough left over to fill a couple of ceramic pots. One of those pots had tomato seeds that sprouted for me free of charge. Bonus!
The real reason why people should compose or better whole cities should, is because the nutrition in the green waste should go back in circulation which they wont do if they end up in a landfill/waste incineration.
The greenhouse gasses reasoning is bogus it decomposes anyway
Modern landfills are also used as energy source where the worst kind of greenhouse gases are burned and turned into less severe CO2.
The space argument is also nonsense. There is plenty place on earth the real problem here is that moving trash is expensive hence poor cities are surrounded by garbage mountains.
If organic compounds break down in a landfill, they release greenhouse gasses. But the same happens when they break down as compost - something the website forgot to mention.
I support composting because I think it’s good for the planet to save space in landfills for things that need to be buried. But I don’t see how either approach actually helps climate change.
And, in fact, without much study, it seems like landfills are actually sequestering lots of carbon. So if our only focus is on climate change (and it shouldn’t be, to be clear) wouldn’t that be the winning option?
Regarding more potent greenhouse gasses from landfills - I believe most landfills in the US burn (or sell) their waste methane, which just turns it into plain ol’ carbon dioxide.