Composting and me
Blog
My rekindled relationship with composting
While working in renewable energy in Africa, and looking for ways to support agricultural communities to absorb the benefits of our infrastructure projects, I became very interested in questions around soil health, fertiliser scarcity, and organic waste management. Between my field trips and my work with energy regulators, I began looking at the soil in my own backyard and studying the effects of modern agriculture and horticulture, suspecting that my previous efforts to plant vegetables and ornamentals were somehow stunted. When the pandemic hit, I spent more and more time in my garden (a passion since childhood, somehow forgotten over the years abroad), which provided a kind of ‘mindful’ home-based hobby during lockdowns - an afternoon outside always brought my mind back to harmony after a day of remote meetings and regulatory drafting. I saw the severe depletion of soil first hand, whereby nothing was growing in our hard, hillside garden - largely due to rainfall running over the land, and previous tenants focusing purely on plants rather than soil.
Scaling up my small compost system with all the greens and browns I could source in my neighbourhood, I felt the usefulness of turning organic waste into a resource without having to rely on council or industry. I enjoyed the feeling of building and turning a pile and watching nitrogen- and carbon-rich materials interplay with the oxygen, water, worms and biota, until it became a rich earthy natural resource. I saw the difference it made for the plants above ground, knowing that this was an indication of the life beneath. And I engaged with the science by reading, observing, building sensors and collecting data, and networking with experts in agriculture, waste management and ecological conservation and regulation. The science around compost and its application is particularly fascinating when we see just how much soil globally has reduced biodiversity and how valuable compost is as an amendment and remediation for soil, especially with the economic shocks in fertiliser supply chains.
A waste problem in Australia
Extrapolating the lessons from home soil improvement and waste processing, you quickly realise just how valuable all our organic waste is for ecology and agriculture. Returning to Australia, I found the national, state and local governments all devoting massive efforts to come up with new options for processing all kinds of waste, prompted largely by China progressively banning the import of waste since 2017, but also by Australia regulating the export of different waste types since 2020. This hasn’t ended Australia’s waste exports, which actually increased in tonnage by 3% in the last reporting year. The overall outlook can be disheartening, but awareness and efforts at local levels feel a little more positive and it makes you wonder whether thinking big is always the solution.
Experience abroad
Looking at the way composting works in other countries I find the uptake of community composting in the USA particularly interesting. Alongside an exciting segment of medium-scale composters, who focus on producing really high quality compost for agriculture from clean organic waste sourced from producers like breweries, coffee roasters and food producers, the community composting operations there are creating impact by working close to the source of the waste, improving efficiencies and multiplying in number. They may not process tonnes of organic waste each day like large-scale municipal and industrial composters, but by honing their processes and mushrooming to the point of many sites in each city, their contribution is significant, especially noting that they can avoid CO2 emissions of commercial operations from road transport.
New York City food scrap drop-off sites as part of the NYC Composting Project
Community engagement with agriculture
Experts and bureaucrats agree that there are some fundamental challenges around organic waste in urban centres. The way I contextualise this is that modern life is organised around work and home. To work, we need grey infrastructure, office space, transport, connectivity and the like. At home we need modern conveniences, as much floor space as we can get, significant amounts of power and water, and again, connectivity. Our relationship to food and its production is complicated and we can feed ourselves from restaurants, food delivery, processed, packaged or at least portioned food. As a result of various living preferences, Australian urban suburbs have sprawled so far that food production is hundreds of kilometres away for most of us. This is very different to the zoning in countries where there are more cities with smaller populations or denser residential areas. In hundreds of cities around Europe (think Amsterdam, Birmingham, Dublin, Hamburg, Lyon, Prague, Warsaw…) you can find agricultural belts just ten or twenty kilometres out from the city centre. This proximity creates connections and efficiencies between the urban population and the food supply chain.
When searching for sites and setting up project models for organic waste processing in Australia, the value of urban real estate and the distance to agricultural production is challenging. Alongside this, there is only limited consciousness around agriculture and ecology in urban communities. One opportunity that may hold the solution is the awareness on the part of governments of the importance of green spaces. With accelerated densification occurring around particularly in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, experts now strongly advise planners to incorporate more green spaces in cities to address issues such as air and noise pollution, water absorption, micro climate, physical and mental health, social resilience, and ecology. My hope is that urban green spaces can provide the platform for people in cities to understand and practise ecology, and run small-scale projects like composting, micro forests and wildlife habitats.
Benefits of decentralised/community composting
By operating in denser city environments, community compost systems:
Focus on capturing the numerous yet small loads of food waste that have previously been sent to landfill and are complicated for the large-scale operators to collect;
Rely mostly on pedal power or foot traffic, by bringing waste production, processing and compost application into close proximity in order to reduce CO2 emissions;
Make waste management and compost production more visible to the general population, hence creating awareness about this important part of public infrastructure;
Save public, commercial and household expenditure on waste management and compost production, by having everybody contribute just a little bit more effort as opposed to throwing waste in the bin;
Provide compost to local green spaces without the need to buy and transport compost from outside the the area;
Complement both home composting and large scale composting by filling a gap for those who can’t compost at home or get their waste collected;
Teach households the importance of source-separating their waste so that it can be composted without the burden of contamination;
Allow us to experiment, innovate and study compost at a smaller scale, where mistakes are not as costly.
Community composting as part of the larger waste management framework
The idea of processing waste in smaller batches at the local level is similar to the science behind decentralised renewables, where we have understood for over a decade now that it is more effective to supply electricity to the difficult corners of the earth with smaller isolated mini-grids, than to try to extend the central power system, and that you can do so in a highly carbon-free manner using the energy resources nature provides.
As a visualisation of the different technical options available to us for organic waste management, the Food Waste Hierarchy below from the Institute of Local Self Reliance in the US is kind of an application and extrapolation of the waste management pyramid, adding a lot more options and practical examples to the standard categories of Reduction, Reuse, Recycling; Energy Recovery, Treatment, and Disposal.
What’s particularly interesting is the types of waste management opportunities which we are not making very much use of, and just how much impact they can have. In Australia we have seen some awareness and promotion campaigns on reduction and home composting, alongside larger incentives for industry to improve sorting systems and processing capacities. But, we have yet to work on the really compelling approaches to composting that make up the middle section of the hierarchy. Localised, decentralised composting should be playing a bigger role, as should medium scale composting, which focuses on creating high quality compost for agriculture and has a huge impact on national soil quality. Even our centralised composting plants, both aerobic and anaerobic, are not able to process the capacity of organic waste that we are going to have to recycle now as kerbside food waste collection comes online and landfill is restricted.
Challenges and opportunities
For a lot of gardeners and home composters (see my recent study) the practice of composting is already so enjoyable and rewarding that there is no question about whether it should be promoted as a community venture, but for others, it may not be as enjoyable or even practical. So what makes the small-scale methods of composting particularly compelling from a waste management perspective is the prospect of financial viability and the fact we starting to see figures on community composting job creation alongside all the other co-benefits seen in terms of reducing the cost of waste management, sensitising people to waste less, to separate waste more carefully and reduce environmental contamination, to appreciate the value of compost as a better alternative to ammonium nitrate in farming, and to provide real life science education on one of our planet’s most important chemical cycles. We are not just talking about a feel-good community initiative, but a sustainable, low-carbon alternative to centralised public infrastructure and current waste challenges.
A major implication to community composting is the fact that councils are beginning to launch the collection of food waste (alongside garden waste), as part of the municipal urban waste management sector, to be processed at industrial-scale facilities. The obvious question on small-scale composters’ minds is:
If taxpayers are funding municipal organic waste composting, is community composting still worth investing resources in?
Work to do
Currently there is not enough data or experience to begin to answer this question in the case of Australia. We do not yet know how much it will cost to divert all residential organic waste from landfill because it has not been done before. We suspect that despite compost being a valuable resource as an alternative to commercial fertiliser and a remediation amendment for depleted or contaminated soil, government will still provide funding to cover the cost of collection and processing. We observe that not many farmers are using compost and often struggling to transition away from expensive commercial fertiliser. And we see contamination from plastics and chemicals making it very difficult for large recyclers to produce clean compost from household waste. There is plenty of low-quality compost available on the market at a very low price - how can we produce more compost and be sure to find demand for it to justify the cost/effort?
Some experts have raised concerns about the contamination we are seeing in kerbside-collected food waste and how we will be able to use all the low-grade compost produced, while others believe the problem is manageable. We know there are challenges when it comes to the proximity of where food waste is produced (largely in dense cities), to where it can be processed (industrial outskirts), and where the vast amount of finished product can be applied (rural agricultural regions).
Employing a multi-pronged approach to food waste processing makes sense because it lets us innovate with the full range of technologies we can come up with, it trains us to reduce the amount of waste we produce and avoid contaminating it with plastic and chemicals, and it allows us to make full use of opportunities that don’t require road transport to distant sites for processing and application. My area of work is in piloting options and assessing the usefulness of composting approaches not instead of, but alongside large-scale central waste processing. It’s likely we will see each of the levels of the waste hierarchy being applied in the complete solution that unravels as we move away from food waste landfill, but I’m particularly interested in how much waste can be managed through the “Most preferred” approaches towards the top of the triangle.
Composting and me
Blog
My rekindled relationship with composting
While working in renewable energy in Africa, and looking for ways to support agricultural communities to absorb the benefits of our infrastructure projects, I became very interested in questions around soil health, fertiliser scarcity, and organic waste management. Between my field trips and my work with energy regulators, I began looking at the soil in my own backyard and studying the effects of modern agriculture and horticulture, suspecting that my previous efforts to plant vegetables and ornamentals were somehow stunted. When the pandemic hit, I spent more and more time in my garden (a passion since childhood, somehow forgotten over the years abroad), which provided a kind of ‘mindful’ home-based hobby during lockdowns - an afternoon outside always brought my mind back to harmony after a day of remote meetings and regulatory drafting. I saw the severe depletion of soil first hand, whereby nothing was growing in our hard, hillside garden - largely due to rainfall running over the land, and previous tenants focusing purely on plants rather than soil.
Scaling up my small compost system with all the greens and browns I could source in my neighbourhood, I felt the usefulness of turning organic waste into a resource without having to rely on council or industry. I enjoyed the feeling of building and turning a pile and watching nitrogen- and carbon-rich materials interplay with the oxygen, water, worms and biota, until it became a rich earthy natural resource. I saw the difference it made for the plants above ground, knowing that this was an indication of the life beneath. And I engaged with the science by reading, observing, building sensors and collecting data, and networking with experts in agriculture, waste management and ecological conservation and regulation. The science around compost and its application is particularly fascinating when we see just how much soil globally has reduced biodiversity and how valuable compost is as an amendment and remediation for soil, especially with the economic shocks in fertiliser supply chains.
A waste problem in Australia
Extrapolating the lessons from home soil improvement and waste processing, you quickly realise just how valuable all our organic waste is for ecology and agriculture. Returning to Australia, I found the national, state and local governments all devoting massive efforts to come up with new options for processing all kinds of waste, prompted largely by China progressively banning the import of waste since 2017, but also by Australia regulating the export of different waste types since 2020. This hasn’t ended Australia’s waste exports, which actually increased in tonnage by 3% in the last reporting year. The overall outlook can be disheartening, but awareness and efforts at local levels feel a little more positive and it makes you wonder whether thinking big is always the solution.
Experience abroad
Looking at the way composting works in other countries I find the uptake of community composting in the USA particularly interesting. Alongside an exciting segment of medium-scale composters, who focus on producing really high quality compost for agriculture from clean organic waste sourced from producers like breweries, coffee roasters and food producers, the community composting operations there are creating impact by working close to the source of the waste, improving efficiencies and multiplying in number. They may not process tonnes of organic waste each day like large-scale municipal and industrial composters, but by honing their processes and mushrooming to the point of many sites in each city, their contribution is significant, especially noting that they can avoid CO2 emissions of commercial operations from road transport.
New York City food scrap drop-off sites as part of the NYC Composting Project
Community engagement with agriculture
Experts and bureaucrats agree that there are some fundamental challenges around organic waste in urban centres. The way I contextualise this is that modern life is organised around work and home. To work, we need grey infrastructure, office space, transport, connectivity and the like. At home we need modern conveniences, as much floor space as we can get, significant amounts of power and water, and again, connectivity. Our relationship to food and its production is complicated and we can feed ourselves from restaurants, food delivery, processed, packaged or at least portioned food. As a result of various living preferences, Australian urban suburbs have sprawled so far that food production is hundreds of kilometres away for most of us. This is very different to the zoning in countries where there are more cities with smaller populations or denser residential areas. In hundreds of cities around Europe (think Amsterdam, Birmingham, Dublin, Hamburg, Lyon, Prague, Warsaw…) you can find agricultural belts just ten or twenty kilometres out from the city centre. This proximity creates connections and efficiencies between the urban population and the food supply chain.
When searching for sites and setting up project models for organic waste processing in Australia, the value of urban real estate and the distance to agricultural production is challenging. Alongside this, there is only limited consciousness around agriculture and ecology in urban communities. One opportunity that may hold the solution is the awareness on the part of governments of the importance of green spaces. With accelerated densification occurring around particularly in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, experts now strongly advise planners to incorporate more green spaces in cities to address issues such as air and noise pollution, water absorption, micro climate, physical and mental health, social resilience, and ecology. My hope is that urban green spaces can provide the platform for people in cities to understand and practise ecology, and run small-scale projects like composting, micro forests and wildlife habitats.
Benefits of decentralised/community composting
By operating in denser city environments, community compost systems:
Focus on capturing the numerous yet small loads of food waste that have previously been sent to landfill and are complicated for the large-scale operators to collect;
Rely mostly on pedal power or foot traffic, by bringing waste production, processing and compost application into close proximity in order to reduce CO2 emissions;
Make waste management and compost production more visible to the general population, hence creating awareness about this important part of public infrastructure;
Save public, commercial and household expenditure on waste management and compost production, by having everybody contribute just a little bit more effort as opposed to throwing waste in the bin;
Provide compost to local green spaces without the need to buy and transport compost from outside the the area;
Complement both home composting and large scale composting by filling a gap for those who can’t compost at home or get their waste collected;
Teach households the importance of source-separating their waste so that it can be composted without the burden of contamination;
Allow us to experiment, innovate and study compost at a smaller scale, where mistakes are not as costly.
Community composting as part of the larger waste management framework
The idea of processing waste in smaller batches at the local level is similar to the science behind decentralised renewables, where we have understood for over a decade now that it is more effective to supply electricity to the difficult corners of the earth with smaller isolated mini-grids, than to try to extend the central power system, and that you can do so in a highly carbon-free manner using the energy resources nature provides.
As a visualisation of the different technical options available to us for organic waste management, the Food Waste Hierarchy below from the Institute of Local Self Reliance in the US is kind of an application and extrapolation of the waste management pyramid, adding a lot more options and practical examples to the standard categories of Reduction, Reuse, Recycling; Energy Recovery, Treatment, and Disposal.
What’s particularly interesting is the types of waste management opportunities which we are not making very much use of, and just how much impact they can have. In Australia we have seen some awareness and promotion campaigns on reduction and home composting, alongside larger incentives for industry to improve sorting systems and processing capacities. But, we have yet to work on the really compelling approaches to composting that make up the middle section of the hierarchy. Localised, decentralised composting should be playing a bigger role, as should medium scale composting, which focuses on creating high quality compost for agriculture and has a huge impact on national soil quality. Even our centralised composting plants, both aerobic and anaerobic, are not able to process the capacity of organic waste that we are going to have to recycle now as kerbside food waste collection comes online and landfill is restricted.
Challenges and opportunities
For a lot of gardeners and home composters (see my recent study) the practice of composting is already so enjoyable and rewarding that there is no question about whether it should be promoted as a community venture, but for others, it may not be as enjoyable or even practical. So what makes the small-scale methods of composting particularly compelling from a waste management perspective is the prospect of financial viability and the fact we starting to see figures on community composting job creation alongside all the other co-benefits seen in terms of reducing the cost of waste management, sensitising people to waste less, to separate waste more carefully and reduce environmental contamination, to appreciate the value of compost as a better alternative to ammonium nitrate in farming, and to provide real life science education on one of our planet’s most important chemical cycles. We are not just talking about a feel-good community initiative, but a sustainable, low-carbon alternative to centralised public infrastructure and current waste challenges.
A major implication to community composting is the fact that councils are beginning to launch the collection of food waste (alongside garden waste), as part of the municipal urban waste management sector, to be processed at industrial-scale facilities. The obvious question on small-scale composters’ minds is:
If taxpayers are funding municipal organic waste composting, is community composting still worth investing resources in?
Work to do
Currently there is not enough data or experience to begin to answer this question in the case of Australia. We do not yet know how much it will cost to divert all residential organic waste from landfill because it has not been done before. We suspect that despite compost being a valuable resource as an alternative to commercial fertiliser and a remediation amendment for depleted or contaminated soil, government will still provide funding to cover the cost of collection and processing. We observe that not many farmers are using compost and often struggling to transition away from expensive commercial fertiliser. And we see contamination from plastics and chemicals making it very difficult for large recyclers to produce clean compost from household waste. There is plenty of low-quality compost available on the market at a very low price - how can we produce more compost and be sure to find demand for it to justify the cost/effort?
Some experts have raised concerns about the contamination we are seeing in kerbside-collected food waste and how we will be able to use all the low-grade compost produced, while others believe the problem is manageable. We know there are challenges when it comes to the proximity of where food waste is produced (largely in dense cities), to where it can be processed (industrial outskirts), and where the vast amount of finished product can be applied (rural agricultural regions).
Employing a multi-pronged approach to food waste processing makes sense because it lets us innovate with the full range of technologies we can come up with, it trains us to reduce the amount of waste we produce and avoid contaminating it with plastic and chemicals, and it allows us to make full use of opportunities that don’t require road transport to distant sites for processing and application. My area of work is in piloting options and assessing the usefulness of composting approaches not instead of, but alongside large-scale central waste processing. It’s likely we will see each of the levels of the waste hierarchy being applied in the complete solution that unravels as we move away from food waste landfill, but I’m particularly interested in how much waste can be managed through the “Most preferred” approaches towards the top of the triangle.
Composting and me
Blog
My rekindled relationship with composting
While working in renewable energy in Africa, and looking for ways to support agricultural communities to absorb the benefits of our infrastructure projects, I became very interested in questions around soil health, fertiliser scarcity, and organic waste management. Between my field trips and my work with energy regulators, I began looking at the soil in my own backyard and studying the effects of modern agriculture and horticulture, suspecting that my previous efforts to plant vegetables and ornamentals were somehow stunted. When the pandemic hit, I spent more and more time in my garden (a passion since childhood, somehow forgotten over the years abroad), which provided a kind of ‘mindful’ home-based hobby during lockdowns - an afternoon outside always brought my mind back to harmony after a day of remote meetings and regulatory drafting. I saw the severe depletion of soil first hand, whereby nothing was growing in our hard, hillside garden - largely due to rainfall running over the land, and previous tenants focusing purely on plants rather than soil.
Scaling up my small compost system with all the greens and browns I could source in my neighbourhood, I felt the usefulness of turning organic waste into a resource without having to rely on council or industry. I enjoyed the feeling of building and turning a pile and watching nitrogen- and carbon-rich materials interplay with the oxygen, water, worms and biota, until it became a rich earthy natural resource. I saw the difference it made for the plants above ground, knowing that this was an indication of the life beneath. And I engaged with the science by reading, observing, building sensors and collecting data, and networking with experts in agriculture, waste management and ecological conservation and regulation. The science around compost and its application is particularly fascinating when we see just how much soil globally has reduced biodiversity and how valuable compost is as an amendment and remediation for soil, especially with the economic shocks in fertiliser supply chains.
A waste problem in Australia
Extrapolating the lessons from home soil improvement and waste processing, you quickly realise just how valuable all our organic waste is for ecology and agriculture. Returning to Australia, I found the national, state and local governments all devoting massive efforts to come up with new options for processing all kinds of waste, prompted largely by China progressively banning the import of waste since 2017, but also by Australia regulating the export of different waste types since 2020. This hasn’t ended Australia’s waste exports, which actually increased in tonnage by 3% in the last reporting year. The overall outlook can be disheartening, but awareness and efforts at local levels feel a little more positive and it makes you wonder whether thinking big is always the solution.
Experience abroad
Looking at the way composting works in other countries I find the uptake of community composting in the USA particularly interesting. Alongside an exciting segment of medium-scale composters, who focus on producing really high quality compost for agriculture from clean organic waste sourced from producers like breweries, coffee roasters and food producers, the community composting operations there are creating impact by working close to the source of the waste, improving efficiencies and multiplying in number. They may not process tonnes of organic waste each day like large-scale municipal and industrial composters, but by honing their processes and mushrooming to the point of many sites in each city, their contribution is significant, especially noting that they can avoid CO2 emissions of commercial operations from road transport.
New York City food scrap drop-off sites as part of the NYC Composting Project
Community engagement with agriculture
Experts and bureaucrats agree that there are some fundamental challenges around organic waste in urban centres. The way I contextualise this is that modern life is organised around work and home. To work, we need grey infrastructure, office space, transport, connectivity and the like. At home we need modern conveniences, as much floor space as we can get, significant amounts of power and water, and again, connectivity. Our relationship to food and its production is complicated and we can feed ourselves from restaurants, food delivery, processed, packaged or at least portioned food. As a result of various living preferences, Australian urban suburbs have sprawled so far that food production is hundreds of kilometres away for most of us. This is very different to the zoning in countries where there are more cities with smaller populations or denser residential areas. In hundreds of cities around Europe (think Amsterdam, Birmingham, Dublin, Hamburg, Lyon, Prague, Warsaw…) you can find agricultural belts just ten or twenty kilometres out from the city centre. This proximity creates connections and efficiencies between the urban population and the food supply chain.
When searching for sites and setting up project models for organic waste processing in Australia, the value of urban real estate and the distance to agricultural production is challenging. Alongside this, there is only limited consciousness around agriculture and ecology in urban communities. One opportunity that may hold the solution is the awareness on the part of governments of the importance of green spaces. With accelerated densification occurring around particularly in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, experts now strongly advise planners to incorporate more green spaces in cities to address issues such as air and noise pollution, water absorption, micro climate, physical and mental health, social resilience, and ecology. My hope is that urban green spaces can provide the platform for people in cities to understand and practise ecology, and run small-scale projects like composting, micro forests and wildlife habitats.
Benefits of decentralised/community composting
By operating in denser city environments, community compost systems:
Focus on capturing the numerous yet small loads of food waste that have previously been sent to landfill and are complicated for the large-scale operators to collect;
Rely mostly on pedal power or foot traffic, by bringing waste production, processing and compost application into close proximity in order to reduce CO2 emissions;
Make waste management and compost production more visible to the general population, hence creating awareness about this important part of public infrastructure;
Save public, commercial and household expenditure on waste management and compost production, by having everybody contribute just a little bit more effort as opposed to throwing waste in the bin;
Provide compost to local green spaces without the need to buy and transport compost from outside the the area;
Complement both home composting and large scale composting by filling a gap for those who can’t compost at home or get their waste collected;
Teach households the importance of source-separating their waste so that it can be composted without the burden of contamination;
Allow us to experiment, innovate and study compost at a smaller scale, where mistakes are not as costly.
Community composting as part of the larger waste management framework
The idea of processing waste in smaller batches at the local level is similar to the science behind decentralised renewables, where we have understood for over a decade now that it is more effective to supply electricity to the difficult corners of the earth with smaller isolated mini-grids, than to try to extend the central power system, and that you can do so in a highly carbon-free manner using the energy resources nature provides.
As a visualisation of the different technical options available to us for organic waste management, the Food Waste Hierarchy below from the Institute of Local Self Reliance in the US is kind of an application and extrapolation of the waste management pyramid, adding a lot more options and practical examples to the standard categories of Reduction, Reuse, Recycling; Energy Recovery, Treatment, and Disposal.
What’s particularly interesting is the types of waste management opportunities which we are not making very much use of, and just how much impact they can have. In Australia we have seen some awareness and promotion campaigns on reduction and home composting, alongside larger incentives for industry to improve sorting systems and processing capacities. But, we have yet to work on the really compelling approaches to composting that make up the middle section of the hierarchy. Localised, decentralised composting should be playing a bigger role, as should medium scale composting, which focuses on creating high quality compost for agriculture and has a huge impact on national soil quality. Even our centralised composting plants, both aerobic and anaerobic, are not able to process the capacity of organic waste that we are going to have to recycle now as kerbside food waste collection comes online and landfill is restricted.
Challenges and opportunities
For a lot of gardeners and home composters (see my recent study) the practice of composting is already so enjoyable and rewarding that there is no question about whether it should be promoted as a community venture, but for others, it may not be as enjoyable or even practical. So what makes the small-scale methods of composting particularly compelling from a waste management perspective is the prospect of financial viability and the fact we starting to see figures on community composting job creation alongside all the other co-benefits seen in terms of reducing the cost of waste management, sensitising people to waste less, to separate waste more carefully and reduce environmental contamination, to appreciate the value of compost as a better alternative to ammonium nitrate in farming, and to provide real life science education on one of our planet’s most important chemical cycles. We are not just talking about a feel-good community initiative, but a sustainable, low-carbon alternative to centralised public infrastructure and current waste challenges.
A major implication to community composting is the fact that councils are beginning to launch the collection of food waste (alongside garden waste), as part of the municipal urban waste management sector, to be processed at industrial-scale facilities. The obvious question on small-scale composters’ minds is:
If taxpayers are funding municipal organic waste composting, is community composting still worth investing resources in?
Work to do
Currently there is not enough data or experience to begin to answer this question in the case of Australia. We do not yet know how much it will cost to divert all residential organic waste from landfill because it has not been done before. We suspect that despite compost being a valuable resource as an alternative to commercial fertiliser and a remediation amendment for depleted or contaminated soil, government will still provide funding to cover the cost of collection and processing. We observe that not many farmers are using compost and often struggling to transition away from expensive commercial fertiliser. And we see contamination from plastics and chemicals making it very difficult for large recyclers to produce clean compost from household waste. There is plenty of low-quality compost available on the market at a very low price - how can we produce more compost and be sure to find demand for it to justify the cost/effort?
Some experts have raised concerns about the contamination we are seeing in kerbside-collected food waste and how we will be able to use all the low-grade compost produced, while others believe the problem is manageable. We know there are challenges when it comes to the proximity of where food waste is produced (largely in dense cities), to where it can be processed (industrial outskirts), and where the vast amount of finished product can be applied (rural agricultural regions).
Employing a multi-pronged approach to food waste processing makes sense because it lets us innovate with the full range of technologies we can come up with, it trains us to reduce the amount of waste we produce and avoid contaminating it with plastic and chemicals, and it allows us to make full use of opportunities that don’t require road transport to distant sites for processing and application. My area of work is in piloting options and assessing the usefulness of composting approaches not instead of, but alongside large-scale central waste processing. It’s likely we will see each of the levels of the waste hierarchy being applied in the complete solution that unravels as we move away from food waste landfill, but I’m particularly interested in how much waste can be managed through the “Most preferred” approaches towards the top of the triangle.
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
Top Community Composter Shuts Operations
June 5, 2024
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
Reduced-Workload Community Composting
May 6, 2024
Composting and me
Composting and me
Composting and me
January 3, 2024