BUSINESS
By David M. Brown
RECYCLED FOOD
Composting turns trashed food into plant food By Ben Dayton
M
y wife and I cook a lot at home, and in the process of preparing food we end up with a lot of food scraps -- carrot and avocado skins, eggshells and orange rinds, not to mention the occasional leftovers we let linger in the back of the fridge and forgot to eat. Hey, nobody’s perfect. I’d been throwing these food scraps in the trash for most of my life, until a few years ago when I discovered the wonders of composting. Now, we compost everything we can from the kitchen, and we’ve seen a big reduction in the amount of trash we put out on the curb. It feels good. Perhaps your cooking also creates a lot of food scraps. What do you do with them? Do you, like many people, throw them in the trash? Have you ever wondered where all those trashed food scraps end up?
landfills and incinerators every year. Also, food scraps make up one of the largest portions of the waste stream. But here’s why you should reconsider the habit: When put in the trash, food finds its way to your nearest landfill where it decomposes under anaerobic conditions, creating methane gas in the process. Anaerobic decomposition means your food scraps decompose without the aid of oxygen. This happens to material in a landfill because it gets so compressed by its own weight that all the oxygen (amazingly) gets pushed out. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So a city’s worth of food scraps decomposing in a landfill means a whole lot of methane is being produced and released into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming. Some landfills capture this methane, but the majority do not.
FROM THE TABLE TO THE LANDFILL If you trash your food scraps, you’re not alone. According to Feeding America, approximately 72 billion pounds of perfectly good food -- from every point in the food production cycle -- ends up in
20 greenliving | May 2018
COMPOSING IS THE CURE That’s where composting comes in. It’s one simple way to help reduce greenhouse gases and make good use of your food scraps. It’s
greenlivingaz.com