Roger Fowler
Professor Kim Fortun
Environment and Politics
22 October 2015
"The Future of Garbage: Curbside Compost." Earthshare. N.p., 19 Feb. 2014. Web. 21 Oct.
2015. <http://www.earthshare.org/2014/02/compost.html>.
The main argument of this article is that composting is a positive choice both
economically and environmentally. Cities such as Seattle and San Francisco have municipal
composting programs which have saved them money and prevented adverse environmental
effects from the typical way food waste and other types of biodegradable trash are put into
landfills.
In fact, composting has been so beneficial to San Francisco that “by 2020, San Francisco
wants no trash at all to reach landfills or incinerators. An aggressive composting program is
putting them on track to reach this goal. Today, the city recycles and composts about 80% of its
trash: no small achievement considering the average national recycling rate is only 35%.”
Michael Bloomberg left office in New York with the statement “We bury 1.2 million tons
of food waste in landfills every year at a cost of nearly $80 per ton,” he said. “That waste can be
used as fertilizer or converted to energy at a much lower price. That’s good for the environment
and for taxpayers.”
24 percent of American garbage which makes its way into landfills is food and yard
waste which can decompose, but in the conditions in landfills it is unlikely to be able to
decompose. In landfills, trash decomposes in a way which does not use water or oxygen, which
produces large amounts of methane. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,
so much so that burning methane is better for the atmosphere than letting it escape. Natural
decomposition produces almost no greenhouse gases and also produces mulch which can be used
as a fertilizer by local farmers and gardeners.
It is not just large cities which want to provide composting, either. Over 150 communities
have some sort of curbside compost collection along with their garbage collection, and in other
places there are private companies which are willing to provide such services for a price. Green
trash is also cheaper to process than typical trash. Existing landfill facilities can be retrofitted to
also allow for composting, which cuts down on costs and the problem of needing a large place to
process compost.
This article provides strong support not only for composting in large cities, but also for
small cities. This will help to convince the city of Troy to adopt a compositing program, as it will
be profitable in the long run. It also helps to solve the problem of where municipal composting
would be done, as it can be done in the already existing landfill.