Composting vs. Waste-to-Energy: The Politics Of Green Waste

- by Stephen Han­d­ley, Octo­ber 3, 2014, Sus­tain­ablog

In Tul­sa, Okla­homa, green waste is very much on the polit­i­cal agen­da. Accord­ing to Tul­sa World, the city’s trash board vot­ed this week to pur­sue a plan to col­lect and incin­er­ate it rather than invest in an active com­post­ing facil­i­ty. Pro­po­nents of the com­post­ing plan are deeply dis­ap­point­ed by the vote.

City Coun­cilor Karen Gilbert says, “That [vote] sets us fur­ther back from the orig­i­nal plan of hav­ing an active com­post­ing, mulching facil­i­ty,” Gilbert said. “It’s frus­trat­ing that we start off with an invest­ment, but then we don’t fol­low through with the pri­or­i­ty of that investment.”

Those in favor of the incin­er­a­tor approach com­plain that the city can’t afford the cost of the pro­posed com­post­ing facil­i­ty and that is costs too much mon­ey to sep­a­rate out the green waste from the rest of the city’s trash. Doesn’t it seem as though the sit­u­a­tion in Tul­sa is a micro­cosm of the entire “glob­al warming/climate change” debate going on around the globe?

Green waste con­sists of two com­po­nents: yard waste, such as leaves and grass clip­pings, and food waste. Dis­pos­ing of them requires dif­fer­ent strate­gies but tak­en togeth­er, they account for a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of all the waste going into US land­fills every year.

Accord­ing to GreenWaste.com, about 75% of sol­id waste is recy­clable, but at present only about 30% actu­al­ly gets recy­cled. 21.5 mil­lion pounds of food waste gets sent to our land­fills every year. If that food waste were com­post­ed, the reduc­tion in harm­ful emis­sions into the atmos­phere – most­ly methane – would be equiv­a­lent to tak­ing 2,000,000 cars off the roads in America.

In Wash­ing­ton State, a local prison is ver­mi­com­post­ing all its food waste and sav­ing about $8,000 a year in dis­pos­al costs. The com­post then gets spread on the prison gar­dens to help grow food for the kitchen. At North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, an ambi­tious pro­gram to col­lect and com­post emp­ty piz­za box­es is on track to process more than 370 tons of the con­tain­ers in its first year. And in Mass­a­chu­setts and Seat­tle,new laws man­date com­post­ing of food wastes.

In Swe­den, 99% of all trash is recy­cled, com­post­ed or burned. Swe­den does not have the amount of open avail­able land need­ed for large land­fills. It also does not have the abun­dance of nat­ur­al resources that the Unit­ed States does. So it oper­ates a num­ber of large incin­er­a­tors that pro­vide elec­tric­i­ty and heat for gov­ern­ment build­ings. Crit­ics say that burn­ing only adds pol­lu­tants to the atmos­phere, but that nation’s polit­i­cal lead­ers main­tain that mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy removes vir­tu­al­ly all of the harm­ful emis­sions and the elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed goes a long way towards meet­ing Sweden’s pow­er requirements.

The best con­clu­sion to draw from all this is that local needs will gov­ern how trash – par­tic­u­lar­ly green waste – gets han­dled by var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties. There is no “one size fits all” solu­tion. One could argue that Tul­sa is tak­ing the eas­i­est way out and look­ing only at short term costs ver­sus long term ben­e­fit. But the real answer is pro­vid­ed by Göran Skoglund, an offi­cial with the munic­i­pal pow­er facil­i­ty in Hels­ing­borg, a city in south­west Swe­den. He says he hopes the sup­ply of waste to keep the city’s incin­er­a­tor going will dis­ap­pear. “This sounds strange…[but] that would be great for this plan­et. It’s not sus­tain­able pro­duc­ing the amounts of garbage that we do.”

And that’s the take away from this sto­ry. Ulti­mate­ly, it is not about burn­ing vs. com­post­ing vs. recy­cling. In the end, it is about reduc­ing the amount of waste that peo­ple gen­er­ate. That’s where the focus of the polit­i­cal debate about waste prod­ucts should be.