Sustainable Ideas...

If you were wondering whether or not to be concerned about food waste, consider this: the city of Vancouver alone collects 1.5 million tons of trash, including 180,000 pounds of organic waste, at a cost of $2.7 million each year. That’s a lot of organic waste (food rinds, etc) that could be going back into the soil instead of rotting in landfills.

In our global food market we’re shipping food into our cities, eating it (or not), and producing tons of organic food waste that we then truck back out again. Composting that waste would improve the soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by sparing it from rotting in a landfill, but for some of us (apartment-dwellers like me especially) that’s not a realistic solution most of the time.

But, Ruben Anderson has a plan to make composting readily available to us urban dwellers (as reported on Alternet.org) by making a composting system that was on a “walkable scale,” accessible for everyone and easy to use. Already, some cities have backyard composters or balcony worm bins, but to take it to the next level, each apartment complex could provide composting for residents, either through an outside compost heap or an industrial composter.

Anderson’s wildest dream is the neighborhood bio-digester that would sit at four-way intersections around the city. Residents could throw compost into the chute on their way to work or the bus. And this new way of composting would create new jobs for compost helpers who would ride through the city, on bikes of course, adding nutrients and other necessities to help the food become soil and bring that new soil to gardens around the city.

Learn more about composting at the UK company Accelerated Compost Ltd the home of the Rocket Composter, the industrial Vermico Composter, or the verstaile Biodigester.

Are you down for some urban composting on every corner? And, if not, where do you think our food waste should be going?

Photo from The Gestalt Gardener: Extreme Composting post.