Commercial and community-level composting, March 17

March 17 (Tuesday)

7-8:30 p.m.

346 West James Street (the house with the purple bench)

Our guest expert this month will be Professor Eve Bratman of F&M's Earth and Environment department, who will describe a project her students did in 2018 assessing the viability of commercial/community composting for Lancaster.

Composting food and yard waste creates a beneficial carbon sink, removing carbon from the atmosphere; but landfilling the same waste creates atmospheric toxins. In spite of that, large-scale composting is a topic often lost in the buzz of plastic-straw mania. For example, in the most recent issue of the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen writes about New York City's garbage:

"Paper and plastic are separated, but recycling of organics--food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots--remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York's trash. . . . But recycling of organics is arguably more important that plastics, metal, or paper . . . In landfills, starved of oxygen, decomposing organics release methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming effects are fifty-six times those of CO2. "

So why don't we have compost bins sitting alongside our recycling bins? I don't know, but maybe this Tuesday we'll find out.

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Zero Waste Lancaster

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