A Post on Compost

So it's time for a quick update on my foray into composting.  As I have previously mentioned, I was coming to discover that collecting compost materials and delivering it to another location, that can actually make use of the compost, may be a more sustainable and efficient use of my resources and time than actually re-inventing the wheel and creating my own composting system.  I'm still collecting composting materials and am still in the process of educating my roommate, and myself, about what can and cannot be composted but ultimately I plan on not doing the actual composting process and will instead be opting for taking full bins of "compost materials" to a local public place that already has an established compost system.  I've yet to fill up the bins that I have chosen to use for this process, so I haven't yet determined where the best place to compost the materials are but I'm leaning towards one of the public gardens that are around Bloomington and have been given some suggestions by those more in the know than myself.

A picture of the Butler Organic Community Garden, a possible recipient for my compost materials.

Although this project has taken a 90 degree turn from the direction I had originally envisioned, I'm pretty happy with what I've ended up with and feel like I'm still getting the opportunity to learn about composting and its benefits, even if I'm not actually the one gaining those benefits.

Traffic Calming

Speed Humps at First Street

At the beginning of this semester one of the first activities that I participated in as a result of my Sustainable Communities class was that I attended a monthly meeting of the Bloomington Commision On Sustainability at Bloomington's City Hall.  One of the items on the agenda that evening, and the one that seemed to have the most contention and discussion, was regarding two large round-abouts that had been proposed over a year ago and were about to begin being built.  Part of the issue that some in attendance had with these proposed updates to the roads was that these round-abouts would likely have the opposite effect that one might normally associate with them; they would actually increase traffic volume and speed through the areas that they would be installed in. (If you'd like to take a look at the minutes from this meeting they can be found here.)  As a result, it was suggested that these areas would become more dangerous for other alternative forms of transportation, such as biking and walking, and would have a deleterious effect on traffic calming attributes that seem to be valued in a community such as Bloomington.

Traffic Circle at 6th and Oak Streets

Given that Bloomington holds itself out as a model community, it seems to me, that Bloomington would pride itself on creating traffic calming neighborhoods and strategies in order to keep its neighborhoods more desirable and friendly to community-building forms of transportation besides single owner/rider cars.  This can easily be seen in how much of a bike friendly town Bloomington is (there are bike racks everywhere) and from what a solid bus system it has as well.  So it struck me  (and no doubt others at the BCOS meeting) as a bit odd, that so much of the city's budget was being spent on measures that increase the flow and speed of car traffic.

Bloomington does seem to have implemented some form of a traffic calming strategy and I was even able to find a pretty cool google map that details some of the various traffic calming aspects that can be found around Bloomington.  My best guess is that most of the traffic calming measures shown on the map are found

Traffic Island: Azalea Lane

in and between neighborhoods where most residents are citizens of Bloomington (vs. seasonal students) who live in nicer neighborhoods and would appreciate measures that lend to a greater community feel and prosperous appearance of their neighborhoods.  However, as is mentions in Sustainability and Cities, sustainability can't be accomplished by only implementing traffic calming in certain areas of a community, because all that tends to do is push traffic to outlying areas.  By implementing traffic calming measures in some neighborhoods but still budgeting for large scale road upgrades that provide for more and faster traffic in others, there seems to be a mixed message about where the city's values lie and whether it is concerned with the sustainability of the entire community, or only certain parts of it; or whether sustainability, in regards to car traffic reduction, is a focus at all.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

While reading "Waste as a Resource" from Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (1994) by John Tillman Lyle, I came across what appeared to be a most surprising statistic.  I will reproduce it here verbatim:

"In the United States each person produces 50,000 pounds of waste each year and almost 20,000 gallons of sewage."

Now, given the amount of water that people use on a daily basis for toilets, showers, sinks and so on, the sewage number didn't really set off any alarms of skepticism in my brain.  However, it seemed very ludicrous to me that your average American produces that much solid waste.  So based on the assumption that this factoid is referring to 50,000 pounds of solid waste (since sewage basically covers most liquid waste, and pounds are generally the units used in measuring solids) I set out to verify that my hunch about the ridiculousness of this number was correct.

Buried within a 2009 EPA report on municipal solid waste I found a table which details the amount of solid waste (in pounds) generated per person per day in America, shown below:

The nice thing about this table is that it shows a decent amount of historical data as well, which I will get to in a moment.  4.34 pounds of solid (non-sewage) waste per day still seems pretty high (at least for myself) but it rings true in my head as a number that could at least be feasible.  When we adjust this to show yearly amounts (per day x 365.25) and graph the three different levels of waste shown in the table, we get this:

This data shows that the amount of waste that a person produced in 2009 was just below 1,600 pounds. After various recovery methods (recycling and composting) were taken into account and after some amount of combustion with energy recovery was used the actual amount of waste that remains (red line) was approximately 860 pound per person in 2009.  This is still a lot but is a great improvement over the nearly 1,200 pounds that remained after recovery efforts in 1980.

But nowhere on this graph does the data ever approach anything resembling 50,000 pounds per person per year.  So how does one go about trying to reconcile such a disparity in 2 alleged "facts"?  The first thing that comes to mind is that John Tillman Lyle's book was written prior to 2009 and thus the data might have changed since then.  But the EPA data goes back to 1960 so that hypothesis is out.

Another possibility is that the 50,000 number includes "raw material processing."  This, I assume, would be due to attributing a portion of manufacturing and industry waste to each individual person.  Mathematically this may play itself out, but it is not what someone would understand when reading the quote that I originally took issue with.  The quote reads as though each person personally produces 50,000 pounds of waste.

At worst this quote is a lie, and at best it is a misleading statistic, either intentionally (to make a point) or erroneously.  But either way it demonstrates an important point:  When reading anything purporting to be truth it is important to be skeptical about what you are being told.  If a claim is outlandish or hard to believe or seems to defy common sense, it's worth investigating further.  This is the essence of science.

Using statistics that may not be an accurate accounting of what we claim they are does nothing to bolster the integrity of the science underlying the need for sustainability.  There are enough simple direct facts that easily support the need for sustainability and it only ultimately hurts the cause of attempting to create a sustainable planet when we try to play twister with the numbers.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

In the process of researching my potential transition from a non-composting person to one who does, I've run across the possibility that building and using a personal composting system might not actually be the most sustainable solution for my particular situation.   It would be fun to try, but doing something because it seems

Some particularly elegant and relevant art.

 

neat or cool is not the appropriate reason to do it, when it comes to sustainability.  It needs to make sense and be the most sustainable option for the situation.

I have little doubt that composting is more sustainable than non composting, but what I'm still evaluating is the method by which I ultimately end up doing that.  My current living situation is not one that doesn't really foster having the opportunity to use the end products of composting.  By this, I mean that I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building and don't own enough plants to make use of the volume of compost that would result from my own personal compost bin.  Essentially, I would have to somehow transport my compost to a place where it could be put to use.  So if I'm going to have to drive somewhere to drop something off anyway, it seems more sustainable to not buy all of the supplies that I need to create a proper composting system and instead just use a simply container to gather compostable materials and then eventually drop it off to be composted at a community garden or something similar that already has a composting system set up.

Sometimes making efficient use of already existing resources and processes is more sustainable than going through the expense and resources to replicate those processes.

I haven't fully decided which way I will go yet.  Stay tuned.