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.

Model Building With Water

When it comes to sustainable practices, strategies and encouraging sustainable behaviors, I think a lot can be learned from water resource management.  As I've read through Chapter 5 of Roseland one thing I've noticed is that instead of it describing strategies that could be put into place to improve the water resources or resource management of a community, it mostly talks about a myriad of examples of solutions that have been implemented.  So since I'm prone to ask "why" when I notice something that deviates successfully from the norm, I of course began to wonder why it is that there seems to be so much more involvement, especially in the form of municipal and government incentives (both positive and negative), in improving the sustainability of how we use, treat, and conserve water.


My best guess is that water is more tangible.  There are far fewer steps that most people need to see in order to understand how unsustainable water resource management can adversely affect them and their families and communities than for other sustainability issues.  Everyone wants clean water and they aren't afraid to make sure that their elected representatives know it.  This results in more actual and immediate action by the (US) government at large for improving water systems.  Unfortunately, while this might be getting more done for improving water systems for those of us lucky enough to have governments that can and want to do something about it, what it doesn't help with is the issue of poor water quality and rampant water pollution in developing countries.  So it's nice to see that many of the larger humitarian organizations such as the World Bank and UNICEF (See the UNICEF video about water issues in Africa below.) have specific water resource strategies and focuses, but certainly more can be done.

But I digress. Besides the fact that I think developing countries should be first in line for new innovations in water treatment and management, I think that maybe we should try to model other strategies regarding sustainable practices on how water resource and treatment has been approached, especially concerning adoption and getting buy-in from the general public.   Because it seems like things are actually getting done with water resource management, and any sustainable strategy that we can look to as a model of success seems like a good model to pick apart and use in other areas.

So, how do we bring other sustainability issues out into the light so that they are viewed as more direct and immediate concerns by the population and governments of the world?  People don't like to be brow-beaten; even if it is for a good cause.  Someone out there has got to have some new and brilliant ideas.  Let's hear 'em.

Worm Food

As part of my Sustainable Communities class this semester, I've been tasked with coming up with a personal sustainability project.  My plan for this is to explore the options available to me for setting up a composting/vermi-composting system.  From the research that I've done thusfar, I'm leaning towards doing the vermi-composting as that will give me a continuing compost throughout the year that will be independent of weather constraints.  There are others in my class who currently already have this kind of system so I am hoping to gain the crucial element (worms) from one of them versus having to try to find my own via some form of sketchy back alley worm salesman.

I face a few barriers in being able to do this successfully:
1.)  Convincing my roommate to participate in or at least tolerate my doing this.
2.)  I don't want to build a quick and easy system only to want to replace it with something nicer and better in 6 months.  So I need to research and determine the best, most durable, and most effective system to use the first time around.
3.)  I must resign myself to being responsible (even if it's just to a tiny degree) for keeping something else alive and fed.  (Hopefully this one won't be too hard.)

Alternative Sources... of Motivation

Chapter 3 of Roseland talks about various ways to use community policy, as determined by the government, to help encourage development of sustainable practices amongst citizens and businesses within a community.  I also recently commented in response to Jennifer G's post, in which I suggested that getting everyone in the world to hold hands and sing the praises of sustainability isn't the most realistic or viable approach to actually accomplishing a sustainable planet and society.  Let's assume (which seems pretty reasonable) that we can't convince the people of the world, en masse, to live sustainably by appealing to their morality and getting them to actually CARE (please see my comment for more detail as to my thoughts on this) about sustainability.  So if an epoch of enlightenment isn't anywhere in humanity's immediate future, what can be done to at least start pushing us towards a sustainable existence?

We trick people.

Part of why people/businesses choose not to act or spend money in a way that is sustainable or environmentally responsible is because there is generally a premium that must be paid in order to do so.  That premium can be financial or convenience-related or both.  Recycling is a common example of this. 

My suggestion is that we make the cost of not acting in a sustainable manner so high that people "voluntarily" choose to do so because it is easier, cheaper and less hassle than the alternative.  To a degree, this is already being done in some places.  There are cities (Bloomington, IN is among them) that don't charge for recycling but instead, charge for trash pickup based on the amount of trash to be hauled away.  So you separate out your recycling, buy things that don't come with excess packaging and as a result have much less trash.  Less trash means less that you have to pay to have that trash removed.  This solution also gives people the ability to be less thoughtful about how to deal with their waste (See, all freedom of choice is still intact) but they will be the ones who bear a larger burden of dealing with that waste as well.  For this to work most effectively, revenue gained from these programs should be only used to improve trash processing and recycling programs within a community and not just thrown into the general community pot to be split up and parceled out based on some politician or bureaucrat's whim.

One strategy that would likely make this type of program more successful as far as the number of people who choose to participate would be to make the cost of non-participation even higher than it already is.  If the government were to turn all highways into toll roads and increase the tax on gasoline to the point that a gallon costs $10, people are going to be much more careful about when they choose to drive and what activities they choose to utilize motor vehicles for.  I would personally love to see the price of gas at closer to $10/gallon for this very reason.  Nothing spawns innovation and new technology like trying to find alternatives for what we have decided is too costly.

"But wait a second, Scott," you might say as you tentatively raise your hand, "There's a hole in your logic."

That's true, there is:  If we can't assume an ideal world of everyone agreeing that sustainability is one of the most important goals and acting to accomplish that goal, we can't assume that a government has the best interest of its people or world in mind either.  But as has been shown many times throughout our species' sordid history, governments are much more pliant in being steered towards whatever the specific purpose of the day is than is the entire world population.

So call your representatives and elected officials (two or three times) and make yourself heard.  It's amazing the small number of squeaky wheels it takes to get things moving.  It's definitely not the only or best method for working towards saving the world, but it IS a method and it couldn't hurt.  And if you have a best friend who happens to be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, call her up and ask her to swing her weight around a little.