A lesson in composting

First. It's been way too long since I've written a post. Life got a little crazy for a bit, so I am way overdue. I have a backlog of potential posts building up in my ideas folder (yes, I have an ideas folder). This one is inspired by something I saw at the National Museum of Natural History, a good attempt at being green, but poorly executed.

This should be a fairly obvious; but to compost a piece of waste, say a paper plate, or leftover vegetables, it actually needs to be composted. This is entirely different from throwing waste in a trash bin. Regular garbage goes from the familiar process of bin, to garbage truck, to distribution facility, and then (usually) to landfill. Think about that final destination for a second - "land" "fill". Garbage is put there with no intent of ever degrading, because then the land would not be "filled", thus dashing the hopes of ever building over it years later. Everything that we throw out this way is never going to recycled, never will be reused, and will certainly never be composted. The best case scenario is that the landfill operator uses the methane emitted to provide a little power.

For the above reasons, it’s a pet peeve of mine when I see perfectly compostable waste thrown away in bins destined for the landfill (mall food courts stress me out immensely). This is even worse in circumstances where businesses that have gone to through the effort to get compostable plastic cups and cutlery, only to dump them in the trash. It happens more often than you would think, and at institutions that should know better like the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

When I visited there last month, I was elated to see that their enormous food court used all recyclables and compostables, with the exception of a few things like coffee cup lids and saltine cracker wrappers. This was pretty good I thought, until I went to dispose of the waste afterwards. There were separate bins for recycling and waste, but no compost bins anywhere! I looked around, but no luck. At first I thought that maybe they just composed all of their waste, but unfortunately the presence of a few plastic items would make that impossible. All of their effort to 'green-up' their eatery, and yet, it was all heading to the landfill. The scraps, compostable or not, will remain there for centuries. I find this excusable for small businesses that want to be environmental responsible but do not fully understand how it works, but the preeminent natural science museum in this country should know better. And based on their numerous exhibits on dinosaurs and deep time, they should understand better than most how long things last when they're buried.

In fairness to the museum, I should say that there ARE other environmental benefits to using compostable plastics made with PLA. The major one is that the process of making PLA is much kinder to the environment than other plastics. The industrial waste stream is much, much larger than the consumer one, so minimizing upstream pollution sources may actually be more important than working on the eventual disposal location. (a good primer on this can be found at thestoryofstuff.com). Regardless, the museum should be setting a good example, following through with their good intentions, and composting the waste. Better yet, they should use the opportunity to explain to their patrons the importance of waste reduction rather than perpetuating the myth that throwing out compostables in a trash bin is akin to composting them.