Thinking a different way about our waste

And why that means you should start composting, now.

A lot of people still don’t want to compost. They think it’s time-consuming, or it smells bad, or whatever other thing. It’s easier, and it seems cleaner, to just throw things in the trash and be done with it. “I don’t compost because it smells bad,” somebody will tell me, confidently, having never attempted to compost before. “I would compost, but I don’t want to look at all that rotting food,” says another friend, revealing that they don’t actually know how a compost is built. This type of attitude always prompts me to ask a single and rather simple question: When’s the last time you went to a landfill? If the answer is “never,” I think it’s time to start really thinking about what it means when you tell me that you don’t want to deal with compost. All your garbage can does is make your trash somebody else’s problem. Specifically, somebody who is definitely poor and probably not white.

Predictably, landfills are overwhelmingly built in low-income communities, where they regularly pollute the surrounding area with noxious odors, actual chemicals, and other contaminants. They’re also an enormous source of global pollution. According to the EPA, landfills in the United States released 109.3 million metric tons of methane into the atmosphere in 2020 alone. (That’s 16.8% of total methane emissions across all sectors.) Where’s that methane coming from? Organic matter—like food scraps, grass clippings, and paper scraps—deprived of oxygen as it breaks down inside highly compacted landfills, releases methane gas. This is a huge problem, and it belongs to all of us.

Remote sensing of methane from high-altitude aircraft in April reveals plumes of the gas at the River Birch Landfill outside New Orleans. Source.

Last year, the U.N. published a broadly terrifying report about climate change, in which they identified the urgency of immediately reducing methane emissions if we hope to survive the coming century. Cutting methane is the “strongest lever we have to slow climate chnage over the next 25 years,” according to Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP. Methane comes from a variety of sources, including oil and gas facilities, but it’s estimated that 40% of identified “super emitter” sites in California alone are landfills. That means that how we treat our garbage stands to have a tremendous impact on the future of our planet.

There are huge structural changes to be made in how we handle our waste, but we can start building the change ourselves, today, in our very own backyards, with compost. Learning to compost radically shifted my relationship to both garbage and my consumer habits. These days, almost nothing in my house goes in the trash. And what I can’t compost—I avoid buying. I compost my hair, my nails, my blood, my dryer lint, my dog’s fur, and my leftover tater tots. I compost my old clothes when they’re too ripped up to wear anymore. I compost jeans. I compost my dead plants, my cardboard boxes, and all of my junk mail. Once, I composted an old bible I found. All of it goes into the pile and comes out again as living, fertile soil. It sounds extraordinary, perhaps, but it is actually the most incredibly ordinary thing in the world. Everything around us is composting itself, all the time, without requiring our intervention or even awareness. I find this amazing, and also quite fun; a perpetual science problem that I can playfully solve with my own two hands and some tinkering.

Compost made of paper waste, cardboard boxes, food scraps, plant debris, and an old bible that I found trashed in an alley.

When people insist on telling me that compost is “icky” and they don’t want to deal with it, I can’t help but hear what they’re actually saying: “I’m lucky enough to not be effected by the consequences.” But the consequences are here. Communities are being poisioned today, right now, our air is being polluted every moment, and—still—we’re tossing everything, every day, straight into our garbage cans, and thinking “compost” is the thing that’s nasty. It’s time to get over our collective gag reflex and start keeping our stuff out of landfills. Start composting!

Love,

Cass