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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Soon to be followed by a failed attempt at forcing organic waste recycling onto citizens...

I'm all for composting. I'm not for adding a third waste management stream all the way to single-family homes which will likely comply poorly with organic waste regulations due to the inherent disgusting inconvenience it entails. Officials are now seriously suggesting you store your food waste in the freezer to prevent smells, insects and rodents. As if we all have extra space in our freezers, extra time to deal with a third waste stream, extra space for a third trash can...

I really agree with the spirit of these proposals but I wish the folks in government would temper the idealism with pragmatism. "Doing something" isn't enough.

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We've had composting in the SF Bay Area for ages -- San Francisco made it mandatory in 2009 -- and despite being someone who produces a lot of organic waste (I cook a lot), it's never been a problem for me. You don't need to store food waste in the freezer unless it's something particularly vile you wouldn't want sitting in your outdoor/garage compost bin for the week. Everyone's municipal trash bins eventually got downsized by default (you can pay more for the bigger ones still if you want) and that's almost never been a problem for me because so much waste goes into the compost bin instead of the trash. With the proliferation of compostable takeout containers, etc, my compost bin is sometimes more full than my trash bin!

I happened to be stuck in a car with someone that works for recology. I can't remember the numbers that were thrown around, but they sell an impressive amount of compost, so much so that its a net win for them financially - unlike plastic recycling.

Same story in Portland - we’ve always had a yard debris bin, that now doubles as any biodegradable food compost. Trash cans are smaller and only gets picked up once every other week. If you’re careful about food waste and recyclables, it works out just fine.

Maybe I'm missing something but I've never understood the point of composting.

- It's a hassle.

- You can buy good compost for very little at the hardware store that's produced at industrial scales

- Landfill space is not a precious resource in most parts of the world

- Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill

Where is the upside?

edit b/c I don't know how to format things

> Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill

This point is not actually true. Landfills are not built to optimize for decomposition, they're optimized for density. The high density leads to heavily anaerobic conditions below the surface, to the point where excavating a landfill can find shit like newspapers from decades ago.

Plus, composting makes more sense from a land use perspective. If you're exclusively taking compostables, and shipping out the compost, your land use limits your throughput, but for a landfill, your land use limits area under that curve, cumulative input. You fill up a landfill, then you have to make another one. They are, somewhat ironically, disposable.

you can't use landfill as compost because its really quite contaminated

But the volume of compostable material is small compared to the overall trash volume, right?

Aren't we talking about a negligible quantity relative to amount of effort and (potentially) negative sentiment amongst swing voters?

I don't think so. Ever since my household started putting food waste in the ward waste bin instead of the trash bin, our trash bin has been mostly empty on any given week. A few scraps of single-use plastics that can't be recycled,

Of course, that's assuming that your recycling isn't also going into the landfill, which isn't a great assumption.

Counterpoints:

Local supply chains are nice and tidy from an economic and GHG perspective.

Landfill fees are expensive, and the city can sometimes sell the compost, use it themselves, and offer excess to citizens to come pick up by the wheel barrel full.

Compost really isn't that cheap, at least not at my hardware store. Especially if you are filling more than the odd pot or two.

In most cities with composting programs, you can opt out. (Also, it's not that big of a hassle. People used to act like putting glass bottles in the recycling bin was arduous, too, but on the scale of human drudgery and misery it honestly doesn't rate if you just get on with it. Or don't, and just opt out).

> Your garbage will still turn into compost, just in a landfill

It will compost, anaerobically, producing more methane and VOCs, and as they do, they create a sludge, that often picks up acid and other contaminants, which quick create leaks in landfills.

https://www.clf.org/blog/all-landfills-leak-and-our-health-a...

> The water that gets into landfill cells picks up contaminants from the waste and becomes “leachate.” What’s in the leachate depends on what’s in the landfill, but some chemicals can be counted on, such as volatile organic compounds, chloride, nitrogen, solvents, phenols, and heavy metals.

> The safeguards intended to prevent leachate from escaping a landfill cell – pipe collection systems in newer landfills and the plastic and clay liners mentioned above – fail over time. This toxic brew of “garbage coffee” leaks out of the landfill and seeps into groundwater – contaminating wells and waterbodies.

Anecdotally, 3 of 4 landfills in my area have ongoing leaks from leachate and now strictly police cardboard and other organic non household trash from the sites.

I would think heavy metals would be a much bigger issue wrt water contamination from a health point of view.

Not that the anaerobic sludge is great, but I would rather see a bigger push to recycle used electronics.

As far as methane, am in total agreement there. It's probably even better to incinerate paper products (if you are not in a subtropical region like LA).

Our town has trash pickup, recycling, and yard waste pickup.

Behind the scenes it almost all goes to the same landfill. It's nothing but theatre and extra costs.

How do you know?

Almost all recycling end up in the landfill.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-r...

Municipal recycling is mostly political window dressing to outright falsehoods.

The headline says 'plastic recycling' whereas the GP's claim was about recycling and yard waste in general.

Glass, aluminum, and cardboard are almost always profitable to recycle if the city is big enough to make it worth the infrastructure expense. It's the recycling of plastics that we were scammed into thinking made a difference. It does not. Twas a clever move on the part of plastics producers. Meanwhile most gets either a. dumped in a local landfill (after added expense and hassle of collection and sorting), b. shipped partway across the world and dumped at sea, or c. shipped all the way across the world and burned. Note, there are two specific types of plastic that can actually be profitable to recycle, Numbers 1 and 2 (PET and HDPE). The rest is pure junk.

Compost may be similarly beneficial, depending on public compliance, the market/public need for the compost product, and how efficient a particular region can make their system. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all kind of deal, and probably is not even worth attempting in some regions.

I was told by someone who works for the waste district. Admittedly it's unverified, but he said the only stuff that is reliably recycled are the aluminum cans and steel. The market for plastics and other materials is usually such that it's cheaper to just dump it.

What about yard waste?

Your original claim was 'almost all' so if you're just talking about plastic I think I'm quite right to question what you 'heard from the garbage guy'.

Yeah he said the yard waste was all landfilled. They don't have a big compost pile somewhere.

In BC we've had this for decades, everyone uses it. There's decomposable bags that you can put your compost in, and when you tie them, they take care of most of the odor issue.

So guessing you don't own a house in California?

We already have a third waste management stream. Organic waste bins. They are green. Most people use them for leaves, branches, grass cuttings, etc. They have been available since long before this law. My property produces at least one full bin a month from everything that is growing on the property. My neighbor actually has two bins.

I'm single and barely produce a gallon of waste a week and usually less. I do actually have a counter top bin with a lid where I drop cuttings but my property is big enough that I have an actual compost pile. But I STILL use the green bin I have because I can't compost all the tree limbs and sticks and what not in any reasonable amount of time.

Generally speaking a single person's organic waste isn't even worth composting. It's like 1/100th of what a single tree on my property will shed in a season. It will enrich a compost pile because human food is rich in sugars so the worms will love it but expecting everyone to do it is silly.

I don't, but I also know that green bins are not commonplace throughout the state. Some locations have them, some do not. San Diego did not, although you were free to buy your own waste container and it would be picked-up bi-weekly. In my old town in NorCal, the city would pick up piles of green waste left on the street.

Yard waste is vastly different from food waste. Yard waste might smell a bit(wet leaves/grass mostly) but it generally doesn't attract roaches and/or rats.

Keep in mind that green waste varies greatly depending on the area and your landscape. I had a heavily planted yard of native vegetation at my old San Diego house and it produced less waste than my kitchen.

In a town near Sacramento, there was a flyer-in-the-mail plan to collect the organics every other day, to reduce stink. So, a huge truck, with single digit mpg, stopping at every house, to reduce green house gas emissions from a few cups of vegetables.

Luckily, it was delayed, hopefully because someone saw the stupidity of it all.

People are putting PFAS-laden "compostable" items in the municipal compost, it won't be long before the "organic" compost should be considered toxic waste (if not already). But we only elect "activists" and not serious people, so nobody with power is going to look into this.

Anecdotally, with composting, just a 5 gallon bucket every other week (and yes, eating at home), my trash waste is more than cut in half (and my bucket is on my deck, where it doesn't smell, so i empty the trash less)

I currently use Compost Now service, but started with Bokashi - which prevents the smells, bugs; but from a price perspective the counter top compost systems seem they would pay for themselves in less than a year compared to curbside service (our trash).

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