Composters - the men and women behind the vision

Most of the garbage we produce in our home has high levels of food, paper and other biodegradable waste, "organics" in the trade. In a landfill, these organics lead to methane, a strong greenhouse gas. Organics also lead to the stench and water pollution associated with landfill.

As a result, whenever you look at dealing with garbage, organics is a prominent target. Most obvious is to stop the waste in the first place. Reduce wastage of food and you are a long way in front. According to the Australia Institute, $5.2m of food is wasted in Australia each year, more than is spent annually on digital equipment.

You can do better at landfill, capturing the methane, but this is ultimately a losing bet. Most of the gas is gone before you can capture it. You can incinerate it, but to get energy out of the organics you have to consume energy drying it out.

Best is to convert the organics to compost, and take the organics back to the land where it can grow more crops. It seems obvious but is far from settled. There is the question of contamination of the finished compost - heavy metals, plastics and glass being high on the list of concerns. There is the question of technology - the piece of plant to convert the waste into compost, how effective it is, how expensive. And, finally, there is the question of economics. Compost is classically low value, but its low density makes costs high.

Enter the composters. These are the people who underpin the entire edifice of sustainable waste management. They take a product from a waste processing plant, generally of low value, and add value such that it can be sold on to end users. The value is added through blending to create a product targeted for particular soil deficiencies, distribution, agricultural trials and even packaging. Some of the cleverest work is in pelletising compost so that it can be direct drilled into broadacre crops with seeding machines.

Without the composters, the end product after composting garbage would still be garbage. It would be a product looking for somebody naive enough to accept it. With composters, the end product is high value and in demand. Crops demonstrate this.

Perth is blessed with three excellent composters: Nutrarich, Richgro and Custom Composts. Each is driven by strong personalities who believe in what they do, and do what they believe. They don't see themselves as participating in the waste industry. They are in agriculture or horticulture. They are the most valuable piece of the puzzle. 

Compost worked into horticultural soils, image from Biogro

I suspect these traits are shared by composters around the world. They are driven, passionate and highly articulate people linking two ends of the continuum, ends that always were connected until relatively recently. Here's to the composters - the men and women behind the vision.

Incineration and the future of waste

Today I was at a seminar on "waste to energy", otherwise known as incineration.

It was quite surreal. Listening to great speakers from the US and UK (and they were excellent - thank you) on video-conference, in a packed room (had to be well over one hundred there), I couldn't help the feeling that I was watching the justification of mainframe computing in a personal computer era.

You see, the presentations were all about how incineration is fine environmentally etc. I get that environmental and health factors concern people. It's easy to get frightened of the "pollution factory" down the road, especially when you can't see the pollution. But I don't think this is the problem with incineration.

For mine, the problem with incineration centres on its philosophy of bulking everything into a furnace and then cleaning up the back end. In doing this, you pretty much have to cater for the worst case.This is expensive. And the best fuel (plastic, timber, cardboard) is so easily recycled through much cheaper avenues. You are desperately vulnerable.

So the problem becomes how do you finance these things? Especially now in the post GFC world where banks are risk averse (!?). Incinerators are immense capital investments (several hundred million dollars just to build) that require waste feed secured over decades. And that, to me, is why incineration will fail.

It is no accident that incinerators are only built when underpinned by government. This might be finance, subsidies or waste feed,or more likely all of the above. Absent one, the business case gets very dicey. Large mixed waste incinerators are not built commercially.

Commercial incinerators do exist, but they are smaller and focused on a specific waste stream. Why? Because it requires less pollution control, feedstock is more secure and the business case is stronger.

But it comes back to this. Why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that is forever at risk of new pollution control standards, when you can invest a few million and make a highly focused plant hum. A portfolio of these little plants dealing with discrete parts of the waste stream - now there's a business I'd want to build!

Murray Bookchin, waste and recycling

It is the classic story. Several years ago I was browsing through a second hand bookshop, one of the great pleasures in life, and stumbled across Toward an Ecological Society. It was a collection of essays by an author I'd never heard of, Murray Bookchin. It proved to become one of my favourite books of all time, and especially the title essay.

In brief, Bookchin argues that society needs to move from a central approach of domination - dominating women, people, animals, nature in general, and recognise itself as a part of a whole. He contrasts ecological thinking with environmentalist thinking. Ecological thinking is revolutionary, seeking to reform society in a technologically advanced harmony with nature. Environmentalist thinking is geared around maximum exploitation (or domination) of nature.

I get this. As an environmental engineer, my career is all about doing what is required to minimise environmental impact. It presumes it can know the impacts of actions in extraordinarily complex and non-linear systems. It never asks how the question can be reframed such that the question of environmental impact becomes inconceivable. An analogy - we don't walk down the street looking to minimise broken limbs. It is inconceivable that we should harm ourselves.

Bookchin also writes of human scaled technology. This is where things come close to home for waste management, and indeed, he makes explicit reference to the failures of centralised, monumentalist waste management. To take it further, he is critical of the "economies of scale" and "leave it to us" approach of waste management which ultimately leads to monster landfill, incinerators and other base level waste systems. This is everything a human scale waste system is not.

A human scale system involves humans. It works with humans to reduce their waste in the first place, then engage in sorting their waste, and ultimately using high technology to process waste. It is an approach of great subtlety.

It doesn't need these elaborate efforts at "community engagement" to convince people that they really do need this big plant which will solve their problems. Instead, it responds to the desires of people to actually engage. It is increasingly plausible as people move from trusting "experts" to trusting the crowd, increasingly likely as technology leaps forward. Our waste plants are getting smaller, and people are doing more themselves.

Toward an Ecological Society, Murray Bookchin. Image courtesy of Amazon

Ultimately, the tale of Bookchin is a tale of hope over despair. We can control our destiny. It is reasonable to know your world. We can live in a world that is not free of waste, but rather enables each of us to put out waste back into the productive economy. We can change the world one decision, one action at a time.

And most importantly, we can build business models around this. We can build business models that engage with people, deliver on their core values, prevent waste to landfill and are profitable. All at the same time. This is only impossible if we lock ourselves into the domination mindset, the "grow or perish", "big is best", "economy of scale" inanity.

It is an opportunity that is set to become real as intelligent people gather around heretical ideas. It is the future I want to live.

As for Bookchin, he passed away in 2006, 85 years of age and having lived a life filled with crystal clear polemic.