Hooray for the home composter!
Recently I’ve been navigating the bureaucratic maze of state government ‘waste’ policy. I have to stop reading at regular intervals, go outside, breathe deeply and do something real (like turn my compost).
Yet, all this reading has reminded me of just how important our back-yard home composters are; without them our ‘waste’ system would be more expensive, more damaging, more energy intensive and more precarious than it already is.
“In a good economy there would be no such thing as waste” wrote Wendell Berry, and we know this is true of natural systems, where anything that builds up too much, soon becomes a resource for another species or part of the system. Our industrial economy seems to have not comprehended this yet, with ‘wastes’ regularly building up to dangerous levels, causing damage and needing to be managed or “gotten rid of”.
But, we know, there is no ‘away’ we can throw things, everywhere is connected to everywhere else by air, water & soil and by the creatures that move in and through them.
Every landfill site is a neighbourhood, a farm-scape, a water catchment, an ecosystem. Do we believe there are really places that deserve to be trashed?
Home composters seem to understand these things intuitively. Rather than seeing food ‘waste’, the composter sees wonderful rich nutrients just waiting to be processed back into their garden. Rather than seeing an annoying pile of leaves and twigs, the composter sees ingredients that will balance those food scraps in their compost pile.
There is no reliable information on just how many home composters there are in each community (information we would dearly love to know here at YIMBY*), but the last time it was asked in the census, 25% of households said they compost, we suspect it could be much higher in many Central Victorian communities.
We all pay for the waste-system through our rates or rents, and these fees are pretty flat, yet the real costs of having our waste ‘removed’ goes up and down with how much ‘waste’ we generate and how much ‘waste’ service we use. Bins collected weekly cost more than those collected fortnightly or monthly. Every time a truck stops outside our house to pick up a bin it costs. Every kilo or ton of general ‘waste’ or organic matter costs to transport, tip and process and those costs are different for different waste streams.
There are also hidden costs we collectively bear the burden of, like the air and noise pollution from the rubbish trucks and the danger they pose on our streets. Heavy trucks do more damage to our roads than any other vehicle type, grinding up the asphalt, and then the particles of those tyres become the largest contributors to microplastics in our environment, ending up in our soil, our food and our bodies.
We know not everyone can be a home composter, but those who are do an amazing service for the whole community, keeping tons of material out of landfill, reducing the impact of trucks on our roads, cutting pollution and emissions, cycling ‘waste’ food nutrients back into food and saving us all quite a lot of money.
If you are one of those home composters, thank you, and please keep up the good work.
AUTHOR: JOEL MEADOWS
Joel Meadows works with *Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com or to book in for a compost workshop!
This was also published in the Midland Express on 15 August 2024