Approaching zero waste
The economy is basically a giant garbage machine. Because we must consume more this year than we did last year for the economy to grow we must discard and buy anew constantly. This generates megatons of garbage. Some progressive new stores are embracing old ideas like waste not want not and are making it easier to approach zero waste. Today I shop at the Green Grocer in Oregon City and soon Austin, TX will enjoy in.gredients to help reduce the amount of packaging we must accept when buying the food we want. Both of these stores recognize that the majority of waste from the grocery store to our home is in packaging. By selling package free whole foods and reusing packaging inevitably acquired other places a significant portion of the waste stream is reduced or even eliminated. Customers are encouraged to bring their own containers (that same plastic spice jar you paid $5 for at ABC grocery can be refilled from the bulk spices for $0.50). My shopping list has become a bag full of empty labeled containers. I know I need to buy more of something when I run out and I know what to buy by filling the containers in my bag. Easy as packaging free, bulk rate pie.
It is nearly impossible to avoid accumulating some waste that will be landfilled so what is one to do? First I’d like to point out that there is no silver bullet. What makes sense in Redland, OR does not make sense in Manhattan. My experience may not map to your life. I am an anal freak obsessed with garbage; you probably are not but there is still a great deal we can learn from each other.
Food waste: Vegetable scraps are pretty easy anywhere (worms, composter bins, backyard pile) but things like meat, oil, dairy, cheese are tougher. Not only are they harder to compost (typically go rancid and smell from the type of bacteria that eat them) but they also attract scavengers looking for a tasty meal. As long as the amount of meat/oil/dairy is small compared to the size of your compost pile it will be fine. Bury it down under at least 6″ of mostly decomposed material (like older compost) and that will eliminate the smell and keep scavengers away.
Pet waste: We have two indoor cats which refuse to be potty trained. Still we don’t have to landfill any of their waste by using biodegradable flushable litter (S’Wheat in our case) and keep the litter box in the bathroom so cleanup is simply scooping clumps into the toilet and flushing. If you’re really into saving water you can even co-flush with your pets but that’s mainly for hardcore treehuggers.
Dogs are tricky because while they potty outdoors we have built up an urban system where it is then sealed in little plastic baggies and landfilled. This makes no sense but its the state of things. I’ve heard some innovative ideas but still waiting for that dog crap revolution to come. If you’re really hardcore you could pick it up with toilet paper and flush it – if you are ballin harder than baseballs you could collect your dog (cat and even human!) waste in a homemade methane digester and use the methane to cook, heat your house, or generate electricity.
Everything else: Be mindful of what goes into the landfill. Reuse what you can. That only delays it being landfilled (especially plastics) but it reduces demand for virgin containers. Certainly nothing biodegradable and ideally only dry things should be landfilled. We mostly trash non-recyclable non-resuable plastic and other dry clean packaging. Things that contained food need to be rinsed out before tossing. They need not be sterile just pretty clean with some of the water shaken off. Things that are a challenge are aluminum foil used for cooking – burnt on food so can’t recycle and hard to clean off. Doing this means you can keep trash indefinitely without the garbage smelling. We’ve had trash bags sitting in the garage for 2mon but there’s no smell because there’s nothing in there that rots.
Your Tips: What do you do to reduce waste? We’d love to learn some new tricks!
New In-vessel composter trials
Glean 1st Stage Digester
I’ve been working on a new prototype for our two-stage composting process, allowing food waste to be rapidly decomposed before being fed to worms. The rapid composting happens in an In-vessel forced aeration digester, a chamber where we pull air through our composting material. This differs from a compost pile, which is manually turned to aerate the mix (and since its aerobic decomposition we need to introduce oxygen). A happy by-product of aerobic decomposition is heat, which we need to kill pathogens making the finished compost safe.
Because of the chilly winter temperatures and small digester it has been a challenge to get the compost to heat up. What I’ve learned will be applied to the revised design and ultimately the digester we use in production.
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Reciprocity
Part of Glean’s mission is to reconnect to the animate, living world. Our fast-paced modern lives have made it easy to forget that we are a part of the grander world community from the smallest ant to far away rivers, and that our relationship with them is reciprocal. To touch a tree is to be touched by that tree. To pollute a river is to be polluted both physically and spiritually.
Composting food waste, and using that compost to grow the next cycle of food closes a logical loop in the very human activity of agriculture. Agriculture, especially a small organic farm, is deeply rooted in the human and non-human world; that we consider a separate, purely human world is itself a pretty odd notion. If we take a step back and think about the rest of the natural world, it’s very apparent how absurd it is to landfill unused “wasted” food.
As much as we distract ourselves with new gadgets, football games, and the artificial confines of city walls and sterile cubicles, we are still dependent on every other participant in this world as they are dependent on us. Our society, however, tends to consider “nature” to be a resource pool to be used as we see fit. The US is wholly dependent on cheap energy, which has enabled us to do remarkable things and lead easy, comfortable lives. Even the poorest Americans have access to services and resources that most of the world literally dies for. Our technologies are wondrous and invaluable, but come with a heavy price.
Consider this: for cheap electricity, Appalachian mountains are razed, eviscerated to access their hearts of coal. Slag, ash, and toxic mining water pours downstream from these operations, destroying the local environment. Local communities not only lose their irreplaceable mountains, but suffer the health consequences of coal mining and when the mine dries up they are left economically depressed. In the same vein, a detriment to all of us is the prevalence of myriad chemicals that leach from our plastic containers, or residual pesticides on food, or the outgassing of laptops, carpets, paint, and most of the other products in our daily lives, or pharmaceuticals that leach into our water supply. Our advances in medicine are countered by our increased exposure to toxins. Our total control of indoor climate is countered by an increasingly unstable outdoor climate.
The point is not that we should abandon our advances and go live in a cave and hug trees all day long. The point is that balance will always be maintained. For all that we take, we must give back just as much whether by choice or by force. By recognizing this we can choose to be better neighbors – and be nourished in return.
Zero Food Waste: Sour milk
Finished product!
It’s happened to all of us before: sour milk. Today my morning coffee was ruined because our new fridge is too warm and the milk spoiled (cottage cheese coffee, mmm). With half a bottle left, I hate to throw it out – but I don’t have to. When life gives you sour milk, make cheese!
Heres what I did.
Making cheese from sour milk is beyond simple. Here’s how:
1**. Gently heat the milk until the curd separates from the whey (sorry no pic. You can’t miss it – the curd forms a white puck and the whey is yellow, looks nothing like milk).
2. Remove the pan from the heat, let set for 5-10min. Be careful to remove from the heat. Overcooked sour milk gets bitter.
3. Gently strain thru a napkin, facecloth, or (if you have it) cheese cloth and lightly salt the curd.
4. Tie up the strainer and let the whey continue to drip for another 20min. You can squeeze a bit to remove more whey and make a more pleasant soft cheese (less whey = harder cheese)
5. Refrigerate, then eat it as fresh cheese (recommended); mix with cream, salt and pepper for cottage cheese; brine for a feta-esque cheese…
This makes a cheese similar to cream cheese. Its best fresh, spreads, and also melts like cheddar (you can make mozzarella with it). Let me know how yours turns out!
**If your milk isn’t sour enough it won’t develop a curd on its own – you can instead use rennet or add a shot of vinegar. Using vinegar means you won’t have a melty cheese but its easier and more forgiving than rennet.
The case against composting
Composting, like recycling, is a bad idea. It’s a Band-Aid on a broken system. It looks like a good idea considering to the staggering amount of biodegradable waste coming out of our food system. Its written off as the cost of doing business – consumers want perfect produce and it has to survive weeks of shipping and storage. The argument is that by composting we are wisely using that excess to feed nutrients back into the food system. We’re a culture that addresses problems by creating new products to produce new sources of revenue. There’s no money in being less wasteful.
There are many reasons why so much food goes unused. There are many reasons why food loses nutritional value with every step it takes away from the farm. Indeed, there is naturally going to be waste: anything that spoils does so because humans aren’t the only ones after food’s nutrition. There are also parts of plants and animals that aren’t eaten.
Aside from this natural waste, though, a great deal of our food is not waste but rather is wasted. With little effort, one could eat nothing but discarded grocery store food and still eat better, fresher, healthier food than most Americans – just ask any dumpster diver. The vast majority of this food waste and wasted food is landfilled – a staggering 98 percent in the US. It fills up the landfill faster, produces methane, produces toxic sludge that leaches from the landfill, polluting the area nearby, and causes a host of other issues that negatively impact all life on earth.
In a culture of waste – one that throws away nearly half its food – composting seems like a sound approach to prevent the myriad environmental, social, and economic issues that arise from landfilling food waste. It is so attractive because it produces money and requires very little behavior change. As a consumer, you hardly have to change a thing about your daily life. The most you’d be asked to do is separate your kitchen scraps from the rest of your garbage – not too big of a deal since you already do it with recycling, right? Even grocery stores and warehouses simply need to separate food waste into different dumpsters – a little training, and you’re done. Like all waste, it’s hauled away (who cares where as long as it’s not in my backyard), and shows up sometime later in superstores’ gardening section. The machine keeps moving, with a snazzy new eco-friendly label, and we’re still throwing away half of the food we produce.
Bottom line, the case against composting is that composting is a romantic (and productive to be sure) way to combat our country’s waste problem – but ultimately one that won’t change food/waste economics. The industry will change when we not only compost food waste, but reduce the amount of waste we’re producing as cities, businesses, communities, and individuals. Such a holistic change requires a strong conviction of waste and its consequences, something most of us have a hard time visualizing since most of the consequences of waste aren’t tangible to us…yet. For now, it’s sometimes tempting to think of composting as petty in light of a big bad waste problem that inspires pessimism.
Keep composting. But do so realizing there’s far, far more to be done.
