resolution #1--composting

I grew up with the admonition, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  If ignorance is no excuse, then willfully disobeying is even more inexcusable. Therefore, imagine my dismay when one morning in December the front page of the LA Times proclaimed, “Starting Jan. 1, food scraps must be tossed into the green bin for composting.” 

Composting is not new to some of you.  My husband’s Aunt Mikke lived on a farm, raised pigs and always had a compost jar next to her sink.  But for this suburban girl who has never had a vegetable garden or pigs to slop, composting was a foreign concept.  As foreign as eating haggis on John Burns Day.  Haggis is pretty dreadful; would composting be as disgusting as haggis?

The premise of California Senate Bill 1383, passed in 2016, is that California is a throwaway culture, tossing unused food that goes into our landfills and breaks down into methane gas, “a super-pollutant as much as 80 percent more toxic than carbon dioxide.”  So as of January 1, 2022 all Californians are supposed to put their food scraps in the bins for “green waste”, grass clippings and leaves. 

This means that I need to sort out another substance in my kitchen.  I already have a recycling bin for paper and bottles and cans, and even some designated plastics.  The program providing recycling bins was started in the 1990’s.  In the beginning everything had to be sorted into its own category.  That was tough.  But in less than 30 years it has become second nature to me to separate the recyclables from my trash, made much easier once they all could be jumbled together and sorted somewhere else.  (The cynics among you say that recycling just ends up in a landfill anyway, but my research tells me that only 4-12 % is not clean enough to be recycled…a consumer problem.) 

Back to composting… while this is a big adjustment for me, now that I know the law, what would it say about me if I just ignored it?  And now that you know, what should you do?  Does it sound hard or irritate you?  Or do you feel grateful for the knowledge that there is something more you can do to steward this beautiful gift of the Earth that God gave us?

We can still put food waste down the garbage disposal.  Though it also turns to methane gas, there is the potential to capture that from the sewage system and turn it into fuel.  But it looks like I will be adopting the slop jar on the counter.  Wouldn’t Aunt Mikke be proud?  

Love, Liz

In case you are wondering where the food scraps will go, large-scale organic farmers are giddy at the prospect of sites for industrial composting.  They simply can’t make enough compost to meet their needs.