Why Composting Is In The Green New Deal

When Glacier National Park was established in 1910, it was home to nearly 150 glaciers. Today, that number is down to 30, and those remaining are quickly shrinking. Nearly 80% of the snow caps, which have covered the mountain of Kilimanjaro for 11,000 years, have melted since 1812. It is believed that the majority of the central and eastern Himalayan glaciers may virtually disappear by 2035. This year Antarctica hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, a record high temperature. Due to the melting ice caps, sea levels are rising causing flooding at an unprecedented rate, and every year record high temperatures are recorded. Fossil fuels are the primary source of carbon dioxide, the other major factors (according to the EPA) include deforestation, animal agriculture, and landfills. 

Climate change is already taking an incredible toll on food systems, our health, and our politics. Air pollution is estimated to cause or contribute to nearly one-third of deaths by stroke, lung cancer, and heart disease. Climate change has caused widespread crop failures and is expected to significantly decrease the global production of food staples. Currently, 1 in 8 households in the U.S. alone are food insecure. Drought and rising sea levels are causing freshwater shortages while simultaneously thousands of people are dying from floods worldwide. In 2017, it is estimated that between 22 million and 24 million people were forcibly displaced due to catastrophic climate change-induced weather events. This number is going to increase drastically. Climate refugees will largely define politics for better and for worse in the coming decades.

The change that we as a society need seems daunting and unlikely. A lot has to happen in a very short period of time. If you’re not feeling too apathetic, you may find yourself often wondering what one person can do. The good news is that we have a way for you to dramatically reduce your environmental footprint – and there’s a good chance you’re not already doing it.

Composting Is Radically More Important Than Most People Know

Americans produce on average 4.4 pounds of trash per day with an estimated 0.45 pounds of this being compostable and 1.1 pounds being recyclable. 

The recycling industry is far from perfect. Often, when we recycle, our used materials still end up in landfills. When materials do make it to their recycling destination, it takes a lot of energy to convert plastics, glass, metals, and even cardboard into reusable material. Compost, however, can happen naturally and easily with little to no energy output. The act of composting food waste sequesters carbon. We need to sequester a massive amount of carbon while we reduce greenhouse gases. But when food is not composted, when it goes to the landfills, it creates an even bigger problem than plastic bags that take hundreds of years to decompose.

Methane – A Potent Greenhouse Gas

When food waste is put into a landfill it produces methane. Methane gas fuels toxic landfill fires that use tons of water to manage and can take months to burn out. But methane isn’t just flammable, it’s also a potent greenhouse gas. While carbon dioxide is the typical boogeyman of greenhouse gases, methane is said to be nearly 30 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Landfills account for 17.7% of all anthropogenic methane, coming in third place to animal agriculture and fossil fuels respectively. 

Obviously methane is a big problem, but the good news is that methane reduction helps make an immediate impact.

Because methane typically has a much shorter life in the atmosphere than CO2 (12 years compared with 100 to 300 years for carbon dioxide), reducing methane release from landfills can help rapidly reduce climate change risk.

Landfills have a huge greenhouse gas problem. Here’s what we can do about it.

Soil Erosion – If Climate Change Doesn’t Kill Us, Our Agricultural System Might

The dirt we grow most of our food in is degraded. We typically grow the same crops on the same land – monocropping. The crops continue to pull nutrients from the soil, but as the soil gets depleted, the crops don’t get the nutrients they need, and they become more susceptible to pests, weather, and infection. This soil degradation causes an increase in the use of pesticides and herbicides which harms the micro-ecosystem, further degrading the plant’s ability to absorb nutrients. Crops need increasing amounts of fertilizers to grow. Petroleum and other fossil fuels are used to produce fertilizers. The results are soil erosion and nutrient-deficient foods soaked in toxic chemicals. Fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in farm water run off the dry soil and flow into lakes and oceans contributing to deadly algae blooms. Crops require increasing amounts of water as the land becomes increasingly arid. 

Soil erosion in agriculture is the removal or degradation of topsoil by farming activities such as chemical treatments, farm water runoff, and tillage, causing compaction, loss of soil structure, and reduced permeability. Urban soil erosion and stormwater runoff are the biggest contributors to nonpoint source pollution according to the EPA. 

We need to compost.

We need to grow nearly all of our crops with composted soil. Compost provides the nutrients the crops need while the compost and soil underneath it retain more water. We should be using compost to rejuvenate the soil, to repair soil structure, to reduce the use of chemicals in farming and landscaping, and to reduce water-runoff in farming and urban settings. 

What The Green New Deal Says

Bernie Sanders released a plan to invest $160 billion into composting programs and other similar food recovery programs. In case you haven’t read The Green New deal yourself, here’s what it says about composting: 

“Help states develop food recovery and composting programs with a $160 billion investment to help solve hunger. If food waste were its own country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China. Meanwhile, 40 million people in this country are food insecure. We need to give states the resources they need to reduce food waste and hunger in their communities.”

The Green new Deal

Food waste makes up nearly 30% of the waste we produce. Through composting, we can recover nearly 27 million tons of waste, reduce erosion, slow climate change, improve crop production in just about every way, and maybe, just maybe, survive the next couple of centuries as a species. 

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