Egg shells, corn cobs, tea bags, left-over cereal, apple cores, paper bags, ash, dead flowers, potato skins, leaves, capsicum pips, stale bread, hair, paper towel, chicken bones, twigs, fish carcases, manure, newspaper, cardboard, grass clippings, weeds, coffee waste: all this organic matter for most people, simply goes in the rubbish along with the plastic bags, packaging and every other type of waste, with no thought to where it all ends up.
But by returning compost that is carbon rich back to the land, there could be a solution to two of the most critical economic and environmental problems facing our country today – land degradation and waste generation. Councils around Australia are putting their thinking caps on in order to find solutions for the ever-growing pile of waste we humans are producing.
“I’d say in the next five to ten years, Hobart council is going to run out of landfill,” says Scott Blacklow, Waste Minimisation Officer at the Hobart City Council, Tasmania.
The council is a mere stone’s throw from facing the problem of lack of space for waste, along with many other states in Australia.
Landfill is said to be a short-term diversion of the problem of waste management. Research has shown it creates toxic leachate that seeps through the soil contaminating ground water, and exudes an overwhelming amount of harmful gases into the atmosphere.
Currently there are almost 6500 businesses and about 47,000 people in the Hobart city, yet it is not known how many of them recycle or compost their organic material. What is known, is that organic material makes up almost half the amount of waste being deposited in landfills around Australia. The council in Hobart says that about 75 percent of people in their municipality are taking part in kerbside recycling.
Talking to a few Hobart residents about how their households operate, it is interesting to discover that most people feel waste management is their responsibility.
Judy Holter, 39 and a mother of two young boys living in Sandy Bay, says she does what she can and her children always keep a close eye on the recycling process at home.
“A lot of our food scraps go to the guinea pigs, rather than tossing it out. I think it’s easier than trying to bag it and put it in the bin,” Judy says.
“The boys just went to a water expo at school today, so now when I get home tonight, it’s going to be ‘You’ve had three minutes in the shower mum, use a cup full of water when you brush your teeth, don’t leave the tap running.’ They definitely keep me in tow,” Judy says with a loving look in her eye.
Judy says she feels that people should be more aware of how to conserve and recycle, and feels the more education there is in the community, the better.
Jody Botting, a fellow resident in the Hobart area and mother of a two-year-old boy, says her family does recycle, but composting is not an option for them with their living arrangements.
“We are renting our house, so at the moment we don’t have the facilities to compost. But if and when we own our own home, we will have a compost bin in the backyard,” she says smiling.
Botting tries to re-use as many resources as she can, in the kitchen and around the house, or she says she feels guilty.
“I think we should recycle, so that people don’t use up resources, that aren’t renewable, too quickly,” Botting says.
“It makes me feel good, that I am doing my little bit. It’s our world, we have to live in it – so you need to be aware of waste management. Every little bit counts, so people should make the effort,” Botting says.
The figures about businesses and their recycling habits, held by the Hobart Council at the moment are woeful according to Blacklow, so steps are being taken to change that.
“We know very little, as it has always been seen as not our problem from the council’s point of view,” Blacklow says.
“We are currently looking at developing a food waste collection system from industries, and conducting a waste audit, which will look at what kind of waste various companies are producing,” he says. “They should be composting and they can.”
Tips are places that most kids love exploring. A trip with parents to the tip is the ultimate highlight to a weekend. Yet as people get older, the novelty wears off, and the tip becomes a smelly, distasteful, unsightly place we are forced to experience in order to deliver our waste.
Ecologist Peter Rutherford has always loved getting involved with rubbish, even now at the age of 49. Whether it be worms, compost, landfill or eco-gardening, you name it he’s done it. You can spot Rutherford driving along the road in a white van, piled high with rubbish bins, and a magnet on the rear window reading “I’m a certified eco-gardener, ask me how?”
Rutherford is also the compost guru from the Kimbriki Tip on the outskirts of Sydney in New South Wales. He says it would be in councils’ best interest to push composting in the homes of Australian families.
“Here councils get charged by volume for depositing landfill, so if they can get people to pull their organic waste out of their bins and into a compost, it would save the council so much money and space in landfill,” says Rutherford.
Rutherford has always been a passionate ambassador for the environment, and after developing a worm farming business and establishing a compost learning/eco-gardening centre at the Kimbriki Tip, he definitely knows the ins and outs of waste.
Rutherford assisted with the implementation of a Vertical Composting Unit (VCU) on Lord Howe Island, off the east coast of New South Wales. This unit is one of the first commercial sized compost units to be developed and it was done so in Auckland, New Zealand. Aside from being able to cope with enormous amounts of waste, these units transform unwanted sludge into premium grade compost that people can then reuse.
Paul Brown, Executive Director at VCU Technology, says the initial inspiration for creating these units came from realising the unharnessed power of organic matter.
“Organic matter is the great healer of the soil and it is also a great leveller. It can influence so many varying conditions outside of the soil itself,” Brown says.
“For example with a high organic matter in soil, not only do you retain and improve the mineralisation of the soil, you can also buffer against future degradation and erosion,” he says.
The compost units tower up to four and half metres high, reach almost 80 degrees Celsius in the core and the smallest units can hold around 25 cubic metres of waste. They can handle a massive four tonnes per day of throughput waste, and are known for being low cost and simple to use without being labour intensive.
“In a nutshell - you put rubbish in at the top and it gets biologically processed and comes out the bottom,” Brown says.
The community of Lord Howe Island came together a few years ago and recognised that the waste management system they had in place was not sustainable.
“Prior to the bio-waste vertical compost facility going on to the island, they used to bury food waste, septate and sewage, vegetable oils in the sand dunes, and burn their green waste and paper,” says Brown.
It was seriously damaging their ground water supply, not to mention the costs of getting other rubbish shipped across to the mainland.
With new waste strategies combined with installing the unit, their waste stream went from being 201 tonnes per year, to 27 tonnes.
Rutherford has seen the change in the community first-hand on Lord Howe and he believes vertical composting units may be a way of dealing with waste in huge volumes for many communities.
Brown also believes these units may be the answer for waste management of communities and large business.
“The system in the Mackenzie district in New Zealand assisted the council to close their landfills completely and create Resource Recovery Parks. This package helped reduce landfill waste by 74 percent,” Brown says.
“The potential is huge for these units as the technology can be applied from an urban situation, like the system in Bromley, South West London, to a very remote place such as Lord Howe,” Brown says.
The Hobart council has many processes in place attempting to address the problem of too much organic waste going into landfill. Blacklow visits schools, teaching students about the benefits of setting up a compost at home, sends out brochures about recycling and sells cheap compost bins to encourage home composting.
“I do presentations to school groups, teach them about worm farms, composts, then hopefully the info gets back to parents, that’s the idea anyway,” Blacklow says.
“If people began composting in their homes, I guess up to 40 percent of the domestic stream could be diverted from landfill,” he says. “But there is no one answer, there’s so many different wastes out there.”
Rutherford thinks that governments should be getting their hands messy, and start educating people. Rutherford runs countless short courses in eco-gardening at the Kimbriki Tip in New South Wales, and they are always extremely popular.
“They should be doing a lot more on education, there are too many bloody brochures out there, they need practical education,” Rutherford says.
“Putting more money towards it, getting collection processes in place, and getting people involved,” he says.
“Get composting going on a large scale, managing the home compost is the message that councils aren’t getting across I think…” Rutherford ponders. “Home composting is the key,” he says.
The Sydney ecologist is not alone in his opinion of the role of government and waste management; both Brown and Blacklow have stated the need for legislation and education.
“New generation composting techniques give councils and governments more choices on processing waste streams, so I feel that they should be doing more in education, policy development and enforcement of regulations,” Brown says.
Blacklow does not deny there is lack of control in Tasmania.
“The whole recycling and waste management system almost cries out for some sort of government regulation, but there is not really anyone here in Tasmania that knows enough about waste to take control,” Blacklow says.
Money is always an issue when it comes to governments or councils implementing strategies. Blacklow says that council does not make money from dealing with people’s waste; the cost always outweighs the income.
An interesting fact is for one tonne of landfill, people in Hobart are charged around $30, yet in New South Wales, the fee is up near $80 per tonne. Now, waste is waste isn’t it? Why do people in Tasmania pay almost a third less?
“I suppose we could charge more money for depositing landfill here in Tasmania. Victoria has some good campaigns going on because they charge a lot more money than we do,” Blacklow says.
Australian topsoils have been highly weathered over long periods and are now very thin and low in organic matter. This has been compounded by farming methods adopted since European settlement. So many problems stem from low percentage of organic matter in our soil: erosion, water contamination, algae blooms and poor mineral content in food.
Rutherford says he has always believed that we must put back what we have taken from the land. Compost is high in carbon, and increased carbon in the atmosphere is a major contributor to greenhouse gases.
“Humus is made of carbon, that’s why it’s so beautiful and black. If people put more organic material back into the soil, we could pull so much carbon out of the atmosphere, it would make such a dramatic difference to the quality of our environment,” Rutherford says.
It is amazing to discover that we have the power to begin to undo the damage we have caused to the environment, according to Brown, if only people would start realising the benefits of organic matter.
“If you don't have organic matter in soils then the soils are not sustainable,” he says. “No food production equals no human population over a long period of time. So we are currently not sustainable as a race - we need to be if we want to continue.
“This means organic matter is one of the essential keys in making humanity a sustainable race.”
How To Compost
It’s as easy as one, two, three:
1. Collect all scraps and bits and pieces from your house, steering clear of meat, dairy products and cooking oils when you are just starting out.
2. Get a compost bin from your local hardware store or council and put it in a spot in your garden where it will get quite a bit of sun.
3. Fill it with kitchen scraps, grass clippings, twigs and bark, garden waste almost anything, and make sure you turn it and water it. If needs be, you can use a compost activator if you don’t have time to tend to it often.
The end result is beautiful rich compost you can utilise on your garden.
Jennifer Swinson, 22, is a third year journalism student at the university of Tas, also studying marketing, with "an interest in all things green!"
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Sunday, August 10, 2003