The garbageman rides a bike
By adamg - 9/29/11 - 12:21 pm
Back in the day, many towns had two kinds of refuse - trash, which went to a landfill or incinerator, and garbage, the food remains that went to a local pig farmer to feed his animals. Bootstrap Compost, based in Jamaica Plain, gives customers a dedicated garbage can, which it picks up and turns into compost.
Comments
He never did explain exactly
He never did explain exactly what the point was. It's not like your coffee grounds and orange peels are polluting the environment, are they? While you may be able to generate value out of turning table scraps into compost - I do at home for my own garden - that doesn't explain what's in it for the 'clients' he picks them up from. Other than that vague sense that 'I'm doing something' or other.
You recycle paper to save trees. You recycle aluminum and glass to keep cans off the streets and save some energy. You recycle plastic shopping bags to keep them from blowing down the road or getting into the ocean and killing sea turtles. What cause do you serve by giving some guy your carrot tops and corn cobs beside making him a little money?
Buisnesses save money by not
Buisnesses save money by not having to pay the trash company to take away their garbage. The landfill doesn't get filled up with stuff that's biodegradable and can be used elsewhere. Less stuff in the landfill means there is more time before it has to be capped and a new site found, or if its going to an incenerator from which the exhause is vented into the atmosphere... now it isn't.
1. Didn't it show him picking
1. Didn't it show him picking up from someone's house? I doubt he's serving businesses with those little pails and his bicycle.
2. Biodegradable materials are exactly what should go to the landfill. It's safe, harmless, and breaks down. It's things like mercury that shouldn't go in to landfills.
3. This country does not have a land shortage - there's plenty of room for landfills. And carrot tops and potato peels don't take up much space in landfills.
4. Local incinerators were shut down years ago.
Biodegradeable materials tend
Biodegradeable materials tend not to break down in landfills (ever seen a picture of a newspaper, decades later, still readable:(http://www.landfill-site.com/html/landfill_liabilities.html)
This because landfills are full of non-biodegradable materials and tend to be lacking in oxygen and moisture.
I don't understand why in the world you are so against other people composting, if you want to fill up landfills with things that could biodegrade but instead will just sit there taking up space, do it. But dont freak out because people who understand what happens at landfills are trying to do a little bit to save the city money (dumping stuff in landfills costs money) and save more land from being needed for landfills.
Take a breath. No one is
Take a breath. No one is freaking out. And no one is against other people composting. I'm asking where is the value to the waste donors? I compost everything possible and use it in my own garden. I just don't see the value of the business model other than a feel-good keeping-up-with-the-Green-Jones type motivation.
There is not compost shortage in our country. Giving some guy your table scraps doesn't hurt, beyond the effort involved, but they're not exactly saving the planet in JP today.
The people of JP would probably be better off just donating their waste to community gardens to compost on a volunteer basis. At least then they'd see the value directly.
Nowhere above did I see
Nowhere above did I see anyone say they were "saving the planet", that is you projecting. Someone is providing a service at a profit to someone who is getting happiness from it. It isn't harming anyone or anything, and in fact leaves every person involved happier--except you for some reason. What is your beef with this?
For someone who proclaims to love JP so much you don't really cut its residents much slack, and routinely use this website as your soapbox to broadly castigate them into the narrowest, almost comical stereotypes.
Just to clarify ...
Hi all,
This is Andy from Bootstrap Compost. I don't think this is covered in the video — evidently not.
My subscribers receive 5 gallons of beautiful, usable soil amendment every 15 weeks. So there is indeed a tangible return. I also donate half my stuff to urban agricultural projects in JP and Roxbury, including ECO on Boylston Street and the Chilcott Community Garden. For folks with families, jobs, hobbies, school, often all four — my service makes tremendous sense. We compost for you AND you get something back.
So thanks for your interest in composting and this conversation.
Sincerely,
Andy
Local incinerators were shut
There's a moratorium on building or expanding new facilities but there are plenty of municipal incinerators still in operation. I couldn't find independent data but there was a two-year old Globe article that reports that 25% of the Commonwealth's waste is incinerated.
What I pay for elsewhere
The garbage collection I pay for at my late parents' home in Portland, Oregon includes:
1 smallish garbage bin (size of a small rubbermaid garbage can, but its one of those wheelydumpsters)
1 larger recycling bin, also on wheels
1 smallish compost bin (also takes yard waste), same size as the garbage bin
Additional trash bags for special times (like cleaning out a hoarder's stash ...) and additional yard waste bags are available for purchase.
These are collected 1x per week, on the basic "small household" plan for $45/bimonthly.
If you have a larger household with more output on a weekly basis, you rent larger bins for larger money.
There is, apparently, a rather substantial market for the compost - particularly for landscaping applications.
Not much different than when the hog farm paid my elementary school for the food waste off of the lunch trays. Food scraps and yard waste are premium trash. If you can get some money out of it (or have a use for it) it pays to keep it out of the more expensive landfills and incinerators.
uhm...
Point Number 4: Wheelabrator (RESCO) on the Saugus/Lynn border (also North Andover and Millbury facilities). It burns trash. It spews shit into the air. It dumps the resulting toxic ash in a landfill in the marsh. Occasionally it violates regulations.
Anything that cuts down on the amount of compostable materials going into the waste stream is a good thing regardless of how much land is available for landfills.
I think
IIRC you get some "finished" compost back from him to use in your garden. Appealing if you don't want to deal with it, or don't have space for a composter in your backyard.
Unfortunately when the coffee grounds are mixed in with plastic bags and old batteries, and diapers etc etc they all have to go into a sanitary landfill, with a liner and a lot of protections to keep nasty stuff from leaching into the water. You don't need all that expensive stuff for the coffee grounds, but you end up paying for it (and filling the landfill faster) if it's all mixed together.
I'm curious
I'm going to ignore the video, which I think was pretty lousy, and focus on your text Adam
Since I wasn't around "back in the day"
What kept people from throwing food in the "trash" or stuff that pigs couldn't eat into the "garbage"?
Was it that people had to pay directly for taking stuff to the dump, and therefore had an incentive to minimize what was in the "trash"? Or were people just more civic minded back then?
I ask, because- it seems to me that the economics of the incentives have to be solved for composting to be more than a feel good green thing. It's (probably) cheaper for towns and cities to only have to deal with tipping fees on non- recyclable, non compostable "trash" and pay lesser fees for compostable garbage, but there's no incentive for the individuals. Lower longterm taxes or more productive uses of their taxes are probably too abstract for most people.
I started composting about 2 years ago using the Cambridge drop offs, and it's reduced my "trash" by half at least. If you multiplied that by every household, that would be a huge savings in tipping fees. (this is assuming that compost "tipping" fees would be less than sanitary landfills).
It just seems like there wouldn't be much motivation for people to remove the furry cucumber in the back of the crisper from its plastic bag and put it in the compost vs just chucking it, bag and all into the "trash". Its icky, and people are lazy, and it's tough to do enforcement.
Trash Vs. Garbage
I can't speak for others, but for my family it was mostly just a matter of doing what was expected.
In Dorchester, late 50's and early-to-mid 60's, there were built-in in-ground garbage receptacles in the backyards of most houses in our neighborhood. I suspect the same was true for other neighborhoods, but perhaps someone else can verify? In any case, the city had separate collections for trash and for garbage. Trash pick up was as it is now, but garbage collectors would come into your backyard, pull the garbage pail from the in-ground receptacle, empty it into a viciously smelly truck, and then return the empty pail to your backyard receptacle.
Anyway, it was just part of the routine. The garbage pail was strictly for garbage. The trash certainly had its fair share of garbage mixed in if someone was too lazy to go to the garbage pail, but never the other way around. Aside from our generally conformist ways, the garbage pail being a dedicated receptacle outside of the house and in-ground, with limited capacity, made it less-than-desirable as a place to put trash. Folks would have had to DECIDE to put trash there out of spite or something, and then actually walked to it and done so.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
What Receptacles Looked Like
I've got one of these!
Mine is much older and more durable looking, but it's definitely the same thing, and is in the alley between my house and the neighbor's. I always wondered what it was, initially having assumed cistern, but then realizing it was far too shallow. So you can expand the mental map for such contraptions to Roslindale, too.
Arlington has them
My 1920s era house had one of these (that was made in Somerville.) Makes total sense given Arlington was full of farms serving as the food source for the greater era back in the day. Unfortunately I had to get rid of mine, but I did keep the old lid for posterity.
We used to have one as well
We used to have one of those in our back yard in Allston! (The house was built around 1908.)
It was removed and the hole filled in, probably some time in the mid-60s, but I have absolutely no recollection of when or how.
We had one in Needham
When I was growing up in the mid-late 70's in Needham, my parents' house at the time, which was probably built in the mid-1950s, had one of these contraptions too. I can remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out ways to keep the racoons out of it (our house was right next to the town forest, so lots of wildlife running around).
Garbage was the only thing picked-up in Needham -- all your trash had to be driven to the landfill (still does, they don't have any curbside trash pick-up to this day). The service probably lasted until the early 1980s or so. Might have been around the same time they capped the landfill and made it into a transfer station.
The magical lid in the yard
Growing up in Saugus many of the older houses still had the garbage pail out in the yard. My parents explained it to me. All the organics were saved in a triangular strainer thing in the corner of the kitchen sink until Nanna would hassle one of the kids to take out the garbage. Step on the handle and pop open the lid and inside the cement hole in the ground was a metal sheath with holes in the side and a wire handle on the top. Once or twice a week a stanky truck would go around and pick up the garbage, carting it off to a pig farm. Then there was the ash can out back where paper and cardboard was burned. And the tin box on the steps to put your empty milk bottles out. And during the War of course there was a very aggressive recycling program for most everything else.
Then the 50s came and it all went to shit.
I started composting about 2
Really? That's a lot of potato peels. I compost all my table scraps in my back yard, and it's far from half my trash - and I recycle all my plastic, paper and metal.
I do a LOT of cooking
like canning 100lbs of tomatoes (that's a lot of skins and seeds).
Also, in Cambridge's program you can also compost paper towels/napkins/butcher paper that can't go in the recycling because they have food on them, but which you wouldn't put into a backyard composter. The industrial composters can do bones, meat, eggshells, even wine corks and mussel shells.
Pretty much the only things we have to throw away are non recyclable plastics like styrofoam and non-stretch plastic bags.
"applied to dozens of jobs a week for two years"?
Seriously?
Dude-talk for didn't
Dude-talk for didn't seriously look for a job.
Reality
It isn't always what you want it to be, but what is.
Just because you would like to think that you wouldn't be in the same boat were you unemployed because you are somehow morally superior, doesn't make it so.
How many people did you hire in the last couple of years? How about your organization?
And that's crazy chick-talk
And that's crazy chick-talk for you don't know what you're talking about.
Yep
I'm afraid so. Just wondering, why do you care so much about my employment history? Let's talk.
617-642-1979
Andy
Better than sending it down the garbage disposal
A couple of times a week I carry my little compost pail out to my back yard and toss its contents onto my compost pile. That's it. I don't have to bury it, turn it, water it, aerate it, I don't do anything to it and after one season, but usually less, I end up with a nice pile of compost. I've started composting a friends kitchen scraps, too, because he didn't want to pay for some silly compost service (probably bootstrap). Most people in JP have room for a compost pile. Why on earth would you PAY someone to cart away your peelings?
No Backyard?
I live in JP on the 3rd floor of a triple decker with no back yard (seriously: none, it's all paved). I do some deck gardening where compost would make sense, but if someone else can make use of my compostables? I could see paying for it. But I don't cook all that much, so I'm not generating enough to make it worth the money. Then again, I only have so much money so I have to be judicious in my spending.
Resilient JP
Compensating for the loss of Hi-Lo's produce department.