Updated 5/16/09
In a column last month, Baltimore Sun writer Dan Rodricks spoke to Lizz King, a West Virginia women who dives into supermarket dumpsters to fill up her compost bin at home. She’s a one-woman-waste-loop-closing-recycling machine.
Veering off its recycling theme, Rodricks’ column mentions that more people are turning to growing their own veggies – as King does – in order to pinch a few pennies during a tight economy. (Many gardening centers and seed businesses are seeing a 20-30 percent increase over last year.) It’s the same victory garden news story currently filing out of every media site. Although I’d argue that a lot of folks are going to be disappointed when starting a backyard garden with short term economic savings as their motivation (mostly due to a learning curve in becoming an efficient home grower), framing the story this way makes more sense from a journalist’s storytelling perspective – it’s timely.
What’s important with Rodricks’ article and King’s story is the closing of the waste loop, which King does at the extreme local level. Rodricks does mention different initiatives going on nationwide that are attempting to mitigate waste at the city level. Sure, you can pick up mulch and compost from dumps around the nation, but the problem doesn’t stop there. There’s so many ways to stop organic matter from suffocating in landfills and spewing up methane (greenhouse gas), even thought that gas can be harnessed for energy.
As I posted last week, communities across the country are taking massive steps in the right direction. I really like the Inland Empire’s idea of reusing empty big box stores for composting centers. Cities could apply the same logic to dead malls – turn former orgies of consumption into organic recycling centers.
Rodricks imagines a future Baltimore on a closed-loop recycling/composting system.
Imagine a Baltimore with 200,000 backyard gardens – or vacant lots turned into community gardens – and each of them stocked rich with compost from a dozen local heaps built off the waste from households, restaurants and supermarkets. Every taxpaying household would be entitled to, say, 200 free pounds of the stuff a year. No Dumpster diving necessary.
