Waste - its so unusual

 

Waste is an unusual thing to blog about.

Unusual because it’s not something many people often discuss. Sure, we talk about sustainability, and recycling but the very word waste conjures up unpleasant connotations. Images of grime and dirt, something no one wants, so it is thrown away into a bin, put in a big noisy smelly truck in the middle of the night and put in a hole in the middle of nowhere while no one is watching. Then covered up, out of site, out of mind.

That is how we humans have handled waste, at least for the last fifty years or so. We could have been doing things differently. It is absolutely fairy to say that we should be doing things very differently.

Here is what I mean. True sustainability relies on using only what we need, so there are not many byproducts – or waste – left over. And even those leftover parts have uses in many cases. A good example today is restaurant food waste. Our portion sizes are huge, by historic standards. And so leftover food gets scraped into the bin. In the kitchen, if its not quite right, it gets thrown out. Again. Food thrown into the bin. A complete waste of all of the resources needed to make the food, harvest the food, and transport it to the kitchen. Only to find that we now have to expend more energies processing and treating it.

If the food ends up in a landfill, it creates methane as it degrades in an anaerobic environment. And that’s really really bad for the environment. Methane is about 23 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. And the leftover nitrogen would eventually end up in the waterways, causing algal blooms and killing fish. Scary.

So what if we composted the food instead. Well, what would then happen, instead of the methane being created, we would see several things. The nitrogen would feed plants. Some of the carbon would end up as carbon dioxide, and the rest would end up in the soil as carbon compounds…that plants would use….to make more plants….that soak up carbon dioxide. No methane, no polluted waterways. And well fed plants. Many people in Melbourne are well aware of this but just in case you are not, there it is. This is one of a number of articles that we write about waste management Melbourne – with more to come.

Now lets look at restaurant kitchen waste from a liquid waste disposal perspective. Grease traps are very similar too. Waste fats and oils go into them and get caught. The less we cook, the less we need to empty them. In days of old when you would get a grease trap pumped out these traps would be pumped out and put directly into a sewage treatment facility. Yep. More methane, and nitrogen into the waterways. Same again, if we compost the leftover product from the grease trap pumping operation we get healthier plants, and less pollution. Worth thinking about when its broken down nice and simple like that, isn’t it?