Leftover broccoli, unfinished hamburgers, wilted salad… sounds like a stinky mess… but it also has the potential to generate electricity. A new power plant fired up this week and you won’t find any coal or natural gas fueling its generators. This plant is powered by leftovers. Tamara Keith reports:
Transcript
Leftover broccoli, unfinished hamburgers, wilted salad… sounds like a stinky mess… but it also has the potential to generate electricity. A new power plant fired up this week and you won’t find any coal or natural gas fueling its generators. This plant is powered by leftovers. Tamara Keith reports:
The Biogas Energy Project on the University of California Davis campus is the first real-world demonstration of a new technology that could change the way we think about trash.
Food scraps from San Francisco restaurants are loaded into large sealed tanks where bacteria go to work, converting the food into fertilizer and releasing hydrogen and methane gas. That gas can then be used to fuel cars, or create energy using a generator.
Dave Konwinski is CEO of Onsite Power Systems Incorporated, which operates the plant.
“We’re burying all this organic waste in landfills, but every one ton has enough power to provide the heat for 10 homes, so the numbers are staggering how much energy we can make.”
Konwinski says he hopes to make the trash to power system commercially available early next year.
Last month, more than 150 people fell sick from spinach tainted with E. coli bacteria. The spinach has been traced to a California-based produce company. While this means trouble for large-scale agricultural producers, Brian Bull reports the outbreak might help smaller, independent farmers:
Transcript
Last month, more than 150 people fell sick from spinach tainted with
the E. coli bacteria. The spinach has been traced to a California-
based produce company. While this means trouble for large-scale agricultural
producers, Brian Bull reports the outbreak might help smaller,
independent farmers:
Bill Warner owns an organic spinach farm. He sells his crop at local
farmers’ markets and restaurants in Wisconsin and to some restaurants
in Chicago. Warner says he thinks the E. coli incident will steer
consumers toward smaller, organic farms like his.
“We just will tell people that in every step of the way we
do, we’re eating our spinach. We drink the same well water that we
water with. So it may get people more back to, ‘Y’know we don’t want
the big conglomerate foods, let’s go back to buying from who we
know.'”
Warner says many, if not most, organic farmers are extra careful.
They don’t seal their spinach in bags, and don’t use manure in their
fertilizer. Instead, they use a vegetable-based compost and wash
their greens with clean well water. Warner says this helps alleviate
the risk of E. coli bacteria contamination.
Environmentalists are hoping people’s Christmas trees end up in parks or gardens after the holidays, rather than the dump. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
Transcript
Environmentalists are hoping peoples’ Christmas trees end up in parks or
gardens after the holidays, rather than the dump. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:
According to the National Christmas Tree Association, between 25 and
30 million real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. every year, and the
majority of those trees are recycled after the holidays.
Jim Corliss is with the National Christmas Tree Association. He says the
group made a big recycling push about 15 years ago.
“We gave a recycling award each year to a municipality or entity which
did a good job of recycling Christmas trees, and according to our surveys
that we did as the years went by we raised the number of recycled trees
in this country from somewhere in the 30 to up to the 70 percentile.”
Corliss says municipalities use wood chips from Christmas trees on park
pathways, in planters or sell the chips as compost.
Life in the suburbs is idyllic to some people... (Photo by Bon Searle)
...and many rats, now that the sewers have been flooded. (Photo by Tamara Bauer)
Unusually heavy rains this summer are partly to blame
for rats pouring out of the sewers in droves all over the country, and the nasty vermin are relocating to some of the most pristine
neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce
Kryszak explains what caused the rat invasion and
what’s being done to evict them:
Transcript
Unusually heavy rains this summer are partly to blame for rats pouring out of the sewers
in droves all over the country. And the nasty vermin are relocating to some of the most
pristine neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak explains what
caused the rat invasion and what’s being done to evict them:
Piercing blue autumn skies and billowing white clouds drift across the chimneys of this modest,
but perfectly manicured suburb. There aren’t even many leaves crunching under foot. Town workers
have already come and vacuumed them all away. But there’s a nasty little secret scurrying under
the porches and behind the garden sheds in this Western New York town. County Sanitation Chief
Peter Tripi takes us for a peek.
“Can you see the teeth marks here? That’s actually rat gnaw marks. And there’s the garbage bag.
And that’s what we found when we went to this property.”
Now, you might be thinking that we trudged through derelict grass and scattered debris to find
these rat clues. Nope. This is a gorgeous, manicured yard – with not a blade of grass out of
place. But Tripi says rats aren’t choosy.
“You would never think by looking side to side that there would be a rat problem in this yard.
Doesn’t matter what neighborhood you live in, or how much money you’ve got. There’s no difference.
They just like your food.”
And you’d be surprised where rats can find food. A garbage can left even briefly uncovered, a
neglected bird feeder, uhhh… dog feces… and even a compost pile.
“Absolutely. This is a rat condo. It’s a grass-clipping compost pile that basically housed rats
to go a hundred yard radius all the way around to the different houses.”
Tripi says rats had to get creative with their housing. A summer of extremely heavy rains drove
the out of the sewers and into some previously rat-free neighborhoods. And with the West Nile
virus killing off millions of birds, the rats have less competition for the food they’re finding
above ground. The consequence is a virtual rat infestation all the way from New York and Illinois
to Virginia, Michigan and L.A. In Kenmore, there have been four thousand rat complaints – nearly
double last year.
(Sound of garbage truck)
Of course, none of this is news to the garbage collectors. They see the problem up close and
personal. Twenty-year veteran Louie Tadaro says this past summer is the worst he’s ever seen.
“Across the street there’s an alleyway and there had to be like ten of them in there, And we
started chasing them with garbage cans trying to kill them, but we couldn’t. By the time we
got there they just split.”
The problem is, they don’t split for long. Vector Control Chief Tripi says now that the rats
have relocated from the sewers to upscale accommodations, they kind of like it.
“And what that means is that they want to live with us. They want to be near our garbage and
our bird feeders. The problem with that is that rats carry diseases.”
We all know about stuff like typhus and the bubonic plague. But there are emerging diseases,
such as a pet-killer called Leptospiroris. It’s killing dogs all across the country. Tripi
says they need to get rid of the rats before the disease starts spreading to humans. So, his
team is taking the rats on, one yard at a time.
Tripi and his Vector control team set rat traps, they fill bait boxes with poison, and – when
they have to – they issue citations to residents who don’t heed the town’s new “rat control rules.” Covered garbage cans only. Clear away all brush. Clean up scattered bird seed and dog feces. Slowly, the rules seem to be working.
(sound of Tripi looking into rat trap)
Still Tripi says it’s mostly educational warfare. And he says now – heading into winter – is the
best time to nip the problem. If the rats get cozy, not only will they stay, they will multiply.
Fully nourished, one adult rat can breed up to sixty baby rats a year.
“The adult rat can live on a little bit of food, but he can’t procreate unless he has a lot of
food source. And they can’t live through the winter unless they’re warm and fattened up.”
So now is the time to – quite literally – put a lid on it. Keep those garbage cans covered, unless
you want some uninvited furry guests this winter, and many, many more come spring.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.
Source: The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing, PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127
www.jenkinspublishing.com
Books can be powerful. Sometimes they can even change your life. As part of our ongoing series on individual choices that impact the environment— “Your Choice; Your Planet”—the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Curtis Gilbert brings us the story of one book that changed his mother’s life… a book that so profoundly affected her that she felt compelled to share its teachings with strangers. It wasn’t the Bible or the Koran… or “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” And the part of his mother’s life that it changed is one so exceedingly private that most people don’t even like to talk about it. He’ll explain:
Transcript
Books can be powerful. Sometimes they can even change your life. As part of our ongoing
series on individual choices that impact the environment — “Your Choice; Your Planet” —
the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Curtis Gilbert brings us the story of one book that
changed his mother’s life…a book that so profoundly affected her that she felt compelled
to share its teachings with strangers. It wasn’t the Bible or the Koran… or “Chicken Soup
for the Soul.” And the part of his mother’s life that it changed is one so exceedingly private
that most people don’t even like to talk about it. He’ll explain:
There’s a sound — something familiar to everyone who lives in a Western, industrialized
country — but it’s a sound you’ll almost never hear at my mother’s house.
(sound of toilet flushing)
Five years ago, my mom turned off the to water to her toilet. She put a house plant on top
of the seat and opposite it built a five-gallon bucket in a box that took over all the duties
of its porcelain counterpart.
“Well I had seen ‘The Humanure Handbook’ in the FEDCO Seed catalog — and it just sort of
intrigued me. And I decided one year that I would read it since I was curious about it year after
year. And I read it and then I began to feel really bad every time I flushed the toilet.”
That’s because every time my mom flushed the toilet she was rendering undrinkable several
gallons of otherwise perfectly good water. And what’s more, she was whisking away valuable
nutrients that she could have just as easily returned to the earth.
That’s right… Humanure is a contraction consisting of two words: human and manure.
Here’s how it works: You use the humanure bucket in pretty much the same way you’d use a flush
toilet. Everything’s the same, except that instead of flushing when you’re done, there’s another
bucket right beside the humanure bucket and it’s filled with sawdust. You use a little cup to
scoop up some sawdust and then you just dump the sawdust in the humanure bucket when you’re
finished using it. That’s it. And the crazy thing, the thing that always surprises people when
I tell them about my mother’s humanure project is that it doesn’t smell bad.
“Anytime anything’s stinky in the humanure, you just cover it with sawdust and it doesn’t stink
anymore, except of course what is already in the air, which is like any toilet.”
Once a day my mom takes the bucket brimming with sawdust and humanure and dumps it into her
massive compost pile. There, it mingles with her kitchen scraps, weeds from the garden, and
just about every other bit of organic matter she can find… and in two years time the humanure
cooks down into dark, rich, fertile soil.
For the first couple of years, my mom was content just to operate her own humanure compost
heap and let her garden reap the benefits — but the more she did it the more of a true believer
she became. Strict adherence to the faith wasn’t enough for her anymore. She had to become a
missionary. She bought a case of Humanure Handbooks and set up a booth at an organic gardening
festival called Wild Gathering.
“And I think I sold one at that Wild Gathering. And then after that I was giving them away right
and left to my sisters and nieces and friends and whoever! And I used them all up and then this
last year I decided that not only was I going to get another box of Humanure Handbooks, I was
going to collect humanure at Wild Gathering!”
My mom knew she’d a lot of buckets for the project, so went door to door at the businesses
in town. She didn’t say what she needed them for, and luckily they didn’t ask. She collected eight
buckets full in all — not quite the payload she was hoping for. Attendance at Wild Gathering was
pretty low that year, due to rain, but relatively speaking, sales of the Humanure Handbook were
way up.
“I sold more at this last Wild Gathering. I think I sold five or six. And I gave one away for
Christmas this year to Natasha, who had been having plumbing problems. And I started my spiel and
she was really quite interested. And, I think we may have a convert there before long.”
Conversion. The ultimate goal of any evangelist. My mom admits that she doesn’t know of anyone
she’s actually brought into the fold — but she likes to think she’s planting seeds. Just
introducing people to the idea that there’s a alternative to flush toilets, she says, is a huge
step forward.
“This is really a shocking idea to a lot of people and a lot of people who come to the house will
not use it. I have to make the water toilet available to them.”
My grandmother won’t use it. Neither will my mom’s friend, Rochelle. And then there’s my
girlfriend, Kelsey. Last summer the two of us spent several days at my mom’s house in Maine
before taking a road trip back to where we live in Minnesota. After quietly weighing the
ramifications of sawdust versus water toilets, Kelsey finally decided to brave the humanure…
well, sort of.
Curtis: “So you used it for some things, but you’ve told me before that there were some things
that you couldn’t bring yourself to do.”
(laughing)
Kelsey: “No, I couldn’t. I did not have a bowel movement during our entire visit to your
house, over the course of four days.”
I’d like to think that Kelsey’s physical inability to make full use of the sawdust toilet
was an anomaly, that most people would have no problem going to the bathroom at my mom’s house
in Maine… But I doubt that’s the case. And that’s not the only reason I’m a little skeptical about
my mom’s vision of a world humanure revolution.
Curtis: “It occurs to me, and I’m about 100 pages into the book at this point, that this is
all well and good for people living in rural areas, but I live in a city. Where am I going to
put a compost heap?”
Mom: “You know, there could be chutes in buildings. There would have to be temporary storage.
Trucks would come in and take it out. Great huge compost piles would be built and it would work
down very… I think that where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
I’ll admit it; I’m still skeptical. I mean I believe in humanure, sure. But I also haven’t
put a house plant on top of the toilet in my big city apartment…and I probably never will.
Call me a summer soldier in the humanure revolution if you will, but when I go home to my
Mom’s next Christmas, I’ll be flushing with sawdust and I’ll be proud.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Curtis Gilbert.
Reporter David Hammond's yard. He has the vague notion that not bagging grass clippings is more environmentally friendly. (Photo by David Hammond)
Most of Hammond's neighbors prefer to bag clippings, leaving a perfectly manicured turf. (Photo by David Hammond)
At one point or another, most of us have had to do yard work. If it was one of your chores as a kid, you probably developed a strong aversion to it, but as some of us get older, get married, and move to the suburbs, something interesting happens. Taking care of the yard becomes important, but is there an environmental impact? As part of an ongoing series, called “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Hammond takes a closer look at his own back yard:
Transcript
At one point or another, most of us have had to do yard work. If it was one of your chores as a kid,
you probably developed a strong aversion to it. But as we get older, get married, and move to the
suburbs, something interesting happens. Taking care of the yard becomes important. But is there
an environmental impact? As part of an ongoing series, called “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Hammond examines his own backyard.
To bag or not to bag? That is the question. Well, at least that’s my question… on most Saturdays
say about 10am.
(lawnmower sound up far away distance)
That’s when the men of my neighborhood head outside for their weekly call to arms. It’s yard day.
And once the first mower starts, like fruit flies to a banana, everyone heads outside to do their
mowing, edging, and weeding. It’s a procession that lasts all weekend.
(lawnmower sound up close distance, up and under)
This is a new neighborhood… only a couple of years old. Everybody has put in new landscaping,
and everybody spends a lot of time taking care of their lawns. Brian Van Netta is one of my
neighbors.
“It’s the showpiece of the house. It’s the first thing that people see when they drive by and it sets the tone for the rest of the house.”
Around here, that means bagging your lawn clippings. You know the routine. Mow a couple of
strips across the yard. Stop the mower. Take the grass bag and dump it into the compost bag.
Put the grass bag back on the mower. Mow a couple more strips then dump again. Then repeat
all afternoon.
I think it’s lunacy… a waste of the weekend. Something keeping me from solving really important
issues like: Does my beer taste great or is it less filling? I’ve also have a vague notion that not
bagging is better environmentally, but I can’t back it up with facts. So I decide to investigate.
(lawnmower sound out)
First stop – Wade Martingdale. He’s a neighbor who’s worked in the landscape business. Around
here, his word carries weight. Unfortunately for me, he recommends bagging.
“If you have a real full turf grass, you know, real thick and full, that when you cut your grass, the
grass clippings are so thick that actually strangles out your grass, its doesn’t let the water get to the
roots, the air, and then what water does get to the roots, it won’t dry so it can promote disease.”
He also says bagging makes a yard look better… usually as he’s looking at my yard.
“You can’t really tell from a distance, but you can tell up close. Just like your grass has a lot of
clumps in it…” (pause… laughter)
I was getting worried. If bagging was really the best environmental and the best neighborly thing to
do, I might actually have to start. No sense getting kicked out of poker night on account of some
grass clippings, but as I looked down my street at all the 30-gallon bags waiting to be picked up, I wondered where all that waste was going.
(sound of trucks picking up waste – up and under)
Canton Waste Recycling handles all of the recycling pickups in my town. Each week, they pick up
yard waste from nearly 20,000 homes, and then haul it to a regional processing center. There it’s
turned into compost and sold to landscapers and fertilizer companies. The only caveat is that the
yard waste collected from the neighborhoods can’t have any debris in it. If there are stumps or
rocks or concrete in the compost bags, then an entire truckload can be wasted. When that
happens, it gets sent to the landfill.
(begin fading truck sound)
So assuming that folks in my neighborhood are not sneaking any dead cats into their yard waste…
bagging seems like a decent bet environmentally. Sure, there is energy used to pick up and
process the yard waste, but the program employs a dozen local people. I had to give it thumbs up.
(truck sound out)
But now, my worry had turned to panic. I could see the rest of my summer out in front of me. No
more pool. No more picnics. No more Sea Breezes at high tea. No, what I saw was a sweat-stained, fat guy lugging 30-gallon compost bags to the curb. That was going to be my summer.
Hell, it was going to be the rest of my summers.
My last hope was The Huron River Watershed Council. They’re a local environmental group and
have developed a lawn care tip sheet. As I read through it, I started to feel the ol’ fun quotient
starting to rise. That’s because the tip sheet recommended not bagging your clippings. That is, if
you mulched them well when you cut them. Laura Rubin is the Executive Director.
“By leaving them there, they are sort of leaching those nutrients right back into the soil. So when
you mulch them, and you leave them, they just naturally put those nutrients back into the ground
and that’s what the soil needs.”
Rubin says that those added nutrients would allow me to save money because I wouldn’t have to
buy as much fertilizer. I also wouldn’t have to buy the composting bags. Rubin added that she’s
not against community compost programs. Just that leaving the clippings was a simpler
alternative.
“Community-wide composting programs are great and if you have a good one, you can’t go wrong.
It’s just changing the waste stream to a different area, but I don’t want to stress that there’s sort of
a ‘good way’ and a ‘bad way.’ If you send it to a composting program, you are still recycling and composting
that up rather than bagging it, and sending it to the landfill is the worst.”
So in the great bagging debate, it seems that both sides can claim the environmental high ground.
As long as I mulch my lawn clippings well, I can continue not bagging in good conscience. And for
the hardy souls who do bag? You’re good too. In fact, next Saturday, as I watch you schlepping
all those bags to the curb, I’ll tip a glass to you.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m David Hammond.
Ontario appears to be ready to take more steps to protect the environment on the north side of the Great Lakes. The new liberal government wants to rid the province of its bad name, especially on issues like recycling and composting. That means diverting 60 percent of the province’s garbage from landfills within the next five years, which could be good news for landfills south of the border. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports, the city of Toronto is taking the lead:
Transcript
Ontario appears to be ready to take more steps to protect the environment on the north side of the
Great Lakes. The new liberal government wants to rid the province of its bad name especially on
issues like recycling and composting. That means diverting 60-percent of the provinces’ garbage
from landfills within the next five years, which could be good news for landfills south of the
border. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports, the city of Toronto is taking the lead:
Toronto generates more than one million metric tons of garbage every year, and the amounts are
increasing. Now it wants to fall into line with the provincial government’s plan to recycle 60-
percent of its waste.
Geoff Rathbone is Toronto’s director of solid waste management services.
He says the city will reach 32-percent by the end of this year, and could make the 60-percent
mark in five years.
“In order to do that we made a number of initiatives such as making recycling mandatory and
banned grass clippings.”
The biggest change is the Green Bin Organics Program. Organic waste such as diapers, sanitary
products and animal waste is picked up in a covered green bin at curbside. That material is sent
to plants for processing and separation.
Rathbone says another plan is already working. It forces businesses to pay to have their garbage
picked up, encouraging them to recycle. So far they’ve cut waste by 40-percent in just one year.
For The Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.
Artist Ladislav Hanka's fascination with fish
fuels his work. Photo by Tamar Charney.
The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many recreational fishermen, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:
Transcript
The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great
Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many
recreational fisherman, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In
cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of
life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:
Ladislav Hanka asks people to take a look at life from a different angle. He does this in his art,
and he does this in real life as I found out when I asked him how old he was when he started
drawing.
“I’ll show you. (footsteps) We’re going to make a little expedition under my kitchen table. So
get on your back, slide under the table with me here, and look up, and there you see some of the
first drawings I ever did. They’re nothing. They are just chicken scratch, but it’s kind of neat.”
Now that he’s an adult, the kitchen is the only room in his house in that isn’t an art studio.
Ladislav Hanka works where you’d expect the living room to be. But there’s no sofa here. Just
lots of counter space, storage drawers, and the press he uses to print his etchings. The corner
where he sketches is cluttered with cans of colored pencils, sheets of paper, and stuff you sure
won’t find at an art supply store.
“Now here is a vat of pickled fish.”
There’s trout, pickerel, a goldfish and other slimy brown creatures in a smelly preservative. He’ll
draw them and at times even dissect them. But when the lakes and streams aren’t frozen, he puts
the bucket away and heads outside for inspiration. He spends a lot of his time hanging out along
rivers fly fishing and sketching.
“I’ll sometimes put on waders, the fishing gear, and take a sketchbook out and just wade around up
to my chest in the water and sit in the lilies on the edge with a sketchbook.”
He uses the sketches as the basis for etchings. They’re inspired by what he observes outside and
from what he learned in school when he studied zoology. Ladislav Hanka’s etchings are very
detailed, but they’re not what you’d see if you just looked outside. There’s very little, if any color,
just warm tones of black ink on creamy paper. Some are landscapes with tangles of tree roots,
dirt, and rocks. Others are underground or underwater scenes with fish, birds, and bugs,
sometimes in various stages of decay.
“It’s a 14-by-18 plate size – it’s an etching. And there’s a moon, a full moon, shining in a very dark
background, very organic sorts of textures with a feeling of some sticks and roots and unclear
exactly what it is.”
At the bottom of the image lurking in the dark quiet shadows are fish called burbots.
“There’s a skeletal element to this burbot. The head is more defined than the rest of the body. And
it’s obviously moving among the sticks and up the light source and through various little bones
and skeletons. The intent is it is something inevitable, that it has to go up to the moon. And the
interesting thing with the burbots are that they do, indeed, spawn at night. They spawn in the
middle of winter. So there’s something I find very compelling about this drama, this ancient
drama, that keeps recurring and happening every year under the ice, in the cold, and under the
moonlit night. There’s a romance about it. I keep going back to spawning cycles.”
Watching salmon spawn has become his yearly ritual. Every fall he sits on the bank of a nearby
creek to watch Great Lakes salmon spawn. Salmon return to the place where they were born to
create the next generation in the moments before they die.
“It’s a forgotten little place that I think once used to be an industrial waste sight almost. A bunch
of 55 gallon drums and tires and poison ivy and all kinds of stuff. There are the salmon coming
up stream, among the logs, and the tires, and spawning. It’s this grotesque and beautiful things all
at once. It’s a spectacle, a ballet, death dancing lightly among them and picking over them, and
there they are, trying to spawn before they die, before the energy seeps out of their system.
Eternal cycles, I guess that’s what it’s about. We’re so used to thinking as in human terms, of a
linear way of thought – you evolve, society evolves, everything goes forward in one direction.
And yet the fact is every one of us lives life much more cyclically than we really admit to
ourselves, and we are disgustingly like our parents and like their parents, and like our great-
grandparents and you repeat the stupid things you can’t stomach in your parents, and there you are
repeating the same things years later. There’s something cyclical about it, but it is also beautiful.”
But why you keep coming back to fish?
“Why do I keep coming back to fish? Well, maybe there is something in all of us that wants to
migrate upstream and return to the source – the going home business, whatever home might ever
have been.”
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.
When you go to your favorite restaurant, you might not realize how many carrot tops, onion peels and potato scrapings end up in the garbage. In the past, most of that has gone into landfills, but one community is trying to change that by running a pilot restaurant composting program. It hopes to serve as a model for other communities throughout the region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty reports:
Transcript
When you go to your favorite restaurant, you might not realize how many carrot tops, onion peels
and potato scrapings end up in the garbage. In the past, most of that has gone into landfillS, but one
community is trying to change that by running a pilot restaurant composting program. It hopes to
serve as a model for other communities throughout the region. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Nora Flaherty reports:
Rene Graff tries to run her restaurant in the most environmentally sound way she can. But there
was one thing – she couldn’t do anything with all the peels, rinds and other vegetable waste that her
cooks generated. Her staff suggested composting, but it wasn’t practical to set up a compost pile in
back where it might attract pests. And it wasn’t practical for someone in the restaurant to take the
stuff away.
“The city didn’t have a compost program where they could pick it up, and as a business, you really
couldn’t have somebody driving the waste out to the compost center, so that was a really big
obstacle for us, was having pick-up.”
Graff started talking to people in her town, Ann Arbor, Michigan. They talked about ways to work
it out so that her restaurant, and others, could compost their food preparation waste. Then they all
found out that the Solid Waste Department had been thinking about the same thing. They all
worked together, and in the end, they put together a program where for 2 months, three local
restaurants separated all of their waste from prepping vegetables, along with coffee grounds and
filters, for the city’s yard waste trucks to pick up.
(kitchen sound – chopping)
They found it was easier than they thought it would be. Emily Adkison manages the kitchen at
Graff’s restaurant, The Arbor Brewing Company. She helped create the system that they used for
food prep composting.
“We would have several bins, one at every station, one at the prep area, one up back on the line,
one right over there by the dish area so the servers can put their used napkins in and coffee
grounds. It’s just as easy as having, instead of a garbage can, you have a 5-gallon pickle bucket
and you throw your scraps in there instead of in the garbage.”
The stuff that the workers throw in the buckets gets picked up by the city’s yard waste composting
trucks. Then, it’s taken to Ann Arbor’s Materials Reclamation Facility, or MRF.
The MRF is a huge, windswept area, with a big population of crows and big, long piles of partially-
decomposed leaves everywhere, emitting a lot of steam and a very earthy smell. Nancy Stone is
educational director for the Solid Waste Department. It’s her job to show people what happens to
their yard and now, food waste, once they’ve sent it here. The whole process takes about a year.
The end result is a high-quality compost, that the city sells to local farmers and gardeners.
“It’s rather crumbly in nature. It has a very sweet smell to it and it looks to me like beautifully
ground espresso grounds. It’s just, I like to garden myself. This is the best stuff to garden with.
This stuff is the best stuff to think of putting on that garden.”
The Ann Arbor restaurant compost pilot program ran for 2 months, and in that time, the city
collected 9 tons of stuff that would have been thrown away otherwise. For Graff, whose restaurant
alone generated one ton of food waste, this is a big argument for future programs, and against
people who say that this kind of program is too small to work:
“When I’m dealing with nay-sayers, the biggest thing they say, ‘if it’s such a small amount that
you’re talking about, is it worth the time, is it worth the effort?’ and I think what people should
know is that every little bit counts, as in I think we were shocked to discover that we diverted a ton
of waste in 2 months, and I would say yes, even the smallest little gesture can have a big impact,
especially if everybody’s doing it.”
And more restaurants will be doing it in the spring — the program is starting up again in May, this
time with 3 more partners. And the people involved in the Ann Arbor program hope that if it works
in this community, it will help lead to a change in the way that other communities, all over the
region, deal with food waste.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Nora Flaherty.
A herbicide is being found lingering in grass clippings and causing compost to damage gardens. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
