Word out of Oregon is that Marion County is considering composting all of its food waste. To which I say: go for it!
I drove through that very county on my recent West Coast trip and if that stretch of Highway 5 is any indication…Fine, I couldn’t tell anything from the road, but I think all counties should promote or pursue composting.
It’s high time we keep food out of landfills and get those nutrients back into the soil via composting.
The article featured some interesting numbers, including: a fifth (20 percent) of the county’s garbage consisted of food. It’s hard to say whether this is before or after factoring in recycling, but either way, it’s higher than the U.S. averages of 12 (before recycling) and 18 percent (after recycling is factored in).
Also, we learned that the county produces 52,000 tons of food waste per year. Given that Marion County has a population of 306,665, that means 339 pounds per person per year. In other words: Each person wastes about a pound of food per day.
Comments
5 responses to “County Composting in Oregon?”
That is great news!
We need something similar here in Portland. (Multnomah County.)
However . . . The answer is not simply to responsibly compost our uneaten food. The answer is to actually eat our food!
-Katy Wolk-Stanley
The Non-Consumer Advocate, who ate her son’s cold cinnamon toast for breakfast rather than see it go to waste.
“use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
http://thenonconsumeradvocate.wordpress.com
Do these figures include numbers from restaurants and the like? Or are they just household numbers?
I’m pretty sure it includes restaurants, supermarkets and homes. So it’s not that each person wastes a pound of food themselves every day, but that our food system produces that much waste per person.
There are some food products that should be composted and not end up in landfills, but they do not fall under the usual definition of wasted food. For example, almost all of my ‘not-eaten’ food consists of banana peels, grapefruit peels, the outer layer of an onion, etc. I’d like to think that I’m still well below a pound per day, but all of this ‘waste’ definitely does add up. Unfortunately, most of the food that is wasted is probably edible, but I still like to think that composting will have a significant impact. Wish they’d do this everywhere…
Thanks for answering Jonathan…that makes sense.
Andrea, after some hard work on life changes, I’m like you in that most of my food waste is inedible stuff(that gets composted). There are six of us in my family(husband, me, and four kids), and we are never at six pounds of inedible food waste in a day. So, I think you’re still way below the one pound a day average.