compost: recycling made easy

With the start of spring, I start to think about gardens and garbage, or rather compost. We live in an apartment, but we do have a small patch of garden out our terrace door. It is about 10 square yards (10m2), but since we’ve lived here, I have planted herbs, tomatoes, lettuce and kale and chilies (the latter two are hard to find in Switzerland). For a good garden you need compost. I used to belong to a neighborhood compost group, but it disbanded due to dwindling volunteers.  Fortunately there is space even in our little garden for a small compost bin, so I struck out on my own. I have a hard time throwing away fruit and vegetable scraps when I know they can be recycled back into a resource that is valuable for growing more vegetables. Garden compost, come to think of it, is a good primer for regenerative, or ‘cradle to cradle’ thinking

In 2002, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published their book “Cradle to Cradle” to document their decade-long quest to change the way waste is thought about in industrial design processes. Indeed, their ideal is to eliminate the concept of waste entirely; all things we make use of should be part of a continuous cycle, from (recycled) raw materials to manufacturing, through utilization to dismantling and repurposing.

The process of using and dismantling to use again can easily be seen in my garden compost. All garden clippings, all stems, peels and bad bits from the vegetables we eat are tossed into the bin (together with a few stray earthworms). The bin never fills up as it shrinks and is transformed from vegetables and vegetation by the worms and the decaying process. Every year or so I turn it and harvest beautiful full-strength compost, which replenishes all the nutrients taken from the soil by the vegetables we ate.

Composting is an example of what McDonough and Braungart  call “up-cycling”, which is converting something of lesser value - garden waste - into something more valuable - food. Much urban recycling, reusing items such as mantelpieces and other ornaments removed during demolition, is also an example of up-cycling. Down-cycling is when recycled material is turned into something of lesser value, such as outdoor furniture made from plastic bottles. This process is certainly valid, but there could well be better options, like not using plastic bottles to begin with. Once plastic is manufactured, it takes ages to biodegrade - hundreds of years! Each time plastic is recycled, micro-particles are released into the environment that often end up in our food chain.

Ideally, we should have an understanding of where our waste is going before we create it. By buying things that have been designed as part of a cycle, we support up-cycling. Batteries and defective parts should be easily replaceable, and when an object is obsolete, it should be dismantled and strategically reused. Especially larger objects - appliances and even buildings - can be broken down into reusable resources instead of being sent to a landfill or incinerator. Concrete can be ground down and used as aggregate in new construction. As consumers, we can look for packaging designed to be recycled or chose products with less packaging.

And so the cycle starts again in my garden. Last year’s garbage is this year’s fertilizer. I’ve just planted my first pepper and kale seeds, and this year I am trying acorn squash. I can’t wait to harvest and enjoy them, and to throw the unused nutrients back into the compost!