January is the month of renewal. So, I am renewing my commitment this month to doing my part to save our planet.
To help slow climate warming, California legislators passed the Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction law, SB-1383, which becomes effective this month. SB-1383 requires communities to provide their residents with a way to compost all organic food scraps and sets goals to reduce disposal of organic waste in landfills, including edible food. These food scraps include all vegetable table scraps, eggshells and other dairy products, meat, poultry, fish, and soiled food containers, for example pizza boxes, food delivery boxes, and used paper plates.
My Naked Gardener’s first column way back in 2018 advocated for home composting of our vegetable table scraps, eggshells, and coffee ground along with your lawn clippings, leaves, and plant trimmings. but meat, poultry, and fish? These scraps are full of protein, fat and bones which take forever to break down by nature’s microbes and smell to high heaven during the wait. I do not recommend you put animal food scraps, pizza boxes, or the like in home composting bins but to follow your local trash disposal service bin use guidelines.
So, what can you do to comply with this month’s new composting law requiring us to keep animal scraps and soiled paper products out of our landfill trash? Except for Mount Diablo Resource Recovery, our local recycling and trash disposal companies now allow you to throw away these animal, poultry, and fish food scraps, bones, and soiled paper products into your green waste container. Green waste is increasingly being routed to biomass energy plants where the waste is broken down at high temperatures into electrical energy and methanol fuel. Clever!
But how is this new way of handling food scraps going to save the planet? California state ecology authorities say that an estimated 20% of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane is produced by food waste rotting in landfills. That is a lot more than cow belches. By your efforts to redirect your table scraps either into your own home composting bin or into the recycling company’s green waste bin, you are helping to save our beautiful planet from global climate change. And it is easy to get into the habit.
You can learn more about how to personally comply with the new organic waste composting law at: https://www.recyclesmart.org/1383 . Plus, interesting new composting technology for the kitchen can now eliminate carting food waste around. You can search for them Online with the keywords, “food waste composting technology.”
It is a great new day in composting. My New Year’s resolution is to compost, compost, and then compost some more.
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