by Lauritz Chambers When we pay taxes we do so in return for services, right? For the most part the services we choose to have are for those things we cannot provide for ourselves. Educating our children, for instance, is thought best left to professionals. Most of us wouldn’t be able to set our own bones when they break and we collectively hire police officers to enforce the laws judges make. So here’s my rant. I totally agree with paying for services I can’t provide for myself. But what about those services that I easily can?
To cut to the chase...Do I really want to be taxed by my local government so that it can hire expensive consultants, purchase valuable land, pour vast volumes of concrete, spend literally millions of dollars on machinery and special trucks and loaders with all the accompanying maintenance and operating costs just to do something that I can very well do myself—take out the compost? Why is it that this simple chore that has been with us since the dawn of civilization is now thought to be so disagreeable and burdensome? Why are we so willing to throw literally millions of dollars at it to hopefully make it disappear? Have we become so addicted to using the green bag that it’s impossible to live without it? Yes, of course, but there’s more.
The technology for backyard composting of kitchen scraps has been sorely neglected. Our engineers have been far too busy shooting satellites into space or finding ways to drill horizontally for oil to pay attention to finding a simple solution to this common everyday problem. When what we really needed was a simple solid container that was rodent- and bear-proof and could last a few generations what we got instead was an upside down plastic tub that at best kept the flies off the compost until the rats and bears could have their collective feed. Yes these tubs were stackable and cheap and 10,000 could fit into a single shipping container from China. Plus, they did help balance our economies. But, they weren’t really a good solution. In fact, they smeared backyard composting of kitchen waste with a harmful and false reputation in teaching us we couldn’t compost in a safe manner in our own yards. Our local government was embarrassingly complicit in the whole affair in paying for and giving these containers out to its citizens not once but twice.
So now we are studying a much more promising potential solution: a centralized composting facility. It will be “state of the art.” It will turn organic waste into “black gold.” It will employ lots of local people and money will be saved from not having to truck it all to Rebanco in Washington. And there will be very little odour And our collective carbon footprint will be a little bit smaller. And we will never have to take out the compost again.
Lauritz Chambers is a local resident who supports and promotes responsible backyard composting.
