A New Look at Composting?

I am one of those weird people who walks by wood set out for trash and immediately starts thinking about what I could make out of it. I just can’t bear the thought of good wood being buried in the landfill. This was the case last week when neighbors were getting their house resided with hardiplank that came on large beefy pallets. I just had to have one as I needed to relocate my compost pile and wanted to make a real bin this time. The timing was perfect. With 10’ sections of 1X4’s and 5’ sections of 4X4 supports, I was able to cut everything in half and make a 5’X2.5’ double bay compost bin, truly coveted in the composting world.

Here is the end result that I am really pleased about, the day of and the day after when I put it into service.

I have given talks in the past about how to compost (which I will offer in a future blog) but this exercise got me thinking (there I go with thinking again) about even a bigger picture benefit to composting so I did some research and wanted to share an October 31, 2014 article on SFGATE entitled “A sprinkle of compost helps rangeland lock up carbon”. Here is a reader’s digest version of the article.

• Plants pull carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis and transfer a portion of the carbon to the soil through their roots. Soil microorganisms then turn the carbon into a stable form commonly known as humus. This not only sequesters the carbon but improves the soil’s fertility, boosting plant growth and capturing more carbon while also improving the soil’s ability to absorb and retain water.

• Soil is a major source of carbon, and we’ve been bleeding it into the atmosphere for many, many years through plowing, overgrazing and poor agricultural practices so anything we can do to get some of that carbon back into the soil is going to be beneficial.

• Grazing is the single largest land use on the planet, and most grazing lands are degraded, meaning they have lost carbon.

• Research shows that if compost from green waste-everything from household food scraps to dairy manure-were applied over just 5 percent of California’s grazing lands, the soil could capture a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from California’s farm and forestry industries.

• Researchers found the effect is cumulative, meaning the soil keeps absorbing carbon dioxide even after just one application of compost.

• The good news is that by returning carbon to the soil in a stable form such as compost, soils can be restored, said Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University.

• Lal considers it essential to restore carbon to the world’s soils, regardless of whether it combats climate change. “The other reasons are much more pressing,” he said. “Food security, water quality, biodiversity, other environmental issues are related to soil. And in addition to all that, it does also offset some of the carbon emitted by fossil fuel combustion.”

• The city of San Francisco, which composts 700 tons of residential and commercial organic waste every day, is the largest such operation in the world and efforts are under way to incorporate soil carbon offsets in California’s cap-and-trade system, so ranchers could earn credits for spreading compost.

While I will certainly not be producing enough compost to ever cover rangeland, it’s nice to know something I am passionate about has potential to reduce carbon emissions on a huge scale. I hope you found this as interesting as I did and I will get off my soap box now. Come to think of it, I need to start watching the trash piles for wood to make my soap box!