By Glen Martin
Robert reed crawled up on a massive pile of food scraps and yard trimmings and sat down. He buried his hands and rooted around a bit, grinning at his colleague, Kirk Steed. But instead of responding with a grimace of distaste, Steed merely smiled.
“Nice,” he said.
And it was nice. That’s because the pile wasn’t an oozing, reeking mass of disintegrating banana peels and moldy pasta from the back of the fridge. It was a dark, slightly moist pile of odorless granular material. Yes, it had once been literal garbage — but now it was transformed into utterly different stuff: compost.
And because it had been transformed, it not only was sensorially inoffensive — it had real value as a nutrient-rich soil amendment.
Due largely to geopolitics, interest in compost is spiking in the farming community. Modern nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers are mostly created from natural gas, so one of the best places to make it is the Middle East, where gas is plentiful and cheap. The countries around the Persian Gulf produce about one-third of the world’s artificial fertilizers, and that crucial supply is now bottled up thanks to the war with Iran.
“It’s really squeezing the farmers,” said Reed, the spokesman for Recology, one of the largest trash management companies in California and an innovator in composting green waste. “Compost enriches soil over the long-term and greatly enhances its structure and water-retention properties. Growers are aware of this, of course — and now with the war on and fertilizer in short supply, they want as much as they can get. We’re selling or giving away all we can make.”
And for the record, Recology makes a lot of compost. The company partnered with the city of San Francisco to launch an inaugural curbside pick-up program for green waste in the city in 1996. In the subsequent 30 years, almost 3 million tons of San Francisco’s compostable material has been diverted from landfills to farms, parks and gardens. Today, Recology operates eight composting facilities along the West Coast, collectively processing 1.5 million tons of compostable green waste annually.
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