Survey: What Do You Do With Your Garbage?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.27.08
John noted earlier that many people in the USA have garbage disposal units to handle their organic wastes, but some cities and other parts of the world do not allow all that stuff to be put into the sewer system, where it has to be filtered out and dealt with, often just hauled to the dump with other sewage sludge. Organic waste is not necessarily garbage; it can be useful stuff.
The understated point of the WSJ article -- and the original post - is that food scraps are a liquid resource (not solid waste) and are (in most cases, especially urban) better managed via wastewater treatment plants than through collection via trucks, even if a composting facility is the destination (and food waste composting sites are nearly non-existent in U.S., as are municipal food scrap collection programs). Conversely, @ two-thirds of U.S. sewage sludge is processed into biosolids/fertilizer products and beneficially reused. Given common usage of disposers in U.S., arguably half of residential kitchen scraps are daily diverted through this means - with very little recognition of that fact by either solid waste or wastewater agencies, which tend not to talk to each other, nor collaborate on such challenges.
And that was the point of the Malmo example: looking at food scraps from a different perspective yields surprising ideas about efficacy of the disposer-based approach.
Biosolids are not permitted in organic land care. Sewage sludge contains a lot more than kitchen garbage, and it can be a source of human and animal waste contaminants as well as toxic materials. Better to compost whenever possible. or get a worm bin!
What comes out of a disposer does not need to be "filtered out and delt with". It will settlle out with the other solids at the sewage treatment plant int the settling ponds. These solids are dried and turned into fertilzer with the rest of the sludge. Most sludge is not hauled to the dump as was suggested above. At the risk of sounding uncivil, does the author of the above know how a treatment plant works?
LA- yes this author knows how a treatment plant works. Settled out would have been a better term than filtered. In many cities (like where I live) the sludge is considered too toxic to be turned into fertilizer and is dumped into landfill sites.
I live in Asia where it is common practice for everyone to separate their trash into food waste, plastics, cans, paper, glass and trash. I assume that the organic material is composted. In Korea and Thailand I have seen the same practice. I sure would like for this to become common place in the US.