Articles
GreenTown Pre-Conference Workshop
To Focus on Municipal Food Residuals Collection and Composting
In the natural world, waste does not exist. Everything is food for something else. And while thought leaders like William McDonough (last year’s Green Town Conference keynote speaker and co-author of Cradle to Cradle) attempt to re-direct our thinking, at some point in our Industrial Revolution this point was lost and we have designed a “cradle to grave” system that discards everything we make to a place we call “away”, or more specifically to our local landfills. The issue is not only that we are running out of places to put our stuff (the Chicago area’s landfill capacity is so tight that we are shipping waste out of state); or that we are contaminating our water sources, land and communities around our landfills; but also that we are contributing to global warming through the mixing of organic matter with other materials which produces methane, a greenhouse gas with 20 times the global warming impact as CO2.
Through state legislation, California has required that 50% of its current waste be diverted from landfills (moving toward 75%), and local authorities are discovering that diverting food residuals and other organic matter and converting it to compost is an economically viable and environmentally sound strategy toward meeting waste diversion requirements. San Francisco; Oakland; Toronto; Alameda County, CA; King County, WA; and recently Minneapolis, among other communities across the U.S.; are beginning to collect residential food scraps and convert them into compost.
On Wednesday, October 1, 2008 from 1-4 pm in Aurora, IL, Green Town: The Future of Community will host a pre-conference workshop entitled, Food Scraps to Composting: Municipal and Commercial Initiatives to Combat Global Warming. John Connolly of Connolly Associates will discuss a state-wide food residuals project he is leading in Ohio with the Department of Natural Resources and commercial facilities; and Geoff Rathbone, Director of the City of Toronto’s Solid Waste Management Services, will discuss Toronto’s three-bin collection system that incorporates food scrap diversion and composting.
Pre-conference workshop fees are $75, and can be purchased on-line at www.greentownconference.com. For details, contact Seven Generations Ahead at act@sevengenerationsahead.org or 708 660-9909.
