101–110 of 127 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not have problems with rats and other vermin?
No. What's 'other vermin'? We have plenty of native animals. I see a few of them feeding in the area I distribute organic matter, including (non-snake) reptiles, turkeys, possums, butterflies, native bees, spiders, etc. Lots of fungi too.
Badgers, foxes, racoons etc. Depends where you live.
Probably should have used a better word than 'vermin'. It sounds overly judgemental.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please elaborate. From what i know based on prior research, most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC ? Are you implying that all buildings have now must build a 3rd chute specifically for compost ? And who's picking up that compost ? NYC Trash collection ? I've seen compost vending machines in my visits to NYC and a few other places, but i've yet anyone using th…
> most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC Also a scam.
Avid backyard gardener here. When we moved to our new house in Fort Wayne our yard was a real problem child. It was a new build in an old neighborhood. All the other houses where about 40ish years old. Ours had also had a 40 year old house, but at some point that house was abandoned, eventually condemned and then knocked down. Eventually a builder snapped up the lot and built our current house. But that means the gro…
I'm currently improving my soil via a series of cover crops chosen to fix nitrogen and aerate soil, but it's yet to be seen how well it turns out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See https://www.floridatrend.com/article/14356/trashed-plan-to-u... St. Lucie County wanted to use a plasma torch that would have converted plastic and other carboniferous waste to energy. Like many other plans to do the same, it fell through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
Yeah, reminds me of Changing World Technologies -- so much hope, so little reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.
If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a consequentialist should accept that it would have taken 16 years to realize it was actually a good thing to do with orange peels.
The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC Also a scam.
In what way?
I find it very difficult to imagine that composting is actually legit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a reasonable question. What's the alternative for the orange peels? They were going to rot and release that CO2 whether they did it in a big pile here or somewhere else.
That's why I said if asked in good faith. :-) But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgiv…
that word and I have never gotten along well. insert obligatory joke at my expense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way?
Most municipalities collect recycling and then just landfill it: https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/ . I find it very difficult to imagine that composting is actually legit.
It looks legit to me, based on a few minutes of web searching: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/compost-gi...
Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity. Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even j…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!
Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record? Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of mo…
Also, it's a sample size of one. There could be 20 other non-published stories where something similar was tried and it turned the place into a toxic wasteland. It's a great success story but I can see why people would be nervous with a food company dumping its waste next to a national park.