Community Composting One Year On

Our little recycling project has completed its first year of life. It has been the subject of a two-page article in a local newspaper, the topic of a small project for some Master degree students in a local university and the object of two talks to environmental education classes in a local high school. Conversely, it has survived workers stealing the bamboo infraestructure, smear campaigns from neighbors, being associated with an infestation of rats and a long, wet rainy season. After all of this, it seems to be emerging stronger than ever, ready to prosper and grow.

The project languished for about two months when many neighbors associated it with the infestation of rats and as the rains kept the whole place wet and somewhat muddy. During that time, only two families contributed regularly, down from seven during the rest of the year. Then, it occurred to me that instead of fighting their erroneous notion about the rats, it would be better to solve it beyond any doubt and allay their fears.

On the Internet you can find lots of compost projects, but they are all either for one family (in an enclosed bin) or huge, industrial deals inside large areas. Very few are outside, and those are mostly for leaves, cut grass and small branches, with very little kitchen waste. Putting the whole operation within an enclosed area would be too much work and expense. So, I figured that rats only like the fresh stuff and if we could decompose the fresh waste in a closed environment, then they would have no reason to come around. Once it gets hot enough and the waste decomposes beyond recognition, then it can be poured out into the open air bins to be finished.

So, we bought several new garbage bins and drilled holes all around them. The procedure is to fill up one bin with waste and leaves and once it is full (which takes 1 to 3 days), then put the top on it tightly and start filling up the next bin. Once they are all full, then the first one is emptied and it is ready to be filled again. Because there are 7 families participating and we only have 4 bins, each bin stays full for a little over a week until it has to be dumped into the outside compost area. Of course, one week is not quite enough for the kitchen waste to become unrecognizable, so we need more bins. However, during that week, the waste inside each enclosed bin really heats up and the volume is reduced by approximately 30%, so a lot of action takes place in there.

The bins in the back are full and so are waiting their turn to be emptied and filled again.
The grey bin in the foreground is getting filled up.

Here are the 4 spaces for compost.
The second one, where the rake is,  is currently being filled up.

This is how the garden area looks now.

This has convinced some of the sceptical neighbors and they are participating once again! With this resolved, I see no reason the project can’t start growing considerably. For this second year, I would like to double the number of families participating (from 7 to 14) and double the amount of kitchen waste and leaves we recycle this year (from 320 to 640 bins). Further, I would like to consider this as a model method for enclosed housing developments around the city and the country. If this idea comes to fruition, I would like to make an introductory video in Spanish, put it up on youtube, and use it to see if other housing developments would be interested in starting small projects. Of course, this is just an idea, we will have to see how things unfold this coming year.

Soon, I will post news about our third compost harvest, about the little vegetable garden that has been started up with our soil and some amazing statistics that I have been compiling about how much kitchen waste is produced in a typical house around here each week and month.

Our Community Garden

Many months ago I mentioned to some of our retired neighbors that they should take advantage of an empty space in the park at the end of our street to start a community garden. They finally hooked a hose up to the faucet there and started planting decorative and fruit-bearing trees pretty randomly around the garden space. When they mentioned that they would soon need planting soil if they wanted to grow vegetables, we devised a composting scheme.

So, we set up a compost area and then put these two bins near it. Kitchen waste gets dumped in the blue bin and then covered by some scoops of dried leaves from the red bin. Once a day I empty the blue bin into the compost area shown below. This photo represents approximately 5 weeks worth of composting.

The sticks you see on top of the compost are dead vines from my maracuya (passion fruit) plant that I put as a first layer to aerate the mix. On top goes the kitchen waste which is then covered with a layer of dry leaves.

The neighbors have done a nice job recruiting other neighbors to recycle their kitchen waste so now there are 7 families participating. Our goal is for ten families to participate so that we can learn how much waste a typical family collects per day, how often they dump their waste and how much that adds up to in all (measured in bins per day). We also have to learn how many dried leaves we can get the housing development gardeners (they prune people’s yards and trees and collect fallen leaves) to take to our garden as they can’t imagine why we would want such "garbage" and so they don’t collaborate very easily. After a few months we hope to have a better idea how it will work so we can get more families involved.

The garden looks like this right now, which is a huge improvement over the gravel-covered barren land that characterizes the rest of the park as you can see in the foreground.

Siddhartha - Gautama - Buddha

The other day I heard an interview with Deepak Chopra about his recent book Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. In the end he piqued my curiosity enough for me to read the book, but maybe not for the right reason. Describing Buddhism, he said that it is a secular spirituality, not a religion in the Judeo-Christian sense. While it is true that Buddhism stands apart from the Westernized faith traditions in several fundamental ways, it horrified me to qualify it as secular spirituality. Now that I have read Mr. Chopra's book, and now that I have reread Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and looked into the matter at least enough to understand what that statement could mean, I'd like to share my conclusions in hopes that this exercise will help those thoughts to continue evolving.

Both books repeatedly mention the "gods" in a way that we today speak of luck as that which helps you do something surprisingly effective. Both books make it clear that at the time it was common belief that people could become gods through an ascetic and holy life. In the same way, both speak of demons as the opposite force, and Mr. Chopra's book personifies a demon as one of the main characters who eventually provokes the final battle that leads Gautama to enlightenment. If this understanding of gods and demons is historically accurate, then Buddha would logically avoid confusing people further by centering his teachings on an Absolute, or God as we understand the concept. His focus on right view, aim, speech, action, living, effort, mindfulness and contemplation were surely the proper medicine that provoked the spiritual and material transformation necessary at that moment in time.

"The following is the Buddha's description of [the Absolute] in the famous Udana passage in the Khuddaka Nikaya: 'There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. Were there not, O monks, this Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, there would be no escape from the world of the born, originated, created, formed. Since, O monks, there is an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, therefore is there an escape from the born, originated, created, formed. What is dependent, that also moves; what is independent does not move' (Udana 8:3). Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, argues from this passage that without the acceptance of an Ultimate Reality (Paramartha) there can be no deliverance (nirvana) (Madhyamika Karikas, cited in Murti 235)."

If you think about it, no Founder of any religion has ever encouraged his followers to dwell on the concept of God beyond basic concepts of uniqueness and certain qualities that God embodies. "Baha'u'llah similarly speaks of an entity, an Unknowable Essence, of which nothing can be predicated: 'To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress . . . He standeth exalted beyond and above all separation and union, all proximity and remoteness. No sign can indicate His presence or His absence' (KI 98). It is simply not spiritually profitable to spend too much time trying to gain further comprehension of God's essence.

If we qualified Islam, Christianity or the Baha'i Faith as secular spirituality, we would surely rob each of them of their essence. So, why should Buddhism be any different? It is saddening that Buddhism seems to have gained much popularity over the past few decades because of this fundamental misunderstanding of Buddha's message.

Another key concept in both books, although more implicit than explicit, is that of reincarnation. Contemplating this has led me to conclude that reincarnation exists in the story of the Buddha, which especially as presented by Mr. Chopra, is the story of each and every human being. He grows up as Siddhartha and upon maturing beyond that role, transforms into Gautama in search of true meaning. This search leads him to again transform, this time into the Buddha when he discovers the reality behind suffering, time and all of creation. This enlightened state provides an unimaginably powerful vehicle for him to generate the same transformational process in others.

In a very real sense, Siddhartha died in order for Gautama to be born and Buddha was born from Gautama's ashes. Thus the same fundamental person was reincarnated twice in order to escape the wheel of suffering. All true change of the order presented in the movement from Siddhartha to Buddha implies death as well as birth. Embracing both as a single forward flowing journey opens us to constant evolution, a maturation process that can eventually induce enlightenment.

Moving beyond the illusion of duality is the single most important concept explored in both books, and they both do it brilliantly. In Mr. Chopra's rendition, Buddha becomes the elements around him, perceives the innermost sensations of others and is able to touch and heal them. In Mr. Hesse's rendition, this vision is personified in the river by which Siddhartha makes his final home. "He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it; he was only aware of a dim suspicion, a faint memory, divine voices."

Visudeva, Siddhartha's greatest teacher explains that "the river knows everything; one can learn everything from it." On this occasion, Siddhartha learned "that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek depths." He also grows to learn that the present only exists for the river, "not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future." Thus, "Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadows, not through reality." Which also clearly implies that all sorrow, self-torment, fear, difficulties and evil happen in time and are thus conquered as soon as time is dispelled.

The river has many voices, in fact the voice of all living creatures are in its voice, as all living creatures come to the river for both physical and spiritual nourishment. This nourishment becomes those creatures, and their voice and their life and death.

"Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew."

"Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. ... He had often heard all of this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices - the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great sound of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection."

This poetic description of the river, and the transformation into enlightenment resonates deep within me. I have felt this flow not in a river as the rivers near here don't flow too well, but in compost, of all places! The life-decay-life process that eventually becomes the source of nourishment as healthy, teeming, fertile soil attracts me like a magnet. All of our mineral, plant, animal and human ancestors are there, present, becoming nourishment. I have always felt that it is a terrible injustice to throw away kitchen waste because it interrupts this life-giving process. I tend to this process in my house, and I sit and listen to it, and watch it and work with it just to learn its lessons in my effort to become spiritual nourishment for others. Just as the river, humus carries a wisdom far beyond my current grasp.

So, beyond highly recommending both of the books under review, I hope that reading them leads the reader to such contemplation of our potential as spiritual beings as I have been provoked to undertake.

Call to Action: Compost for Life

It is beyond doubt that future historians will look back on our generation and the multiple water shortage and contamination problems we currently suffer from, and wonder how Western “civilization” could have advocated urinating and defecating into what little purified drinking water we have left. I apologize to the light-hearted among my readers for touching on such an apparently foul subject, but the growing global water and health crises stand in such stark contrast with current waste-management procedures, that it requires our urgent attention.

If you don’t already think that the world is nearly completely upside down and backwards, then imagine a civilization that considers those who don’t deposit their feces into a bowl of drinking water on a regular basis as miscreants, uncivilized, dirty or poverty stricken. Of course this practice is convenient for taking such refuse to wastewater treatment plants where it is processed and eventually returned to the environment, albeit in some cases considerably more contaminated with “excessive levels of nitrates, chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs, industrial chemicals, detergents, and other pollutants” than before.

This would all be fine except for three factors: water shortages, diseases borne from water contamination and fertilizer needs for boosting agricultural production. Although these are all complex and important topics deserving much more in-depth analysis, I will only briefly outline each one.

Water shortage

• Currently, United Nations estimates that 1.2 billion in a world of just over 6 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. More specifically, in developing countries, 21% of all people do not have access to safe drinking water, and in rural areas the figure jumps to 30%.
• 67% of the world’s households must fetch water from outside their homes.
• Between 1990 and 1995, global water consumption rose sixfold, which is more than double the rate of population growth.
• Increasing industrialization is creating a lion’s share of the problem: it takes 300 litres of water to produce 1 kilogram of paper, and 215,000 litres to produce 1 metric ton of steel. Changes in our diet are also driving water consumption; it takes 15,000 tons of water to produce a ton of beef, while it only requires 1,000 tons of water for a ton of grain.
• China has approximately 21 per cent of the global population, but access to only 7 per cent of the planet’s freshwater.

Water borne diseases

• 42% of the world’s population does not have access to a latrine or other proper means of sanitation.
• “In the developing countries, 80 per cent of illnesses are water-related. Due to the shortage of safe drinking water in much of the world, there are 3.3 million deaths every year from diarrheal diseases caused by E. coli, salmonella and cholera bacterial infections, and from parasites like giardia and cryptosporidium, as well as viral pathogens like rotavirus. In fact, between 1990 and 2000, more children died of diarrhea than all the people killed in armed conflicts since the Second World War.”
• Those of us who are considered to have access to safe drinking water should consider that approximately 10 million people in the US have access to water that is not in compliance with federal standards for removal of microorganisms, and approximately 7 million Americans get sick annually from contaminated drinking water.

Waste Management and topsoil

• Sending human excrements to waste management plants infers that they are in fact waste. Waste is any material with no inherent value that is discarded and has no further use, a completely inaccurate description of human refuse which only becomes waste upon being discarded.
• Byproducts of our digestive system, or any other digestive system for that matter, are in fact a valuable organic resource material rich in soil nutrients. It comes from the soil in the form of vegetables, fruit, nuts, or grains (and even meat), is naturally processed in the body, and then can be returned to the soil in the form of humus after careful composting to provide the highest quality soil additive.
• Returning all organic residues resulting from crop production to the soil, including animal and human residues, should be axiomatic to organic agriculture, although it is not. The profound ignorance that surrounds this topic is causing major agricultural and health problems throughout the world.
• For example, not having enough natural fertilizers has given rise to a gigantic synthetic fertilizer industry. These petro-chemical products deplete non-renewable fossil fuels, cause crop dependence, promote dangerous single crop practices, and once in the human body “interfere with the body’s normal functioning, … damage human chromosomes and cause cancer and numerous other diseases. … For example, human mother’s milk has consistently shown contamination from synthetic organic chemicals since 1951, and the incidence of human breast cancer has risen dramatically since then.”

2005 – 2015 has been denominated the International Decade for Action: Water for Life. At its launch, the UN issued a useful document entitled Water for Life: Making it Happen. In it, they dramatically emphasize the importance of improved water and sanitation services:

“Improved water and sanitation will speed the achievement of all eight MDGs, helping to:

· eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;

· achieve universal primary education;

· promote gender equality and empower women;

· reduce child mortality; improve maternal health;

· combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;

· ensure environmental sustainability; and

· develop a global partnership for development.”

Given this emerging reality, it is little wonder that water has been described as “the oil of the twenty-first century”, a scarce commodity that will be a source of conflict between peoples and nations. This is fine but oil shortages can be resolved by developing alternative energy sources, while the water supply cannot be increased other than by desalinization, a costly and complex process.

The United Nations proposes a complex set of interrelated actions to combat this crisis. A major limitation in advocating flush toilet systems for everybody, besides those mentioned above, is their prohibitive cost for nearly every country around the globe. Because of this, and because this is considered the only civilized solution, governments simply leave the problem unresolved, leaving 90 per cent of sewage and 70 per cent of industrial wastes in developing countries to be discharged into water courses without treatment.

However, in his insightful book “The Humanure Handbook”, Joseph Jenkins clearly demonstrates that composting humanure as he denominates it, is the most accessible, viable and expeditious option for resolving the sanitation quandary and its host of accompanying problems. His many years of personal experience and research indicate that although raw humanure “carries with it a significant potential for danger in the form of disease pathogens,” … they are completely destroyed by composting when the retention time is adequate or when the composting process generates enough internal, biological heat. Both of these conditions are easily met when the compost heap is properly managed.

Spreading the resulting humus over his garden for 25 years has also proven that the product is an effective source of fertilizer for agriculture destined to human consumption. In fact, it may be useful to provide just a short list of the benefits of the humus that results from compost: enriches soil, prevents pollution, fights existing pollution, restores land, destroys pathogens and saves money. I am an avid composter (although admittedly not of my humanure) and would like to add here that perhaps the most beneficial aspect of compost is the sense of self worth and satisfaction one feels when helping organic elements complete their natural cycle and become dirt again.

Of course setting up composting systems that can meet sanitation needs for the 1.2 billion excluded human beings (and eventually the rest of the entire human population), especially in urban settings, would be a daunting task to say the least. However, the progress made towards providing safe water supplies and sanitation services for the world’s poor over the past decade or two (according to the UN, 83 per cent of the world's population used improved drinking water sources in 2002, up from an estimated 79 per cent in 1990) pales shamelessly with the overwhelming and ever increasing need.

All true change comes hard. Changes of this magnitude, requiring rethinking such deeply entrenched ideas about civilization, come even harder than normal. However, we can resist our intuition and permit nearly half of the world’s population to live in conditions that anybody reading this would consider horrifying, or we can explore thorny but promising paths towards true sustainability and dignity. If doing this single action well helps us make huge strides towards attaining all eight Millennium Development Goals, and thus bringing prosperity to the world’s people, I suggest we explore that path without further adieu.

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Jenkins, Joseph. The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing, PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127.

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/factsheet.html

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/monitoring/jmp2005/en/index.html