Begging for Garbage: The New Permaculture
You know you are different when you see garbage and your eyes light up. Except it is not really garbage. It can be compost.
I have become a different person. When the average person is going into their local coffee place and getting their favorite cup of coffee, latte, or whatever , I am waiting in the wings to grab the spent coffee grounds.
When you are having lunch at your favorite Mexican restaurant, my team and I have already been there collecting the tops and bottoms of onions and the root bottoms of celery. Each and every little bit went into a compost pile. We did this in Atlanta, in Greenville, in Columbia, in Augusta, and in Charleston.
That first year, we set a goal of 1 collecting one ton of compostable material over the summer. We hit that goal rather easily in just two weeks. One ton of material diverted from landfill. The vast majority of it was coffee grounds.
There was a satisfaction in watching it build up then heat up then collapse and reduce all to be made ready to be put in the ground.
The thing that frustrates me is having to beg and sometimes dumpster dive for garbage. Let me explain and then ask some people to explain their mindset to me.
If you go into Starbucks, they will be glad to give you their coffee grounds. In fact they encourage it. Many of them even bag it up and put it into a nice little basket at the door for you.
To the other people out there and there are many, why so stingy?
I am calling this the NEW permaculture because the old or original permaculture plans call for a return to the way that things used to be and tend to act in a manner that excludes humanity. I have news for people, we aren't going anywhere. Not only that, but let's be honest, there is a considerable amount of evidence that humans are the biggest single actor on the planet's environment by a wide margin.
An acre here, an acre there, and yes, there is a difference made, but every time a new building goes up, about 10 acres of arable land is taken up. Is the permaculture movement fighting a losing battle in its goals?
The reason I went back to that was because the New Permaculture seeks to find a way to bring into the foal the 7 billion people who are on the planet. That being said how do we also manage the garbage that all of us are producing? On a small scale, I cannot deal with plastic and for the back yard composter, meat is hard to handle also, but the bone that I have to pick with a lot of people in the restaurant industry is how easy it would be to do the other thing. How easy it would be to do the better thing.
A lot of my day is spent, essentially, begging for garbage and there is a lot of it out there that could be put to good and better use. I have worked in restaurants for a lot of years. I have worked in everything from fast food to fine dining, banquets, bars, and more. The sheer volume of things we throw away for convenience sake is appalling. Saving labor and man
hours is one thing and it is a very important thing. To be honest, to pay a person a server's wage to or a back of the house persons salary to watch the garbage is a non starter.
There are other options though. Part of what I do and what we have engaged in is looking at the way restaurants work and looking at ways to incorporate "green" measures into their service procedures. I am left wondering why many restaurants do not take us up on it. For a lot of places it could mean the placement of a trash can and designation for compostables only. If we take on the process of disposing of the material, one has to ask, what is the big deal?
The interesting thing (and I can only relate this to my own experiences) is that we have not been able to see the drawback for the restaurant In fact, it becomes a boon on many levels. Starbucks team members have even said that they love the fact that it is easier for them to take out the trash in the evenings because the bags are lighter.
Sure, every so often, we see a story on the news about some restaurant that is composting their waste and it becomes a big deal when we see a restaurant that has gone to zero waste but for every one that we see, there is a hundred more that are not.
I can confess that I have gone to restaurants and supermarkets and asked them for their waste and far more often we get no's than a yes. The problem becomes a matter of how to deal with that. We have heard before that they do compost only to find out later that they do not. We have asked businesses for buckets, only to find later that they PREFER to throw them away than recycle them. We have seen companies advertise that they use compostable cups and bags only to take those bags, throw them in a plastic bag and put them in the regular garbage headed to the landfill.
In the new permaculture how do you engage with the people who simply prefer let the world go to waste? Long story short we see a lot of dumpster diving in our future, but still...It is so easy. The new permaculture needs to factor in the idea that humans are not going anywhere.
I have become a different person. When the average person is going into their local coffee place and getting their favorite cup of coffee, latte, or whatever , I am waiting in the wings to grab the spent coffee grounds.
When you are having lunch at your favorite Mexican restaurant, my team and I have already been there collecting the tops and bottoms of onions and the root bottoms of celery. Each and every little bit went into a compost pile. We did this in Atlanta, in Greenville, in Columbia, in Augusta, and in Charleston.
That first year, we set a goal of 1 collecting one ton of compostable material over the summer. We hit that goal rather easily in just two weeks. One ton of material diverted from landfill. The vast majority of it was coffee grounds.
There was a satisfaction in watching it build up then heat up then collapse and reduce all to be made ready to be put in the ground.
The thing that frustrates me is having to beg and sometimes dumpster dive for garbage. Let me explain and then ask some people to explain their mindset to me.
If you go into Starbucks, they will be glad to give you their coffee grounds. In fact they encourage it. Many of them even bag it up and put it into a nice little basket at the door for you.
To the other people out there and there are many, why so stingy?
 |
| One Day's worth of banana peels from the local smoothie place. |
An acre here, an acre there, and yes, there is a difference made, but every time a new building goes up, about 10 acres of arable land is taken up. Is the permaculture movement fighting a losing battle in its goals?
The reason I went back to that was because the New Permaculture seeks to find a way to bring into the foal the 7 billion people who are on the planet. That being said how do we also manage the garbage that all of us are producing? On a small scale, I cannot deal with plastic and for the back yard composter, meat is hard to handle also, but the bone that I have to pick with a lot of people in the restaurant industry is how easy it would be to do the other thing. How easy it would be to do the better thing.
 |
| Composted cups...wk1, wk2, wk 3 |
hours is one thing and it is a very important thing. To be honest, to pay a person a server's wage to or a back of the house persons salary to watch the garbage is a non starter.
There are other options though. Part of what I do and what we have engaged in is looking at the way restaurants work and looking at ways to incorporate "green" measures into their service procedures. I am left wondering why many restaurants do not take us up on it. For a lot of places it could mean the placement of a trash can and designation for compostables only. If we take on the process of disposing of the material, one has to ask, what is the big deal?
The interesting thing (and I can only relate this to my own experiences) is that we have not been able to see the drawback for the restaurant In fact, it becomes a boon on many levels. Starbucks team members have even said that they love the fact that it is easier for them to take out the trash in the evenings because the bags are lighter.
Sure, every so often, we see a story on the news about some restaurant that is composting their waste and it becomes a big deal when we see a restaurant that has gone to zero waste but for every one that we see, there is a hundred more that are not.
I can confess that I have gone to restaurants and supermarkets and asked them for their waste and far more often we get no's than a yes. The problem becomes a matter of how to deal with that. We have heard before that they do compost only to find out later that they do not. We have asked businesses for buckets, only to find later that they PREFER to throw them away than recycle them. We have seen companies advertise that they use compostable cups and bags only to take those bags, throw them in a plastic bag and put them in the regular garbage headed to the landfill.
In the new permaculture how do you engage with the people who simply prefer let the world go to waste? Long story short we see a lot of dumpster diving in our future, but still...It is so easy. The new permaculture needs to factor in the idea that humans are not going anywhere.
We cannot persuade local grocery stores to pass along their waste produce. They refuse. "Against corporate policy." is the most frequent line. "Owner said no." is the thing the local independent store told us. No reason. No sense in it. Just NO.
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