Did you know that although you care about climate change, you might be paying to make it worse? To illustrate this, we’ll consider the example of a banana peel.
A banana peel weighs a third of the total weight of a banana (measure it if you don’t believe me) so if you buy a bunch of bananas for R37, you are paying R11 for peels. If you buy a bunch of bananas every week, in one year you would have spent R130 on peels. If you add up the cost of the peels of all the other items in your food basket, it could become R1000. But here’s the troubling bit: When you throw the peel in the garbage, when it reaches the landfill it gets covered with tons of junk and therefore degrades under ‘anaerobic’ conditions which produces methane - a strong greenhouse gas. This means that by buying peels and then throwing them away, you are effectively paying to increase climate change.
The peels are not the problem, and nor is waste, because we will always need peels and we will always not be able to eat them. The problem is that the peels reach the landfill and degrade under anaerobic conditions. If they were to degrade under aerobic conditions (the way they would on the soil), they would be carbon neutral and return to the natural nutrient cycle.
The process of ‘composting’ is an aerobic process because air is continually mixed in with the organic waste, making it release CO2 instead of Methane. We should rather pay to compost our organic waste rather than pay to take it to the landfill.
To learn more about what you can do about it visit https://www.compostkitchen.com
Comentários