Composting Provides Way to Do a Heap for the Environment
“Compost happens.”
Unlike the original witticism, this knock-off has yet to be immortalized on bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets. It is, however, the watchword for what environmentalists and sanitation officials are touting as the next wave of residential recycling--one that offers a simple way to reduce trash and cycle nutrients back into the soil.
The rotting stew known as a compost heap will absorb up to 30% of the refuse the typical householder hauls to the curb. This includes yard wastes--dead leaves, grass clippings, wood chips and hedge trimmings--and kitchen scraps like coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable peelings, and paper towels.
Pile them up and compost happens. Microorganisms greedily devour the rank confection, throwing off so much body heat that a big pile can be used to warm a hot tub. The product of a few months of earnest chewing and digesting is “black gold”--a rich soil food that is plant ambrosia. The bugs do all the work; their host provides nothing but an occasional stir and the stage for this magic show.
To compost cognoscenti , back yard composting is a tonic for much of what ails the environment. It helps relieve the endless search for wild canyons to stuff with trash. It keeps fuel-guzzling, exhaust-belching trash trucks off the road. It produces an organic soil food, thus trimming watering requirements and reliance on chemical fertilizers.
Composting even offers a psychological boost for those who despair of making a difference. In the same way that World War II-era victory gardens channeled patriotic energies, aficionados say composting offers a useful, feel-good way to do one’s bit for Mother Earth.
“When you start composting, you become part of the solution to our environmental crisis,” said John Roulack, who heads a company called Harmonious Technologies and is a compost devotee.
Still, this magic bullet can be a hard sell. Despite its elegant simplicity, it is largely unfamiliar outside the gardening fraternity. Consider the reply of a hardware store clerk who was asked for a composting bin: “What kind of post are you looking for?”
Composting must also overcome the “ick factor”--which seems particularly entrenched among Angelenos, with their passion for tidy, even sterile yards, and obsession with property values.
Ginseng farmers and mushroom growers might go for it in a big way. It’s harder to picture suburban homeowners tending their compost piles. Putting the question in real estate terms--the terms that count--can a steaming pile of decaying organic matter have curb appeal?
In fact, compost need not stink or be an eyesore, but this point requires some missionary work. That is where Roulack comes in.
A slender, bearded man of 33 who resembles a large forest elf, Roulack has hired himself out to sanitation departments in Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale, San Fernando, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks and other nearby cities. They are struggling to comply with a state law requiring cutbacks in landfill dumping, and hope back yard composting will contribute to the effort. So they’ve turned to Roulack and other consultants to stage a series of how-to weekend seminars.
So it was that on a recent Saturday morning, Roulack stood before a gathering of 70 composters and compost wanna-bes at the Lake View Terrace Recreation Center. Even more than usual, he was preaching to the choir.
Although out of fashion everywhere, the throwaway ethic is in particularly bad odor in Lake View Terrace.
The rural foothill community in the northeastern San Fernando Valley has the unwanted distinction of being home to the Lopez Canyon Landfill, the only trash dump owned by the city of Los Angeles. It was exhibit A, plainly visible behind the recreation center, towering above the area like a neighborhood bully.
It’s “our monster,” said Phyllis Hines, land-use chairman for the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn. “It just hangs over our head.”
Roulack discussed good composting etiquette. Do not, he said, use meat scraps--cats and dogs will go rooting through the pile. Although manures are good--even de rigeur for the discriminating compost chef--the poop of meat-eating critters is unsuitable because of possible disease pathogens. It’s usually wise to use a compost bin--either store-bought for $20 to $100, or improvised at home. A plastic trash can with the bottom removed and air holes in the side will do.
Roulack also explored the compost mind, distinguishing between the “compost connoisseur”--usually, an avid gardener, who will range far and wide for choice ingredients--and the “compost recycler,” who mainly wants to reduce his trash.
For those seeking a lesser commitment, Roulack recommended “grasscycling”--or leaving grass clippings to nourish the lawn and reduce watering needs (Good news for those who never raked the grass: You were not lazy, but on the cutting edge of environmental awareness).
But Roulack was merely warming up the crowd. After a while, he turned things over to colleague Bill Roley, an applied ecologist and compost raconteur, who dispensed odd-ball wisdom about life in a compost heap.
“You’re building a whole community of microorganisms here to do your work for you,” Roley explained. “You know the movie, ‘Field of Dreams?’ They said, ‘Build it, and they will come.’ . . . The idea is to hire this whole new public works work force that works 24 hours a day, and all they ask you for is your garbage.”
Then Roley dismissed the crowd with a reminder of the loneliness of all true pioneers.
“When is the last time somebody asked you at a cocktail party, ‘How hot is your pile?’ ”
