Talking Trash With The Cyclists Behind This Compost Startup

An eco-preneur hits pay dirt with a bike-powered pick-up service in the heart of Austin, Texas.

Last year the world generated more than 1.3 billion tons of food waste. Tons. That’s more than 20 pounds of food per person per month that floods into landfills and emits harmful methane gasses. Some cities have gone to bat on the problem by creating civic compost programs. For example, Seattle recently passed a law mandating that all food scraps be kept out of residential garbage and offers weekly pickup of food waste bins. And in Austin, Texas, there’s a similar pilot program, but expansion to the entire urban area could take up to 10 years.

Until then, small business and private networks are popping up to fill in the gaps, including Austin’s Compost Pedallers, a startup that offers bike-powered, carbon-neutral food waste pickup. Since its founding in 2012 by Dustin Fedako, Compost Pedallers has diverted 500,000 pounds out of the waste stream a la community composting. Their 650 subscribers within a five-mile radius of downtown Austin pay $16 a month for pick-up services. Anyone who signs up simply finishes, say, his or her morning coffee and tosses the grounds into a green 5-gallon bucket that the Pedaller crew cleans and delivers once a week. Once banana peels, egg shells, and other nonanimal waste accumulates, the bucket goes out on the porch for pickup. Then one of the company’s nine cyclists arrives in style on a cargo bike and dumps the residential food scraps into large bins strapped to the front of their ride or in a bike trailer that follows behind. At the end of the daily route, the haul goes to the company’s garden partners—called compHOSTS—like Springdale Farms. These hosts add the scraps to their personal compost piles and—with guidance from Compost Pedallers’ how-to handbook—transform the waste into usable material for their growing operation. So far the operation has kept an estimated 70 tons of methane out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Read more here.

Sweden has run out of rubbish

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Due to Sweden’s innovative waste-to-energy program and highly efficient recycling habits, this Scandinavian nation faces an interesting dilemma. They have run out of trash.

The country’s waste management and recycling programs are second to none as only four percent of the nation’s waste ends up in landfills.

By contrast, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, over half of the waste produced by American households ends up in landfills and things are not better in Britain either. To add to that the fact that many things that are collected in kerbside recycling also end up in the same place as there are no means to recycle them, there is a glut in the market for recyclables or they are “contaminated” and thus cannot be (easily) recycled.

Because Sweden manages waste so effectively and then use what remains to partly power their country, they are now living an environmentalist’s dream; a shortage of garbage. Can you believe that?

However, the environmentalist in Britain demand that our waste be recycled and not burned and even that what, invariably, remains and cannot be recycled must be recycled say Friends of the Earth and other groups. Incineration must not be done, they say, and that despite the fact that Sweden shows the way how to do it.

In order to continue fueling the waste-to-energy factories that provide electricity to a quarter of a million homes and 20% of the entire country’s district heating, Sweden is now resorting to importing trash from the landfills of other European countries.

In fact, those countries are paying Sweden to do so. Yes, you read that correctly, countries are paying to get rid of a source of fuel they themselves produced so that Sweden can continue to have the energy output they need instead of using the waste for the same purposes at home. This is madness, if you ask me.

One does not have to be an economist to know that this is one highly enviable energy model and that, besides the economic benefit, the Swedish system of sustainability clearly has vast environmental benefits.

Apart from the traditional recycling programs that are being used, Sweden's waste-to-energy system ensures minimal environmental impact from the country’s waste and thus the country's extremely efficient circle of consumption, waste management, and energy output provides the current global population and coming generations inspiration and guidance towards a more sustainable future.

The United States and Britain could learn a great deal from Sweden and how they do things but, alas, it is in Britain the so-called environmentalists that actually block any attempts of doing this, e.g. production of energy from waste by burning it.

Rather Britain is playing with burning biomass in some power stations in the form of pellets which, in the main, have to be imported from as far afield as the USA and are, more often than not, made from virgin wood rather than waste wood. Or those power plants are fueled by biomass in the form of specially grown “crops” such as willow, eucalyptus, or miscanthus. Plants which use up land areas better used for the growing of food.

We must change and we must change now and follow models that work in other countries and implement them in order, in this case, to (one) have energy security and (two) reduce the waste going to landfill.

© 2013

TERBERG ONE PASS FOOD WASTE AND RECYCLING SOLUTION

NEWS RELEASE - Sunday, 15 June 2008

2008 brings about a new innovation to be introduced into Terberg’s current family of recycling collection body solutions, the Kerbsider® Combi TD, a unique solution that facilitates the collection of food waste and recyclables from the kerbside in one pass. The concept has been created by close working with their customers to aid the design and manufacture of a concept that suits and fits with their operational requirements but affords the familiarity of working with an evolution of the Terberg Kerbsider® range.

The Kerbsider® Combi TD offers exceptional quality, robust build and safety features that come as standard with all Terberg products together with some new introductions, the control system is canBUS based to offer easy diagnostics and configuration changes and both the Kerbsider® body and Combi TD unit are offered with underbody weighing.

Efficient kerbside recycling is offered via the Kerbsider® body but the vehicle also has a leak-proof Combi TD unit that sits between the cab and Kerbsider® body.

The Combi TD unit has been developed specifically for the collection of food/kitchen waste and is therefore constructed from aluminum which assists with payloads and guards against corrosive organic fluids. The Combi TD is fully sealed and is designed to collect loose or bagged food waste in accordance with the requirements of the ABP EC regulation no. 1774/2002. The Combi TD container is mounted into a robust steel frame and is specially designed such that it rotates to discharge its load through its roof opening, this allows tipping into a number of containers including ‘roll-on, roll-off’ skips.

Loading the vehicle could not be easier, various options are available to suit the required operation which include the Kerbsider®-style lifter fitted as shown which can handle wheeled bins up to 240L as well as loose waste, other lifter options include a TLL360 and TLL1280 bin lift version, both available with removable, lightweight aluminium pannier options to give trough loading functionality when required.

Available in three different volume configurations, 2.5, 3 and 3.6 cubic metres, the product has been designed with flexibility in mind to assist with the rigors of today’s recycling collection demands. A typical expected food waste payload for the 2.5 cubic metre version of the Combi TD unit shown is 1750Kgs.

Terberg Matec UK Ltd. now offer one of the widest ranges of BioWaste collection solutions in the UK, providing solutions for private and public organizations wishing to collect food/kitchen and ABP materials. For more information check out the website at http://www.terberg.co.uk
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