SOLAR GREENHOUSE EATS WASTE, SAYS "THANK YOU." reusables through Goodwill or St. Vincent's or the grapevine, we export somewhere between 100 and 200 pounds of mixed waste per year to the county's Solid Waste Division. We import much more than that.... With a little fine-tuning to eliminate the residuals, if all households in the county adopted the system we use at home, the biggest part of the "solid waste problem" would disappear-at least so far as households are c o n c e r n e d . . . . Small systems can't deal with large volumes-by themselves but multiply them, and their impact grows and grows. Still, one reason often given for not investing in small, decentralized systems is that cumulatively, they would be too expensive on a mass scale. Looking at the costs of my system doesn't support this generalization. It costs next to nothing in money because the whole thing is made from salvage-from the Nancy's Honey Yogurt containers we use as the first collection point for kitchen organics to the cedar siding on the greenhouse walls, to the rigid insulating panels and Jim Weaver for Congress lawn sign stakes used to strengthen and tie everything together-it's all salvage. I bought some .hinges and a sheet of plastic for a cover. Capitalization costs were less than $50 by conventional reckoning. Operating and maintenance costs are minimal. -DK July 1979 RAIN Page 13 for using earthworms to convert waste. . • Fermenting waste to produce ethanol may be us_able, ?ut we have no information on any large-scale system using this process, except for a general description from Bolivia. •Period. So much for a consideration of alternatives. If I had to paraphrase this into a single statement,_ it•would go something like this: "Biological processes were reJected because they are too big or too small, no single one is pe~fect, ~nd.we reall~ don't know much about them anyway. Adding insult to injury, a subsequent document produced by ye~ another engineering consulting firm reveals that the planning has p~ogressed to the point of projecting the elimina~ion of all recyc~ing at the Solid Waste Management Center, including matenals storage and the retail operation, and.even public access to the siteall as a part of the expansion to regional burn plant status. Unfortunately, the "screening of alternatives" examples given above are all too typical of what is happe?ing in waste planning circles as we near the end of the landfill era. In order to address this problem-and to make the people of Berkeley more aware that a labor-intensive materials recovery system would lead to remarkably different end results compared to any technology which indiscriminantly mixes ~n_d burns garbage-I was retained by local recyclers to crmque th_e Plan as developed by their city's technical consultant. Here 1s part of my criticism concern'ing the decision not to put money or design time into anything but a burn plant: 5 . • Where did the 200 tons per day figure for composting come from? Even assuming 200 tons per day for the composting feedstock (a grossly inflated figure), there would still be less than 40 tons per day of finished humus to market or otherwise find uses for. • What is a "demonstrated market," and why was this criterion not applied in the case of burning garbage as fuel, which not only lacks a "demonstrated market," but a "demonstrated technology" as well? (See Rain, Nov. '78). • What studies concluded that "economies of (alcohol) systems require large systems of at least 1_000 tons p~r day c_apacity?" Did anyone look into the expenence of China, which has built 4. 3 million small methane systems since the mid1970s? Has anyone heard of the methane system being operated at the Washington State Prison designed by the Ecotope group? Did anyone contac_t Al Rutan of Mi?nesota, who has designed and helped to bmld several operating systems? Trained Incapacity Is No Excuse Evidently the engineers representing the city, the consultant group and the state were just ignorant ~f md.~~ of the systems they eliminated. While there are exceptions, 1t s generally true that engineers are ra~ely trained i? biology,?r ~cology, ~,nd are not made familiar with the expenences of thtrd world countries which have countless low-cost, operational, biologically based nutrient recycling systems. This built-in bias of the eng_ineers often placed in charge of the planning ph~se of waste disposal needs to be exposed in light of the following: . . • If as seems undeniable, the problem of contamination of waste ~ith toxic substances has been underestimated by engineers then the commitment to rely on burning as the primary mean~ of oxidizing and reducing the volui:ne of or~anic m~tter will increase the quantity and quality of nsks, while masking the effects. The pollutants will tend to travel faster thr~ugh the airshed, and will be dispersed over a large_r area. If atr pollution of the type generated by the plant 1s deemed to be unacceptable, the community wil_l have inve_sted several years and a huge amount of paper credit for ~othing-~nd more damage will have occurred in the meantime, making recovery more difficult. CONT.
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