Looks like by the end of our 3-month, 62-household study next week, we will have diverted more than 4,000 pounds of food waste from the Rockbridge County landfill. That’s amazing!
We hope this means before long you’ll be enjoying some great compost for your garden, bringing you a bumper crop of tasty, home-grown tomatoes and zucchinis.
Every trip to your composter also brings another benefit too: a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. You’re making a difference for the planet, right at home.
When we keep composting as a way of life, this seemingly small impact grows and grows.
What kind of impact can we make? Quite a bit, actually. This week we did some back-of-the-envelope math to calculate the collective impact of everyone’s food waste diversion.
Hoping our math is rock solid, where’s what we figure out:
Basic Assumptions:
- 1 metric ton of food waste = 2,205 lbs.
- # tons of metric tons diverted by this study’s end (estimate) = 2 tons (4,410 lbs.)
- 1 dry ton of food waste emits an estimated 65 kg. (143.3 lbs.) of landfill methane (Dr. Sally Brown, Univ. Washington, Biocycle)
- 1 dry ton = .5 wet ton (US Council of Composting)
So, thinking about our project:
- 2 wet tons of household food diverted x .5 dry factor = 1 dry ton x .65 kg = 65 kg (143.3 lbs.) of methane emissions prevented during our Backyard Composters Challenge
What does this mean?
- We’ve made an outsized impact. Methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas that reducing its emissions by 65 kilograms over 3 months has the same impact as keeping 1.6 tons (1,650 kg) of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere. (US EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator).
- Preventing 1.6 tons of C02 emissions for the last 3 months is significant. It is the same as conserving 732 gallons of gasoline or not driving 16,000 car miles. It has the same positive benefit as planting 30 trees that grow for 10 years or preserving 2 acres of forestland. (US EPA per above).
- The benefits keep growing. If all households in the study keeps composting for an entire year, we can prevent the annual release of 6.4 tons of C02, which is the same as taking 4 cars off the road, planting 120 trees, or preserving 8 acres of forest every year. Now multiple that impact by 5 years, 10 years, and you get a picture of how little changes make big impacts when we all work together. Pretty inspiring, yes?
