In Defense of Mandatory Composting
At Hit & Run, Katherine Mangu-Ward mocks San Francisco’s mandatory composting program, which requires – horrors! – residents to put organic waste products out to the curb in a separate trash bin. I confess that I’m not in on the joke. I mean, trash pickup is a public service, right? So what’s wrong with requiring the people who make use of it to sort their trash in a way that minimizes the buildup of landfills? If San Franciscans were being made to compost in their own backyards, then I suppose I’d find these complaints more understandable – but so long as the city is providing (at taxpayer expense, of course) a service that much of the world’s population can still only dream of, why not use some of that waste to fertilize area farms and vineyards?
Indeed, to my admittedly inexpert eye such policies are a plausible example of government efficiency: here in Berkeley, our (non-mandatory) public composting program (which just involves putting food scraps in the yard waste bin) yields a product that is then sold to gardeners and farmers, whereas the stuff that goes in the black bins has to be buried or sent off to sit on a barge somewhere at the city’s expense. Perhaps I’m wrong about the finances, and in any case I know that making fun of “green” initiatives is pretty much the H&R raison d‘être (“it’s even grosser than rinsing out your tuna cans”, Mangu-Ward says of the San Francisco program), but so far as government-sponsored attempts to reduce waste and harmful emissions go this one seems pretty unobjectionable, right?
But composting is something that hippies do, ergo, true conservatives must oppose it. But, you know, no identity politics there, no sir. Why, that’s only found on the left!
— Chet · Jun 12, 05:23 PM · #
Well KMW is no conservative, nor would she self-identify as such. But “identity politics” is exactly right …
— John Schwenkler · Jun 12, 05:30 PM · #
Well, she can’t be a liberal, either, or she’d be in favor of composting.
— Chet · Jun 12, 06:01 PM · #
“[W]hat’s wrong with . . . requiring . . . people . . . to sort their trash in a way that minimizes the buildup of landfills?”
The fact that there isn’t, actually, any shortage of landfill space, or at least that any shortages are caused by political interference with the free market. There are plenty of landowners with vast open spaces who would be happy to take your garbage, if their governments would let them.
Also, mandatory recycling only appears to benefit the city because it relies on large amounts of coerced labor. If trash collection were privatized, presumably Katherine Mangu-Ward would be willing to pay an extra $10 per month not to sort her trash. And she would find trash pickup service at that price, because the wide availability of landfill space would enable a supplier to supply the service at a cost of only $5 per month. Instead of allowing Katherine Mangu-Ward and her counterparties to contract freely, the city is requiring many hours of unpaid labor from her.
— y81 · Jun 12, 06:41 PM · #
Hey, I’d fully support an exemption for non-composters who were willing to pay more for the service. But the idea that it’s “the city” that benefits from this program is silly, of course, since if the finances work out as I suspect then the taxpayers will benefit, presumably in the form of reduced fees for trash pickup.
— John Schwenkler · Jun 12, 06:45 PM · #
The taxpayers may benefit as taxpayers, but only because each of them has done many hours of uncompensated work sorting his or her own trash. We could reduce the cost of highway construction by returning to the corvee system, but most of us would rather pay taxes in cash than in labor services.
Furthermore, I say with confidence that city has not analyzed the question in this fashion, assigning a cost to the uncompensated labor it is coercing and weighing that against the money saved by reducing landfill demand, the value of the compost, etc., and deriving a Pareto optimal regimen. Note that this computation could include the cost of greenhouse gases, if desired, although Prof. Nordhaus suggests that that number won’t be high. Instead, it’s fair to guess that the city values the labor of its citizens at zero, and the value of “saving the planet” as infinite.
— y81 · Jun 12, 07:24 PM · #
Uninformed commentary on environmental matters seems to be KMW’s beat, if her past work is any indication.
— Lee · Jun 12, 07:40 PM · #
“The taxpayers may benefit as taxpayers, but only because each of them has done many hours of uncompensated work sorting his or her own trash.”
I’d be more sympathetic to this idea if taxpayers were required to dump their waste into a giant can and then wade through it at a later date to place it into appropriate sub-buckets. But of course, no such thing is required. Rather, you just have to think about which bin to deposit waste into when you throw it away, and spend an extra minute or two to bring it outside. I would guess the total incremental effort is no more than two or three minutes, tops, once per week.
I’m sympathetic to many of Reason’s ideological causes (and open to the possibility of privatizing trash service, at least in principle) but the reflexive libertarian opposition to environmental issues has always confused me… particularly since many environmental issues have no easy libertarian solutions.
— JeffB · Jun 12, 08:23 PM · #
JeffB’s comment is perceptive: the amount of extra effort involved in throwing your garbage in three bins instead of two is minuscule, and doesn’t come anywhere close to “many hours of uncompensated work”. I am quite certain of this because I have lived with multi-stream and single-stream systems and can discern no real difference in the amount of effort I put into garbage disposal under either system.
— rob · Jun 12, 09:20 PM · #
y81, re: privitized garbage collection. I don’t get it. And I get markets.
Garbage collection is fire and foremost a public health issue, and we make garbage collection public because there’s a massive externalities with garbage not being picked up. Back when I was 19, my roommates and I would certainly not have paid to have our garbage collected, we had more urgent expenses (gin, for one). We would have just let it rot on the front yard (seriously. those were good times.) How would you, as our neighbor, have Coasian bargained with us to stop lest the diseased flies and rats from the pile move on over to your place?
And given inequality in the country, how to bargain from poor to rich neighborhoods?
— Rortybomb · Jun 12, 10:53 PM · #
If she truly thinks it would take “hours” of labor to sort out compost, there is nothing stopping Katherine Mangu-Ward from putting the free market to work and hiring someone to sort her trash for her. But why doesn’t a service already exist? Probably because it takes minimal effort, especially after the initial start-up, to “sort trash”… there is almost no additional work involved in putting an item of waste into one can instead of another, and minor effort involved in the transportation of one additional receptacle, as the actual amount of waste would not change, just the method of carrying it (e.g., two bags instead of one, or a bucket and a bag).
— Sara · Jun 13, 12:14 AM · #
I remember a particular post about a year ago in which Katherine took the time to make fun of people who wanted to use push-mowers instead of gas mowers, for whatever reason (including environmental). I remember at the time being appalled by the fact that there was absolutely nothing libertarian about her position (or the 80% of H&R commenters who agreed). After all, it wasn’t talking about state coercion. . she was mocking individual choice. All in the pursuit of being anti-environmentalist.
Also, there was a fun screed up a few months ago going after George Soros. H&R has essentially morphed into The Corner + Pot Smoking is Okay. They hate liberals equally.
— sidereal · Jun 13, 12:18 AM · #
There are significant negative externalities associated with the disposal of garbage in giant heaps (water and air pollution, habitat destruction, smells, etc.) which must be weighed in consideration of just where we should put our garbage. The absentee landowner who lives in the city 100 miles away may not care, but the ranchers who live next door, drinking water from an aquifer underneath both properties and breathing air that sweeps across both properties, clearly would.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Jun 13, 01:20 AM · #
“Back when I was 19, my roommates and I would certainly not have paid to have our garbage collected”—Rortybomb
Rortybomb, I seriously doubt that you and your roommates owned the house in which you lived. Obviously, the landlord would have contracted for trash removal. His obligation to do so would be enforced by municipal ordinance, or, in a libertarian paradise, by civil nuisance suits from the neighbors, which, if necessary, would culminate in judgment liens and a public auction of the house to someone more responsible.
In fact, this is sort of off topic, but one of the things that puzzled me about the original post is that when I lived in Berkeley, garbage collection was private (but of course it was mandatory to have a garbage collection contract). The problem was that our landlord had only contracted for two garbage cans a week, and sometimes we had more, so we had to take the extra garbage and drive around until we found an unwatched dumpster behind a store and dump it there. Also, my roommates saved all the beer bottles to take to the recycling center, but no one ever took them, and no one washed them in the meantime. Plus, we had all these bags of whole grains for hippy-style cooking. The net result was a major infestation of mice. So we had to get some cats, but there were further complications.
I was taking a lot of drugs at the time, so I might be misremembering some of the facts in the preceding paragraph, but definitely we had a lot of mice.
— y81 · Jun 13, 01:31 AM · #
I think I remember that post, and in any case it’s the sort of thing that drives me BONKERS. As someone who errs strongly on the side of being too anti-coercive, it’s always seemed to me that that’s all the more reason to praise individual responsibility, and embody it in your own life.
And by the way, I absolutely plan to mow my lawn, should I ever get one, with a push-mower; the gas-powered ones stink, and they’re too damn loud.
— John Schwenkler · Jun 13, 03:02 AM · #
Electric lawn mowers are nice to use.
— cw · Jun 13, 05:47 AM · #
“And by the way, I absolutely plan to mow my lawn, should I ever get one, with a push-mower; the gas-powered ones stink, and they’re too damn loud.”
Sheep are good.
Thanks for this post, John. The ire over at Reason is startling, and the reel mower hatred is actually depressing.
One of the things that’s interesting about watching Deadwood is watching how a libertarian community grapples with the realities of living in close proximity. Perhaps SF would have been better served by saying “We will not haul your compostible kitchen waste unless it is in the appropriate bin, but you are certainly free to make other arrangements, provided they are in keeping with the sanitation concerns of the community.” For example I know of commercial office buildings that have small worm farms that do an excellent job of disposing of break room compostable waste, and this will certainly work at a residential scale. Or folks could bag it up and drive it to a commercial land fill. Freedom of choice is not the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. I’m pretty sure the outraged at Reason would not support my “right” to convert my bathroom to a sauna, shit in a plastic back and demand that the city haul it away as refuse, not especial when, for the sake of the general welfare, the city has provided a reasonable alternative.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 13, 11:15 AM · #
I lived in an unincorporated (but densely populated) area of Pinellas County, Florida where there was no public garbage collection. Instead you had to contract with a private garbage company, or else take the garbage to the landfill yourself. The garbage companies all charged c 30$.mo. The dump charged 10$ per visit. And renters, not landlords were responsible for their own trash. Several families went with the landfill option, but they would also allow their trash to pile up in their side yard until they could fill a whole pickup bed with it and make just a single trip with weeks of garbage. Of course in the meantime animals ripped open the bags, flies gathered, a ripe stench wafted downwind, and on a windy day all sorts of crap could end up in everyone’s else’s front yard.
Spare me these libetarian utopias, OK?
— JonF · Jun 14, 02:35 AM · #
Mandatory composting? Horrors! We’ll all be telling our grandchildren what it was like, back when we were free.
— Sean Peters · Jun 14, 11:19 AM · #
From two trash cans a week to one per month:
That’s our real statistic and it continues to shock and delight me. Ten years ago — before any recycling — I hauled two full 32-gallon trash cans out to the street. Back then, only soda and beer cans with 5-cent deposits got recycled.
These days I only put out the trash every other week. This bi-weekly haul consists of one can of recycled plastic, cans, and paper — and one-half a can of landfill-destined waste.
A big reduction in volume and weight is the kitchen waste which we now compost in the yard. I figure it runs about 1/2 to 1 gallon a day — the equivalent of a 32-gallon can each month. It’s been a quick and easy thing to do. Yes, we do use the finished compost in our landscaping, but reducing what we send to the landfill is the real gratification.
— Dave Lash · Jun 14, 11:55 AM · #
That’s about where we are, too. We put out a kitchen-sized bag full of yard waste at least once a week and recycle quite a lot, but real “trash” only goes out every other week at most. And yes, it’s easy.
— John Schwenkler · Jun 14, 03:09 PM · #
y81 is rocking this discussion. The SF proposal makes 2 assumptions: (1) how much benefit the public receives from sorted trash and (2) how much it costs to require homeowners to sort their trash.
If you don’t think landfill space is a problem, then organic trash is the stuff that we don’t care about, right? We’re not talking about the mercury in twisty bulbs or the plastic in ipod packaging — if there are an additional 10 tons of coffee grounds in a landfill, then those coffee grounds will biodegrade and that’s the end of that.
So sorting those coffee grounds out has two benefits — (1) it reduces the landfill space required, and the cost to ship the coffee grounds to the landfill and (2) it provides composting inputs for fertilizer.
#2 is easy to price – composting inputs are worth, to a close order of approximation, whatever the City of San Francisco can sell them for. y81 argues that cost #1 is minimal. That’s a factual assertion that I can’t evaluate, but it seems to be one place where we could all reasonably argue.
In return, the composting program has two costs: (A) Whatever it costs to process and ship the composted goods as compost as opposed to trash; and (B) whatever it costs the citizens collectively to sort the goods.
It’s certainly plausible that the benefit is lower than anyone has estimated, and the cost higher, but you would have to do the math.
— J Mann · Jun 15, 02:24 PM · #
Who doesn’t think landfill space is a problem? There are, as has been noted, significant negative externalities with allowing just anyone to put trash in his or her backyard; given that this is out of the question, it’s just a fact – or so I take it; I’m glad to be corrected with some actual data – that disposing of trash is bound to be an expensive affair.
Not so; or at least not according to one of the articles linked in that H&R piece, which claimed that waste that’s allowed just to decompose emits large amounts of methane, while waste that’s composted does not. Perhaps this is wrong, but once again factual correction would be required.
— John Schwenkler · Jun 15, 04:52 PM · #
Some folks need to learn the difference between aerobic bacteria and anaerobic bacteria.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 15, 05:10 PM · #
Mmmm. So if the coffee grounds biodegrade in a landfill, then they produce methane which we can either capture and burn for energy, which is good, or which we can let go into the atmosphere, increasing heat retention, which is bad. That’s one more thing for the cost of landfill column, I guess, but the ultimate question of cost of landfill versus cost of composting is still not answered.
— J Mann · Jun 15, 08:06 PM · #
The pink police state—the nanny state—mommy fascism, must not be a big deal because you can describe each one of its choking little regulations and then say ‘horrors!’ sarcastically. Much easier than reading Tocqueville.
— Adam Greenwood · Jun 16, 09:06 PM · #