Everyone needs to start composting
An individual mandate (esp. an unfunded mandate) to resolve systemic issues is definitely an anti-pattern.
Criticism of something is not necessarily an expression of fear. This reaction primarily serves to make critics feel ashamed for speaking out against something, as in "oh you're just afraid of my-good-idea-X"
It isn't exactly safe either. There is a lot of diseases in that manure. You need to take more care when applying it than some fertilizers. (though not nearly as much as anhydrous ammonia)
The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does.
Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce.
Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.
Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nuclear attack from both the soviet union and the united states, who both had absolute aerial superiority over china, and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population? It's the simple idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. It's better to have 1,000,000 small producers of steel than 1 major producer of steel when you are facing nuclear armed adversaries. It's also why china didn't start to urbanize until after they produced enough nukes and icbms to guarantee their own safety. Just like Bush didn't want to waste a $5 million missile to take out a $5 tent in afghanistan, nukes are pretty much useless against an un-urbanized nation. There were studies done by the US government on nuclear war vs soviet union and china. All the studies showed that even though china had a much larger population, our nuclear attack on the soviet union would be far more devastating because the soviet union was urbanized whiles china was decentralized and rural.
It's so funny how these people who were doing such inefficient and pointless activities set the foundation for china to eventually usurp the united states. We've been told how incompetent and backwards "the ccp" are and yet we are told that they are our top threat? Which is it?
So much of what's written about china turns out to be nonsense propaganda when you just take a closer look. Could it be that mao and the communists were smarter than people who write wikipedia articles or just read them passively without giving it any thought?
Fun idea, except it (predictably) didn't work at all, because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.
It happens when you try to make sense of a crazy senseless world sometimes.
> except it (predictably) didn't work at all
Some would say it worked precisely as expected.
> because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.
When you are faced with nuclear annihilation, you don't worry about economic feasibility but economic necessity. You do what needs be done. That's why war is terrible economic policy. Everyone is doing the economically infeasible.
China wouldn't be where it is now if it didn't work. Maybe in the most populous country, they were able to produce one or two people who knew what they were doing? Just a thought. You are probably right though. Those bumbling chinese accidentally stumbled upon the largest economy in the world. Sometimes you get stupid lucky.
I think they also let you come get some soil back for your garden or whatnot if you wanted to.
It seemed like a good way to handle things.
https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_0...
That being said, I think organic waste separation of trash is a better idea than everyone composting (from a pest, disease, and efficiency of economy perspective)
I've tried composting, and don't have the patience for it. Lots of folks live in apartments or places with HOAs that forbid it.
There's also the benefit that industrial composting can process things like dairy and meat safely that can't be home-composted.
We have made progress in that for recycling, but there are two trucks that come by my house.
Cardboard, at the very least, would generally be immediately ruined and rendered non-recylcable doing this.
I suspect you'd environmentally gain more from improved recovery of more useful materials from single-stream waste than you'd lose from no longer recycling cardboard products. (Especially since a large amount of dedicated cardboard recycling is itself going to be spoiled by the inclusion of greasy pizza boxes in that stream).
There are facilities that sort the entire stream, partly because diverting material away from the landfill saves cost there.
I'm happy to put my food waste in a little box and have the government come round with a truck once per week, at the very least its rotting somewhere miles away from me.
I don't think i have the space or knowledge to do it myself
No signing up here, you just put the correct boxes out on the correct day and some chap picks it up.
Its slightly frustrating having six different bins and having to keep a schedule pinned to the fridge but it kinda works.
See: How current landfills work
It's really not that hard to fill up the compost bin and then put it out with the trash and recycling every week. Municipal composting is great IMO.
In the case of hydrogen - it isn't that difficult. You develop on site hydrogen production capabilities and replace the fleet returning to site to re-fuel. Self contained.
Getting rid of the old infrastructure - good local jobs to do that, and upgrade it with something new. Come on now, that was too easy.
The point of this whole post is Fertilizer. You eventually have to collect the distributed waste (or compost fertilizer) to a a centralized place. Caveated that the resulting mass could be decreased, but also lose the opportunity to make compost tea, feeding any edible mass to animals, or vermicomposting to get even richer output.
Also lets not discount the distributed cost to teach millions of people how to properly blend (mix grass with food waste etc), turn (else you can either cause fires or create methane), harvest (when's it done), and then redistribute the output.
Yes we could all become home gardeners, but then expect to see our GDP to decline as Software engineers, Lawyers, architects et al. star doing "farm work" and labor.