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Composting is a way we all can help reduce greenhouse gases. If food waste goes to landfills, it become noxious methane gas. A much bigger problem than most of us realize. If composted, it sequesters carbon and also makes great fertilizer. Read more about the value of composting and clean air at the Drawdown Project.
In rural areas like ours in Sandwich, N.H, a composting bins works fine. In big urban areas it is not so easy, but is fully doable. The New Yorker reports: “Today, South Korea recycles ninety-five per cent of its food waste, but twenty-five years ago almost nothing was recycled.”
A people’s movement made it happen. “We had people lying down in the road in front of the garbage trucks to prevent more being brought to the landfills,” Kim Mi-Hwa, the head of the Korea Zero Waste Movement Network, told me. “The government saw that it had to do something.”
She adds, “There needs to be an intermediary between the government and the people. Groups like us. That can explain back and forth. People don’t want to hear it straight from the government.” Also “K.Z.W.M.N. was instrumental in advancing Seoul’s ban on plastic bags, which went into effect at the end of 2018.”
You can read the New Yorker article or listen to it on your smart phone.