Why California is spreading waste on the prairie
A groundbreaking farm scheme in California has the potential to cancel out the states entire commercial and residential carbon emissions - by using waste.
A collaboration between scientists and San Franciscos garbage disposal unit, the scheme turns food and yard waste into compost and spreads it into rangeland, i.e. grassland, pasture, scrub and chaparral. A study by UC Berkeley calculated that covering just 5% of Californias degraded, grazed rangeland with half an inch of compost would remove an amount of carbon roughly equal to the CO2 released in providing the energy used by the states homes and businesses in a year.
As the calculation includes carbon drawn down into the rangeland and a reduction in emissions from landfill, it promises to create an elegant, circular economy-style solution to the twin problems of waste and climate change.
It would be a mammoth effort
After eight years of small-scale trials, the scheme, which is part of a wider Marin Carbon Project, is now ready to be tested on whole ranches or batches of government-owned land. If we prove this out in the next two years, you could go for 5%, Kevin Drew, San Franciscos Special Projects Zero Waste Co-ordinator, told Apolitical. It would be a mammoth effort, capturing the food and yard waste currently going to landfills and combining it with manure and trimmings, but that could create a lot of compost, enough to take a shot at the 5%.
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