My plan

Awhile ago I outlined a student's plan to reduce the college's waste. When I found it hard to get the approximately $1.2 million to fully fund the program, I hit upon a new idea.

What if, instead of $1.2 million to reduce the college's waste, we use $9 million to install a city wide composting plan. While it may cost 9 times the original amount, per capita it's much cheaper. I am really proud of this because it was an entirely original idea. True, it turns out San Francisco has implemented a program entailing almost everything I thought of, and then some, but that doesn't mean my thought wasn't entirely original since I had never read of San Francisco's plan--nor any city wide composting plan--before my idea. So whatever, I'm proud of it.

So anyway, the plan.

You know how you have trash and recycling pick up at your door (or at least here in Charleston we do)? Well what if you had a 3rd bin, for compostable items--which is 40% of all our waste. Instead of having all that waste hit landfills, where it produces methane due to anaerobic decomposition, or being incinerated where it shoots mercury into the air, we can decompose it rather quickly, turning it into rich soil nutrients.

Of course that's a lot of compost being produce. Literally thousands of tons. Which means we can sell it and possibly make money off the whole enterprise, reducing citizen's taxes. It would also help out local farmers and reduce the amount of liquid fertilizer entering the water stream.

In my mind this presentation would have been a lot more breathtaking. I think if this was implemented it would do a world of good though.