A couple of months ago on a sunny Saturday, I worked at the family gift shop while my stepdad Tom manned the till at the toy store. During a fabulous dull stretch, we basked in the sun and chatted about biodegradable diapers. Tom is a biologist and up on the news. Tom said there have been recent studies of landfills where drilling down into a pile brought up decades-old pieces of carrot, still orange and carroty and not at all biodegraded because landfill isn’t composting, it’s storage. I’ve mulled this over at great length, and happen to be sitting at the World’s Largest Encyclopedia. Let’s ask it if stuff biodegrades in landfills.
Atticus surveys the 99 steps down to the Great Lake Darla lives above in her new home in Canada.
Organic substances “biodegrade” when they are broken down by other living organisms (such as enzymes and microbes) into their constituent parts, and in turn recycled by nature as the building blocks for new life. The process can occur aerobically (with the aid of oxygen) or anaerobically (without oxygen). Substances break down much faster under aerobic conditions, as oxygen helps break the molecules apart.
Landfills Too Tightly Packed for Most Trash to Biodegrade
Most landfills are fundamentally anaerobic because they are compacted so tightly, and thus do not let much air in. As such, any biodegradation that does take place does so very slowly.
“Typically in landfills, there’s not much dirt, very little oxygen, and few if any microorganisms,” says green consumer advocate and author Debra Lynn Dadd. She cites a landfill study conducted by University of Arizona researchers that uncovered still-recognizable 25-year-old hot dogs, corncobs and grapes in landfills, as well as 50-year-old newspapers that were still readable.
Well. That is shitty news, but it’s not really news, which is one reason we always had a compost pile when I lived at Mom’s house. Look, I was a commune kid. The gas crisis of the seventies for me conjures images of Mom sitting in gas lines, crying. I shut off lights, turn off water, and I am acutely aware of the ugly mess o’ compostibles I’m not composting, but while I live in an apartment, what can I do? Wa$ted, an eco game show from New Zealand combining cold cash and hot schadenfreude, introduced – to me, at least – the notion of worm farming. This seems like a great idea for someone.
Atticus descends the stairs to the forest. I wonder if he remembers sleeping on my head.
Some folks sort the worms out of the castings and put the worms in fresh bedding. We have other things to do with our time and prefer a split harvest method. It helps if you have trained your worms ahead of time for this harvest method. To train your worms, you start feeding them at only one end of the bin. Do this for about a week. (Worms learn pretty fast.) Now take the bedding/castings out of the end of the farm where you were not feeding them and add it to your plants or garden. You will be removing about half to two thirds of the bedding/castings in this step. You will lose some worms, but those were the ones that were not very smart. Remember you trained the others.
Flying Spaghetti Monster! Train worms? I can’t join that chicken outfit! – though, apparently worm training is hilarious. Back to shopping for another composting method. This shows promise, though it uses electricity:
Darla says Atticus roams far and wide and has introduced himself to the neighbors, Step 1 in his plan to hold some municipal office.
How it works: Deposit food waste items at any time, on any day. Add up to 120 lbs (55kg) per month. For best results, cut items into small pieces. Items remain in the upper chamber, with “hot composting” conditions: mixing, air flow, heat, and moisture (see diagram). The energy released destroys odors, pathogens, and seed germination. The compost is later transferred through a trap door to the lower cure tray chamber, where it continues to compost while you add fresh waste items to the upper chamber.
Interesting…interesting. I do wonder what someone who lives in a little home on the hundredth floor does with resulting buckets of nitrogen-rich soil, though I could march outside and dump compost into the complex’s flower beds. It’s a step in some right direction, but shall we dance?
Hush, hush. Out there, words fly and bite and melt where they land like so many snowflakes flung at us by the winds on an icy night, but we have been here before, and we know it can end well, even if the quiet is only for a moment. 
Poor Impulse Control 