In Person Activism

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"Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them." -Tim Snyder

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Where does the compost go? A town hall mystery (self.inperson)

submitted 7 months ago by schmorpel to c/inperson

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As composting enthusiasts who want to build a project around compost, we had been intrigued about the waste ever since the council had announced their new bio waste collection program and advertised everywhere for people in town to collect and deliver theirs. They handed out buckets, a few containers appeared in two neighbourhoods, and it had something to do with the sustainable development goals.

But no composting facility anywhere in the council, so we asked around and finally got hold of the right person. Found out the waste is carried a hundred kilometers away to a huge central facility, once a week.

Now we need to find out if they let us do better than that?

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[–] poVoq 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They will probably ask you to achieve certain treatment standards, which is not so easy in small composting facilities.

But it's worth a try. Keep us updated how it goes.

Alternatively you could think about setting up a larger biogas plant. This usually has different standards that are easier to reach, but the investment costs are higher and the feed-in tariffs for electricity produced are often not great.

[–] schmorpel 5 points 7 months ago

Yes, that and a lack of people who could work a local plant, apparently (but then again a lot of youngsters move away for work, go figure). The huge (not that huge really) company running both trash and water is quite interesting. They run at a loss since they exist and get good amounts of EU money, the directors are the town halls of the entire region, the company is listed on the stock market? Doesn't look like the transparent entity I'd like to entrust my water and trash to ... but then also, I admit I have zero clues about weird economic entities or composting on a commercial scale, just getting into it. Microplastics were mentioned - apparently it's challenging to keep them out of the finished product. Then again, agricultural biowaste seems to be regulated differently? More research work to do.

Living in a tiny town has great advantages, it's not difficult to just walk into the town-hall and ask all sorts of stuff. They are very un-bureaucratic here, and really seem to be trying to make things work. Then again, you find strange constructs like this private water and trash company where a suspicious lot of local power accumulates. Asking a lot of stupid questions and digging for financial reports is always entertaining and elucidating for sure.