The time has come for a paradigm shift in waste management. Daniel Hathaway, the “Recycling King”, is a leading advocate for zero waste, intelligently packing our dumps, composting and biodynamic farming, and the destigmatization and full utilization of garbage. “If I take a cup and put it into a trash bag, it is immediately turned to garbage,” Daniel says, lamenting the ease with which goods become trash. Today, dumps in the United States are indiscriminate piles of organic matter, recyclables, and perfectly usable items. Daniel insists that garbage, our “‘gross’ natural product”, should be baled and sorted for mining by future generations. While farmers in rural areas use tractors to grind brush into mulch for composting, cities send $20 billion per year’s worth of yard and putrescible waste to the landfill. There it literally goes to waste, producing methane and becoming a fire risk.
Unequipped to deal with organic matter, landfill managers process it and spread it over garbage to promote biodegradation – which Hathaway notes as the destruction of a precious natural resource. By precedent, garbage ownership falls to the state and landfills. It appears that the only way to retain it in the public domain is to practice zero waste. Join us with Daniel Hathaway as we outline a new paradigm for whole systems waste management and biodynamic agriculture.
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