Circularity & Nature-based Climate Solutions
Composting is a Circular Climate Solution
By now, many people know that composting is a powerful tool in the fight against climate change. Keeping organics out of landfills reduces harmful emissions. Adding it to soil helps to reanimate living systems and hold moisture lost through degradation and desertification. Carbon is drawn down through natural processes utilizing it as a necessary resource instead of a planet-warming weakness, among myriad other co-benefits.
Composting is also a circular activity that allows humans to mimic natural cycles that have functioned flawlessly for eons. When talking about circular economies, we often think of life cycle analyses and consumption-based accounting measurements, and how recycled plastics might gain new life as polar fleece or park benches instead of taking that linear trip to the landfill. But nature is the original circular system, and always has been. And it starts with clean, healthy soil; a living system that bears life-sustaining nutrients for uptake into plants that feed humans and non-humans alike.
It’s Not Just Dirt
Non-humans typically function though a shorter cycle (circle, if you will) by returning their “scraps” directly back to the soil in short order. Humans, however, first preserve then reject literally TONS of material through our creative preparations of plants and other once living organisms. These scraps are still brimming with all the necessary components (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium) for soil-making and nutrient-building. Consigning these natural materials to compost piles for breakdown by millions of hungry microorganisms, allowing time for cooking and curing, then spreading the resultant resource on gardens and farms, returns nutrients to the earth to begin the soil-making and food-growing cycle again.
New food grows from used food, again and again and again. The process maintains soil life, which in turn supports all life through nutrient cycling and respiration via photosynthesis. And the removal and storage of carbon from the atmosphere where it causes warming, into the soil where it is wanted and needed, is icing on the compost cake. Nature has always known how to do this best, and composting allows humans to lend a hand.
Save Our Soil
Earth’s land is being starved of the life it once effortlessly supported, and humans can help. Through regenerative practices, of which clean composting is central, we can feed it back the bounty it repeatedly provides. What goes into compost needs to return to the soil, where it can continue to support the circularity of life.
