Compost king: Paul Sellew at TEDxBoston

I've been involved with agriculture just about my whole life this is a picture of me on my family's farm with my brother and sister and a few of my cousins and just like any good farmer knows that a compost amended soil rich in organic matter you can grow just about anything and over the last 25 years I basically have been involved with building out two of North America's largest organic recycling businesses first being green waste things like leaves grass and brush when I got started they were being thrown away in landfills they were being incinerated they were being burned now we've got a network of nationwide composting operations that recycling these organic materials into a valuable compost product secondly biosolids the residuals from wastewater treatment there was no regulatory framework in place to use these materials now there is when I got started they were being dumped in the ocean and they were being dumped in landfills disposed of now if it meets the regulations you can beneficially use those and put them back on farmland so what I'm doing now is really the third big organics recycling opportunity and I think the biggest challenge of my career and that deals with food waste and I'm going to provide a little context about food waste and how we have become essentially the United States of food waste where does it all start it starts on the farm and there's some disturbing trends we are losing farmland to development and erosion and that's a serious issue and it's something now that scientists have phrased a term called peak soil and we are losing way more soil than we're creating and then you combine that with a growing global population and the need to feed more people unsustainable from there these farms are completely different than the farms of our grandfathers and great-grandfather's they grew multiple crops they often had livestock those organic materials were put back on the ground you had a sustainable farm today they grow very few crops if just one they don't often return organic matter back to the soil you're subject to long term so depletion soil loss again unsustainable you combine that with the cost of these chemical inputs fertilizers herbicides and pesticides they're going way up over what the farms are getting for their own crop so farming's always been tough and today it's no different but I think we also have an additional challenge on our hands that food is part of a complicated global logistics system it is being transported by planes by ships by trains and especially diesel trucks its fossil fuel Laden distribution system and additionally by the time that food is picked and by the time it's ending up on your plate time is elapsed and that equates to additional waste now we're used to going to grocery stores and seeing beautiful in effect a cornucopia of food in the grocery industry does a great job but what we don't see is from production through what ends up on our plate enormous waste enormous waste and that waste is expensive billions of dollars a year of cost to our economy and the North American economy over $2,000 per household that is a huge amount of waste and we are a contributor to this waste and it's called breakfast lunch and dinner it's when we go out to eat it's food service if we can't get away from it we need the sustenance to live oftentimes what we don't eat what is off off the plate what do we do with it we put it in the garbage it's mixed in with everything else where does it go goes to the street side it's picked up by a garbage man put into a truck driven to a transfer station once it gets that transfer station it's loaded into a bigger truck and that truck can go hundreds of miles away New York City alone 23,000 tons a day of waste full of food waste going half a million miles a day moving this material around the places like North Carolina Ohio Pennsylvania this is a system that needs to be changed now where do those trucks go over 60% of waste in our society garbage goes to landfills and these landfills are ultimate repositories that food waste that's mixed in with the garbage is rotting in a landfill generating methane emissions landfills collectively are responsible for 20% of methane emissions which is a powerful greenhouse gas and you also don't get the benefit of the organic matter and the nutrients in that food waste it's lost forever trapped in this landfill now what does not go to a landfill goes to an incinerator food waste is wet 8090 percent water so it generates no energy all it does is generate ash and you guess it that Ash goes to a landfill so what I've just described is actually what we are doing it's contributing to loss of farmland loss of soil we are mixing the food waste in with a garbage we're sending it the waste to landfills and incinerators were the most modern economy in the world the world's largest economy and I think there clearly is a way to make this a better way and to change the way we are doing handling food waste right now where does it all start it starts with us everybody through their relationship with food breakfast lunch and dinner should separate the food waste put it into a separate container that separate container can go to another container that's picked up a specialized organics collection route a few towns are doing this right now in North America and good news is that's it's happening but there's thousands of more that are ready to go those containers go to my company's facility located in Richmond British Columbia this basically takes the food and green waste we put it into our in aerobic digestion system a true gift from Mother Nature and that goes into our digesters microorganisms break down that food and green waste and what do we produce we produce biogas and biogas is an incredible source of renewable energy the other product that comes out is a compost based organic fertilizer so all of those nutrients all of that organic matter is recovered and put back on the land at the same time extracting valuable energy out of these materials now if you were to have a thought experiment and you would say let's design the ideal form of energy what would be the attributes you'd want it local you'd want it available anytime you need it you'd want it transportable you'd want it to be able to use for all the different things we need energy for and we'd also want to have no net carbon emissions that's biogas we can make electricity and unlike wind and solar that's intermittent wind has to be blowing Sun needs to be shining we have captured the solar energy in the plant material so we then make base load power 24/7 you also can upgrade the biogas and put it into the natural gas pipeline and deliver that wherever a customer needs energy lastly you can take this upgraded biogas and you can make it into compressed natural gas CNG a transportation fuel for cars for buses for trucks this is truly a miraculous form of energy and completely derived from the food waste that is being transported all around the globe using fossil fuels the other thing if you were to design the ideal type of fertilizer what would be those attributes you'd want something that would improve the physical chemical and biological properties of soil you would want it to have beneficial microorganisms that fight disease in the soil you'd want to have the ability to hold water so you don't have to put as much irrigation on the land you'd want to have macro and micro nutrients everything the plant needs to grow and is released when the plant needs it you'd want it affordable and you'd want it locally available this is compost truly another gift from other nature this compost can be delivered back to local lands and we can build farmland we can amend soils and we can create farmland instead of losing farmland we can support the production of local food stronger communities healthier soils now anaerobic digestion was this invented by some brilliant scientists on the contrary it is basically occurring everyday in the stomach of a ruminant a cow a sheep a goat they are fed plant materials they are many anaerobic digesters those microorganisms the same ones that are in my digesters are breaking down that material and I think we do mother nature one better the cow farts out the biogas and we capture it we have taken we've taken what Mother Nature has designed and improved upon it and this is truly another fantastic technology but it's really mimicked and we're borrowing from Mother Nature and I think improving upon it likewise with compost I walk in the forest and I see a composting operation in Sir Albert Howard the renowned British botanist said farmers ought to farm as nature does in the forest and what he means by that is that the leaves drop the pine needles drop and then a year later you go back and you see compost and you see all those nutrients released that is a sustainable ecosystem they are returning organics back to the soil and really modern agriculture needs to borrow an example from nature in this case as well so the system that I'm describing here the cycle the change that I think we need to make to build a more sustainable future it really starts with everybody we need to separate out the food waste from the rest of the garbage when we do that you can direct it into innovative technologies like anaerobic digestion and composting you can create valuable biogas that has a multitude of applications you create valuable compost that goes back to the soil to grow more plants to grow food and to sustain the cycle and the other thing around this cycle is this economic engine as well you have all kinds of job opportunities green jobs to build these facilities energy entrepreneurs to utilize the biogas all kinds of opportunities in lawn garden and agriculture to use the compost to support local agriculture multiple jobs can be created locally with the waste material that we're throwing out and sending down the road hundreds of miles this is a real opportunity now am i talking about something that is just a pie in the sky on the contrary Europe the biggest economy is Germany it's a fourth largest economy in the world they're recycling 75% of its organic waste in the United States 95% of our food waste we are disposing in landfills and incinerators so that's what's happening it's a hugely important source of renewable energy in Germany where they've got thousands of these facilities in operation good news it's happening here in North America in Canada the western United States and right here in a home state of Massachusetts we're going to begin a band of commercial organics going to the landfill beginning in 2014 so that's really important policy and I'm glad that you know our governor put that put that through one thing I've not talked about is scale and we live a very energy consumptive lifestyle in the West and the developing world wants what we have we need energy at scale and from our own calculations if you're taking all of the food all of Agriculture human waste all kinds of other organics that we generate here as part of our society including dedicated energy crops if we were to direct that through a network of anaerobic digestion facilities we would generate enough energy to completely replace the amount of diesel fuel used in the United States trucking fleet so I think this demonstrates that this is a real opportunity and it's not some cute niche feel-good type story it can be a real engine for renewable energy and organics management in the 21st century now I've talked about this being the most challenging part of my career I've been doing this for a long time and the reason why this this this time it's a little different is that it involves everybody to cooperate and work together everybody has a relationship with food it's a daily essential of our life the good news we've done a great job in separating out other recyclables from the garbage from the municipal solid waste so we've seen that we don't we shut off the water we turn off the lights so I'm optimistic we can do it and I challenge everybody here to step up to the plate let's work together and let's create the next great recycling revolution here in North America thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 330,257

Keywords: ted talk, ted x, tedxboston2013, \Waste Management\, tedx talks, ted, tedx, Energy, ted talks, TEDxBoston, Agriculture, Compost (Material), tedx talk

Id: 6eXRfynD-M8

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2013