I would like to open the floor for ideas on getting composting added to GreenCoin. The most significant "final answer" is to get to a net weight of CO2 that is ultimately sequestered per unit weight of compost.
Currently we have two distinct types of producers in the GreenCoin ecosystem: PV solar (electric power) and biodiesel (liquid/transportation fuel, waste-vegetable oil source)
- For electrical the calculation is 0.527 kg CO2 [global average to produce 1 kWh of electricity) - 0.046 kg CO2 (PV solar equivalent to produce 1 kWh electricity) = 0.481 kg CO2 offset per kWh
- Biodiesel (from WVO): 9.167 kg Co2/gallon petro-diesel impact - 1.969 kg CO2 biodiesel impact = 7.167 kg CO2 offset per gallon
We know that, eventually, GreenCoin will need to encompass agriculture, farming and forestry to have the total CO2 offset impact required in order to address the total carbon picture. So at some point we need to just dive in and get started. I've been reading some interesting information about
composting and soil management benefits, existing
carbon standards such as the ACR, and a bunch of other resources over the past couple of days. The trick is to come up with a good single number that relates compost CO2e to the same CO2e seen with the likes of PV solar.
The ACR published a report with a detailed calculation for compost added to rangeland
here (pages 24-31). This is an EXTREMELY detailed calculation. The general pathology with these types of reports is to take a look at massive projects because, in general, these reports are for the benefit of governments (in this case the State of California) to make informed decisions on how to distribute carbon throughout their carbon tax or Cap & Trade system they have legislated, and therefore projects have a
deminimus size to be considered useful.
With GreenCoin we like to take a more "bottom up" approach; looking at carbon from a small scale, like an individual user or small Producer, and then multiplying that effect across a large population set (should GreenCoin be considered useful and grow considerably, of course). There are several reasons for this:
- it is much simpler to calculate carbon offset effects
- the individual user is engaged much more easily. They can see what kind of difference they are actually making by the decisions they make
- Ultimately the responsibility of carbon belongs with everyone, and the global effect of climate change is exactly equal to [Everyone's Effect * Everybody], so engaging the end user individually is an absolute imperative, in our opinion
For me it is difficult to see how spreading compost over 1000 hectares in California and studying it over 40 years is really so great for the environment
that it's worth paying for. It's just too abstract. And I'm a pretty smart guy when it comes to carbon, or at least I feel I am engaged and "paying attention" so to speak, so when I see other folks that take a look at these things and think "what a giant waste of taxpayer money, screw this carbon bullshit," I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for that. What we are really talking about here, for most of us anyway, is cost. So the dialogue now is what's the cost and how do pay for it? for which at GreenCoin we provide a potential answer: a distributed, market-based system of private ownership.
So with carbon as it relates to organic matter and recycling/reclamation, I was thinking of taking this opposite, bottom-up approach, and then determining if the result was at least theoretically similar to the likes of an ACR calculation, and a good agreement there means we have something that we could go to war with. I present a calculation below but will need to determine a mechanism for comparison to the ACR and update further.
Americans
threw away 254 million tons of stuff in 2007 and 28.3% of that was organic matter ("green waste"). Food waste is particularly bad at being recovered, only 2.6%, and yard waste is pretty good at 64.1%.
- 1 lb of food/green waste is about 70-80% water or a minimum of 0.2 lb organic matter
- of the organic matter about 50% is molecular carbon (equal to about 0.1 lb C per pound of food)
- 0.1 lb pure C is worth 0.367 lbs CO2e, or 0.167 kg CO2e*
- Americans toss about 4.6 lbs of trash a day of which 1.25 lbs is food waste (per capita)
- The average American daily impact from green waste (yard and food) is therefore 0.21 kg CO2e per day
* note, pure carbon (C) weighs 12 g/mol and CO2 weighs 44 g/mol. This is commonly known as CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) so folks are always comparing apples to apples on weight.
* These calculations are quite simple and "back-of-the-envelope." I present them to invite refinement and debate. Also, it helps to show simplicity to further highlight a key benefit of the GreenCoin model.
So that's about the same amount of carbon in green waste as generating 0.5 kWh per person, per day, of green power (such as solar). That's not a big impact but it's a real impact if you spread that across 300 M people. Also, it is a "tangible" impact. When you throw away a day's worth of food at home that would ultimately be landfilled, you threw away 0.5 kWh of green energy. That's 50 full cell phone charges. This is the type of impact I think people can relate too.
I feel significantly convinced that food and green waste presents substantial greenhouse gas reduction potential. I propose offering GreenCoin in the amount of 0.167 kg CO2 per lb of food or green waste. Since most people compost by unit volume, I think
1,000 lbs/yard is a good starting point, so that is 167 kg CO2 per yard of compost. A cubic yard is 202 gallons so 1 gallon of compost = 0.825 kg CO2e.
Reporting: For reporting purposes, a composter could simply report the compost unit weight (preferable) or volume once the the compost is finished. For folks at home who have food/yard pick-up, the GreenCoin credit should ultimately reside with the composter (the municipality, for example). Considering there is not a lot of municipal food waste pick-up in the US, we can push for backyard composting as being the big push. I would hope to make more of a dent in food waste where the recovery is quite pathetic.
When it comes to compost use, I was very happy to read about evidence for a kind of upward-spiraling, virtuous "carbon cycle," that I linked to above. This premature data of additional carbon sequestration, if true, won't be caught in the GreenCoin calc per se, but it does highlight an additional benefit of the power of people changing their carbon habits and mindset in small ways and how that may translate to future benefits toward our environment and climate future that are hard to predict with today's data. This gives an element of hope too; that we have the ability and power to make powerful changes in a meaningful timeframe, and with a lot of the doom-and-gloom type news coverage of climate inevitability, I like having that hope abound.
