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By Jim Rosenau

At our house, it happens every Monday night. We wheel our green waste to the curb to be hauled away. But just where is this “away” anyway? And what happens when it gets there? I got curious, then I got gas money and a photographer from Berkeleyside. Here’s what we learned.

At around 4:30 a.m. each weekday the first of four to five 48-foot tractor-trailer trucks pull up to the city’s transfer station at Second and Gilman. They load  the vehicles with up to 23 tons of Berkeley’s green waste, collected from our curbs and 300 commercial addresses. From there, the trailer trucks travel 69 miles over Altamont Pass, via Highway 580, on their way to the edge of the Central Valley. Here, land is less costly and noses less fussy.

This 124-acre composting space, with the Delta Mendota canal to its west and a dry wall recycling facility to the east, sits amid orchards and grain fields. Here, composting is conducted on an industrial scale, which is not economically or politically practical anywhere close to a town. And here, it is possible for nearby farms to buy compost in quantity.

Before Berkeley began collecting residential green waste in 1990, if you wanted to compost anything — be it the easy stuff, like kitchen scraps or tougher material, like woody prunings, you learned to do it yourself in your own yard. And, all through the 70s and 80s, the likes of Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening magazines provided heaps of encouragement for DIY composting.

In their heyday, these publications printed one article after another on “the best way” to make compost. For me, it was as close to a religious rite as anything I have put into daily practice. Decades of culling, turning and screening went into my piles. But once the city handed out those green pails for kitchen waste, I had to reexamine the bother, given that they would take everything I’d ever put in my pile, even my nail clippings. … Continue reading »