Environment

3921 readers

32 users here now

Environmental and ecological discussion, particularly of things like weather and other natural phenomena (especially if they're not breaking news).

See also our Nature and Gardening community for discussion centered around things like hiking, animals in their natural habitat, and gardening (urban or rural).

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Why compost and residual waste are not together? (lemmy.today)

submitted 8 months ago by Capricorn@lemmy.today to c/environment@beehaw.org

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In Italy (and in most countries I've visited), waste sorting typically involves two distinct categories for compost and residual waste.

Question: Why is compost disposed of in a separate collection rather than with residual waste? Are there any environmental differences if it decomposes together with dry waste versus separately? Is it a matter of disposal efficiency, or is it simply another administrative complexity?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Residual waste is mostly plastics. Isn't that obvious that you don't want that together with compostable material that will be used to make compost or at least something like biogas?

And it also works in reverse: compostable material is usually relatively wet... so if your residual waste ends up in a waste incineration plant, all that water would be very problematic for burning the waste.

[–] Capricorn@lemmy.today 1 points 8 months ago

Probably the second is the reason