With Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown's new plan for bringing compost to the residents’ homes, we’ll be reducing, reusing, and recycling our way into better air quality.
In July, Brown continued on with the recycling plan for the city of Buffalo. The next step of his initiative is a pilot program by the name of Scrap it! Curbside.
34 and More is Buffalo’s way of increasing recycling and in 2019, Brown implemented that five drop-off locations for all scraps be placed around the city.
This next step brings the compost to you.
With Scrap It! Curbside, more than 220 households (2,000 residents) will get to be part of the pilot program which brings compostable bins to homes.
Shaded in the color brown rather than the original green garbage bins, these bins have latches to ensure security from wild animals and unwanted pests. Just as you would with normal garbage bins, you would bring your compost bin to the curb once a week and Farmers Pirates compost will pick it up on the designated day. Now, these pirates aren’t stealing anything you deem valuable, they’re stealing your scraps to give back to the environment.
With 4.5 pounds of garbage being equated to one person per day in New York State, and with a population of an estimated 276,486 residents, that trash goes to one of the 30 landfills in the state. The organic materials that could be composted and used towards a multitude of different things, sit in one of these landfills emitting gases. 90-98% of the gases released from landfills are methane and carbon dioxide, and the last two to ten percent of the gases excreted are “nitrogen, oxygen, ammonia, sulfides, hydrogen, and various other gases.”
The dangers of exposure to ammonia are known, but hydrogen sulfate isn’t as widely known. Exposure to either one of these two in a short time period can cause coughing, irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, headache, nausea, and breathing difficulties. These effects usually go away once the exposure is stopped.
With 30 landfills in the state each producing their own gases, composting allows the city of Buffalo to reduce the gases being emitted into the atmosphere. Cleaning the air while giving rich, decedent compost to farmers, gardeners, and a slew of other agricultural careers in the area.