Green Tip: The Fourth ‘R’

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental nonprofit Resilient Palisades to deliver a weekly “green tip” to our readers.

Climate crisis, global warming, climate change—whatever you want to call it, our climate is undergoing rapid change from multiple sources, including emissions from power plants, industry, automobiles and landfills. The cure seems so large and beyond our individual abilities; and yet there are ways we can begin to reverse the damage at home and today.

A previous Green Tip urged us to consider the five Rs: refuse, reduce, re-use, rot and then recycle. The fourth R—Rot—is the composting of food scraps, an inexpensive and straight forward technique to keep organic waste out of landfills where it produces greenhouse gases that add to the climate crisis (and also take up valuable landfill space).

According to the 2019 LA City’s New Green Deal, an estimated 723,000 tons of organic waste went to landfill in 2011. Ten years later the amount of organic waste in landfill is undoubtedly much higher. The city’s Green New Deal plan calls for establishing citywide food scrap drop-off locations and launching citywide residential food scrap collection.

In the Palisades, we can begin the process now by composting food scraps into rich, healthy soil for our gardens. We can do this in our own backyards or by contributing our food scraps to a neighbor who is composting.

While gaining healthy soil, we will eliminate the needless production of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from our landfills. For a how-to guide, visit lacompost.org. Alternatively, arrange for food scraps to be collected and composted by compostableLA.com.

Composting is valuable for your garden because it:

Enriches soil
Helps to retain moisture and suppress plant diseases and pests

Reduces the need for chemical fertilizers

Encourages the production of beneficial bacteria and fungi that break down organic matter to create humus, a rich nutrient-filled material.