Trash to cash

A lot of people think that composting is just for farmers or those who have land to cultivate. But you can compost any food waste, especially fruit and vegetable discards. These make good material for composting while reducing your trash that has to go to landfills. I myself thought it would be such a cumbersome thing to do, but now we are able to practice waste segregation, taking organic matter back to the soil and reducing our other wastes to less than half of what we used to throw away.

Last year, I invited Olive Puentespina to our farm to teach my staff how to make and maintain compost piles. Olive is an agriculture graduate who is better known for Malagos Cheese, as she is the original innovator who developed local cheese using goat’s and cow’s milk. After handing the business over to the next generation, Olive had time to go to another part of the business, which is making “super compost” and helping restaurants reduce their “landfill-bound” waste. She drove me around Davao where we saw banana peels dumped in vacant lots, and never to decompose properly. She then toured me to her facility where your “fastfood” discards are “melted” and decomposed to make “super compost.”

The big benefit is reducing what we put in the landfill because that is the main challenge of local government units (LGUs) – where to throw their waste as landfills are getting filled to capacity. It is not a sexy topic or subject – solid waste. But we need to spend time learning how we can help address this big challenge. Before I preach about it, I first gave it a try. After almost a year, we must have a whole mountain of compost “curing” at the farm, and the staff are happily maintaining our stock pile for our plants and trees.

I invited Olive to discuss it further in my podcast “Good and Green” in the hope that we can get more advocates to think about their trash. Not because it gets collected, it goes away. Trash will stay as trash until you convert it to useful soil or organic matter. So do listen and get a few tips from Olive as we talk about composting at home. You can start with two pails, one to go to the dumpsite which is your garden or farm, and one on stand by. You will also need a compost primer to spread on the discards so they don’t smell while the pail is waiting to fill up.

Another trash to cash idea is: coconut shells that get turned into charcoal briquettes. Our friends started collecting all coconut shells from the market and asked Department of Science and Technology (DOST) for help in acquiring a charcoal briquetting machine. Now, they make charcoal. When we saw the operation, we also brought our coffee hull, coffee chaff and coffee spent grounds to their facility. Now, our hulls and chaff have another use besides being mixed with our compost.

The charcoal briquettes are bought by operators of barbecue joints, lechon manok stands and they are even sold retail in supermarkets and groceries.

Another idea our enterprising friend thought of is to collect all the shredded coconut from the coconut dealers in public markets. Remember how we used to buy freshly grated coconut meat for gata or coconut milk? They still do that in wet markets. She collects the already pressed grated meat for gata, takes them to a coconut oil maker to press the remaining oil which turns into cooking oil. In olive oil you call this “pomace,” and in coconut oil you probably called “lower class” cooking oil, to be sold unbranded in public markets.

One practice close to our hearts is making paper bags out of old magazines. For the last 16 years we have been using glossy magazines (luckily, Philippine Tatler gives us their old issues) and giving them a second life as paper bags in ECHOstore. We never had to print shopping bags and if we need a reusable bag, we turn to net bags and other eco bags which are for bigger packages. Our staff’s job no. 1 is to learn to make paper bags out of magazines.

You just need to think of who else can use your trash. Like they say, someone’s trash is another man’s gold. But starting at home is the better thing to do. And to reduce trash immediately, we must be conscious of what we use at home like plastic wrap and aluminum foil. I heard that it is difficult to recycle these two materials. The less plastic we bring home, the less we have to think of how to dispose of them.

And while you are learning to make compost, think about how your waste can become soil that you can sell to others. Organic garden soil sells for a mint. So you can make money while reducing landfill-bound garbage, giving our planet a break!

Like what Olive preaches, you can start small by starting at home. At the office, if you can segregate paper – white vs brown – you can sell them to paper mills. Even electronic waste can be converted to cash. So all we need to do is sort or segregate. Imagine how much extra cash you can make by just segregating trash. The brown papers can even be laid out in your garden to prevent weeds from growing. That is what we do at the farm. Cardboard layered with green discards, brown waste, green and we can make a “lasagna” style soil mound.

If your neighborhood association, condominium association or village wants to get rid of trash, it all starts in the home. Think of the cash you can generate that we used to get from newspaper drives (baby boomer era). Since the advent of the internet, even our trash has changed – it has become electronic trash. These are collected by professionals like Ayala or SM and other similar community centers. I am sure there is one near you.

Don’t create more trash. Turn it into cash.