SHIPPING GARBAGE
The Wall Street Journal over the weekend ran a big story on the number of start-ups getting into the food waste business, trying to keep it out of landfills. That’s laudable, of course, but the answers are typical of a segregated rather than integrated approach.
What does a person living in an urban condo do with food scraps? That’s the extreme, of course. Anyone with even a postage stamp piece of ground can use an under-sink vermicomposting bin to turn it into soil-building organic matter and apply it to a piece of soil. But that’s not going to help the condo dweller, so Mill Industries has the ultimate scheme: for a few hundred dollars you can get a food scrap dehydrator and once you’ve accumulated enough stuff you can put it in a box and ship it to them. They’ll grind it and sell it for chicken feed.
In my book POLYFACE MICRO I have a whole chapter devoted to kitchen chickens in urban apartments. You can have 2 or 3 chickens in a footprint no bigger than an easy chair. They’ll eat your kitchen scraps and give you wonderful eggs. If you have them on a carbonaceous diaper (I describe this in detail in the book) they won’t smell and their manure will turn into wonderful compost for your house plants.
And you should have house plants. If you don’t, surely a neighbor has some. I’m reminded of a lady I met who lived in a tiny urban high rise apartment. She asked her landlord if she could use a few square feet of the yard around the complex to grow a couple of tomato plants. He agreed and by the time I met her, she had control of the landscaping of the owners’ complete apartment complex listings, turning them into edible landscapes. That would certainly use all the compost from all the chickens in all the apartments eating all the food scraps---on site.
This is as integrated as the Mill Industries scheme is segregated. And I haven’t even approached the cost of dehydrating. It takes a lot of energy to pull the moisture out of banana peels and moldy oranges. Obviously, the dehydrating makes everything lighter for shipping, but is this really an ecological process? The article features a lady in Utah who ships her dehydrated food scraps to Washington where hopefully it will find a home in chicken feed somewhere else.
People are subscribing to this service all over the country. According to the article Mill has raised $100 million in capital and has dehydrating bins in 10,000 homes. For $100 million, you could place 3 chickens and their infrastructure—assuming $300 per unit—in 333,333 apartments and generate about 166 million eggs a year, worth nearly $90 million (or $100 million if they’re $7 a dozen). That’s a complete zeroed-out return on investment in the first year.
Where is the entrepreneur out there who can see the opportunity? Oh, the problem? People would rather spend money than care for a couple of chickens, and that, dear folks, sums up the problem with the world today.
What do you do with food scraps?