Gil Friend and David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

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Our sewage, as we've already shown—at least with vegetable discards from our markets—can be recycled into compost right here . . . instead of being piped 13 or 14 miles out of town, laced with chemicals, and dumped in the river. We can do much the same thing with our solid trash. Instead of mixing it all together and then trucking it away for landfill, we can separate it right in our households. You know, just have three or four different trash cans and then sell the glass here and the cans there and the paper down the street to companies that would use this waste as raw materials for new products.

PLOWBOY: What are you doing to encourage the adoption of such a system?

FRIEND: We've published articles in newspapers and magazines, and testified at City Council and Regional Council hearings. And we've gotten some results.

The city, for example, was considering the construction of a nine-million-dollar solid waste treatment facility. The idea, by the way, was originally presented by a supposedly non-profit organization, which—in actual fact—represents canners and bottlers. People with a vested interest in throwaway containers. So they proposed a facility which would take mixed garbage and separate it for recycling.

Now in addition to being very costly, such a system could only pay for itself if there was a continued supply of throwaways. Those manufacturers knew that—if we bought their system—we would have committed ourselves to using millions upon millions of their containers. But we're trying to ban throwaway bottles in this city. Fortunately, our testimony—and the testimony of a lot of other groups—succeeded in stopping that one.

MORRIS: Neil Seldman, the ILSR member who's been working in that area, is trying to convince the District government to use recycled paper. Now, of course, Washington probably consumes more paper than any other city ever has in the history of the world. And yet, government purchasing agents almost always buy paper produced from virgin materials because it's 10% cheaper. Well, that's looking at the problem very narrowly because any valid cost figures should also reflect the currect costs of throwing the paper away once it's been used. That's a cost everybody conveniently forgets about, but it's there nonetheless.

PLOWBOY: All right. Paper, bottles, and cans—even old refrigerators and cars—it's easy to figure out ways to recycle things like that. And you've proven that food discards can be turned into compost here in town. But what about the tough one. What about fecal wastes?

FRIEND: They can be processed on the household level or on the block level . . . I'm not sure which is more economical.

PLOWBOY: How?

FRIEND: Through composting toilets, to name just one example. There are a number on the market—although they're still expensive—and they work much like a compost pile. The units are simply toilets with chambers below where the excrement is collected. In some models the waste is stirred by an electric motor. In other designs, the floor of the chamber is sloped so the material very slowly rolls down the slope and over a period of time, turns itself, just as if it were in a compost pile. Micro-organisms decompose the waste and transform it into stable, sweet-smelling humus . . . the best possible fertilizer you can put on your garden.

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