Composting: dirty riches.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: Compost from organic waste

Most people just assume that landfills stink. But real connoisseurs of malodorousness, like composting consultant Clark Gregory, a soil scientist who has helped communities compost such noisome waste products as chicken manure and scallop guts, will tell you differently. Over the years, Gregory has been everything from vice president of the Woods End Research Lab in Mt. Vernon, Maine, to composting supervisor for Fulton County, Georgia, but he prefers to introduce himself simply as The Compost Man. And to his expert nostrils, landfills these days seem almost odorless. Sure, the garbage in landfills is rotten, The Compost Man admits. But it's not rotten enough.

If garbage were allowed to rot properly, developed countries would not be facing so serious a solid waste crisis, since up to three-quarters of what we throw away is organic, readily biodegradable material, such as food, leaves, and paper. Rotting isn't exactly easy, though, in the tightly packed mountain of garbage at a typical landfill, where organics don't have access to oxygen. Landfills are expanding instead of shrinking, and space is becoming both scarce and expensive. In a 1992 survey of American waste facilities conducted by the journal Biocycle, 22 of the 32 responding states estimated their remaining landfill capacity to be 10 or fewer years.

Resolving our waste crisis will depend primarily, of course, on a reduction of our trash output. But when it comes to managing the organic materials that we do discard, the obvious goal is to facilitate nature's tendency toward decay - which is exactly what composting is designed to do. Through composting, the bacteria and fungi that gorge themselves on organic matter can not only reduce the refuse's weight and volume by half within a few months, but also turn it into a rich soil product. And all you have to do is throw your organic waste onto a pile, stir it around occasionally, and watch it rot. Instituted correctly, on a municipal level, a comprehensive composting program - with glant-size piles - could address serious solid waste problems, produce cheap, safe fertilizer capable of replacing many of the chemicals now used in agriculture, and deliver a boost to both local and national economies. In short, it would be perfume to Clark Gregory's nostrils.

The last few years have at least established composting as a rising green industry, especially in the most populous regions of the developed world. In the United States, as recently as...