Domestic Waste Disposers - Environmentally Acceptable?

Are waste disposers yet another misuse of water and electricity and what about their impact on the environment

, is it negative or positive? Do we need them or are they just one more consumer product that we could well do without? You may be surprised by some of my conclusions.

First of all let us consider what happens to organic waste in a household that does not use a waste disposer. In the vast majority of cases the item, lets assume some unwanted cabbage, will be dumped into the trash can. The can will be emptied, into a bag or bin of some description, ready for the garbage truck to collect. The truck will probably take it to a land fill site.

Here are the negative aspects of getting rid of the cabbage in this way.

Could get a little smelly in your kitchen or elsewhere.

The receptacle that you load it into may also give off odours and will probably need to be regularly cleaned.

The local garbage truck will, almost certainly, be powered by an internal combustion engine and that equals pollution.

The landfill site will not be the most attractive local feature and is not a great use of real estate.

Landfill sites give off methane gas, another unwanted form of pollution.

Landfill sites can cause leakage into the ground of some very unwelcome liquids.

Here is what happens when, as an alternative, a domestic waste disposal unit is employed.

The waste disposer grinds the cabbage down to small particles that flow easily down your drainage pipes and eventually finish up at the area waste treatment plant. A very environmentally friendly form of transportation.

Even though the material will still give off methane when micro organisms consume it, in a modern plant this can be captured and used to generate electricity.

The broken down organic matter, sometimes referred to as biosolids, can be used as a fertilizer to generate more food and so the cycle begins again.

You may be thinking that none of this takes into account the water and electricity used by the waste disposal unit. This is an important point and one with surprising answers. Surveys have discovered that the average disposer uses approximately one gallon of water per day for every person in the home. That equates to around one percent of a household's total water consumption.

Even more startling is that most disposers use no more than four kilowatt hours of electricity and that amounts to around 50 cents a year for the average American household!

There are other aspects to take into account such as how environmentally sound are the manufacturing processes used in the factory that makes the disposer in the first place. Assuming that the producer is subject to today's rigorous rules and regulations, when it comes to environmental issues, then the domestic waste disposer appears to be a satisfactory way of disposing and managing our unwanted food.

by: Lawrence Stainbank

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