The Compost King of New York featured on The New York Times begins with Elizabeth Royte’s description of her experience discovering Charles Viglotti’s, a chief executive of American Organic Energy, idea about building an anaerobic food waste digestion in a rural part of Yaphank, NY. He was eager that this site was going to revolutionize the world of waste compost. He explained that despite the high cost of the resource, it will bring many benefits by breaking down the food in a airtight space which will not only trap the smell, but also require less space. This process is unique in a way that most waste compost are operated outdoors. Furthermore, he claimed that his anaerobic digestion will produce both fertilizer and natural gas-like biogas which can be reused to generate heat and electricity. After a brief explanation of his proposal, she describes that despite the many concerns and oppositions to his project, he is still eagerly planning to make his idea into reality to further make our environment better.
Once a product has been used, loses its value, and turn into pure trash, we often turn our back from it, neglecting what would happen to it once it leaves our hands. We tend to not care about food waste as much because as Viglotti has mentioned, we don’t immediately see the effects of properly handling with food waste. This article is comforting in a way that it lets me know someone like Viglotti is out there thinking eagerly about ways to more effectively handle with food waste. His passion about the environment was very inspiring. However, it also taught me that we, like him, need to stop shifting responsibilities to others and neglecting the dangers of food waste and to start taking actions to lead our environment to a better and safer place.
