The Compost King of New York is an article in The New York Times Magazine written by Elizabeth Royte. This article features Charles Vigliotti, chief executive of the company American Organic Energy, and how he plans to use an anaerobic digester to transform New York City’s food waste into both fertilizer and biogas. After explaining how it works, the differences between compost piles and an anaerobic digester, and all the good that will come from using an anaerobic digester, Royte starts to talk about how food waste plays into the lives of your average New York residents. We know that we should categorize our waste when discarding things, but do we really know what ends up happening to that waste once it is no longer in our possession? She then mentions the Department of Sanitation’s curbside program (the largest residential-food-waste collection scheme in the country) and how the quality of the program isn’t very good, a private company called Regal Recycling and how the table scraps collected there eventually make their way to McEnroe Organic Farm, and Will Brinton (who has spent his entire career studying the science of rot, recently discovering that it is actually better to anaerobically digest food than compost it). Although Royte was initially skeptical of Charles Vigliotti, by the end of the article (in learning how beneficial anaerobically digesting food is) she talks about all the good he’s doing and the elaborate plans he has for his company – he really does seem to have a certain enthusiasm for a food-waste-fueled clean-energy future.
At one point in the article, Charles Vigliotti is quoted for having said “We are not changing human nature but building our plant to suit it”. This quote stuck with me, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized how this is applicable to design in general and how it should be considered.
