Editorial: The county should embrace bio-cycling on Vashon
Published 3:31 pm Tuesday, May 25, 2010
King County should do all it can to facilitate what appears to be a creative, smart and environmentally spot-on project to begin a bio-cycling effort on Vashon Island.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a single reason why the county — with its commitment to conservation and its concern about climate change — would not do all it could to clear the bureaucratic hurdles so as to help this project come to fruition. In a world where politicians like to tout win-win solutions, this one’s a ringer.
Here’s our choice, according to a group of Islanders working to make this dream a reality.
Should the county begin picking up yard and food waste on Vashon, it could transport that waste in diesel-guzzling trucks to a corporate-owned composting facility in Maple Valley, let it bio-degrade into compost by way of a process that releases into the atmosphere methane, one of the world’s worst greenhouse gases, and then haul that compost back to the Island in diesel-guzzling trucks for us to put on our vegetable gardens.
Or we could keep our food and yard waste here, composting it in a way that harnesses the methane for energy use.
According to members of Island Green Tech, a recently formed group of engineers, inventors and policy wonks, we could easily make the latter choice on Vashon. Indeed, an Island resident, Bob Kommer, runs a small company that does just such projects — in places other than Washington state. It’s difficult here, he says, because the state and county have rules in place that favor large composting facilities, like Cedar Grove in Maple Valley.
The Vashon project has garnered considerable interest among Island Green Tech members, because, they say, it’s appealing on many levels.
First, it would work well on an island, a geographically discrete place with high transportation costs and built-in needs for locally produced goods, like compost. The energy the project could produce — Kommer says enough to power 70 to 100 homes — would be a step towards energy independence. And perhaps most important, it’s a model of sustainability, a closed-loop system that would start with our food and end with soil, heat and power.
High school students could get involved. Jobs would be created. And unlike other new businesses — restaurants, shops, even professional services — it wouldn’t just chase the same scarce Island dollars, trying to steal customers from another existing business. It would create a product, right here on the Island.
One of the champions of the Vashon bio-cycling project is Islander Richard Britz, a visionary architect and leader in urban agriculture who wrote “Edible City Resource Manual.” Britz sees the project as pivotal — “a big deal,” as he put it, and “a bigger deal than King County seems to think it is.”
Our waste, Britz says, “is a resource that could have enormous economic potential for this Island.” The county has shown some interest, but in order to make this project a go, it would have to tear down some bureaucratic walls and rethink the way it issues bids for compost companies in search of a waste stream.
“We have to get them to shift from habit,” he says, “to novelty.”
King County, led by an executive with strong green credentials and a fondness for Vashon, is one political entity that should be able to embrace novelty. We strongly urge it to do so.
