Hi,
I'm finding the discussion very interesting and stimulating and would like
to second Chris's opinion

At 21:28 11.10.00 -0400, Chris Furedy wrote:
>cut......  I think that Inge and Rogier have made an excellent
>contribution in attempting to compare these
>dimensions of very different composting undertakings...cut....
>and we have a general idea of the financial
>implications of composting urban organicic wastes.  So
>I hope that this work will prompt others to gather data to
>allow further comparisons.
 

Chris Zurbrugg <zurbrugg@eawag.ch> wrote:
>My name is also Chris (but I'm a Mr. :-) ) and I work for SANDEC,
>a research institution focussing on water and sanitation issues
>of developing countries. In solid waste management a major
>part of our research activities focus on
>decentralized composting of municipal solid waste.
>
>I find the dissemination of information from existing cases
>very important and often neglected (maybe because it is
>so difficult to get "comprehensive" data). There are many,
>many composting experiences out there and the
>same lessons learned in one case are learned over and
>over again in other cases.

I wish to make a brief statement on the above alinea of Mr. Chris - hopefully
there won't be more Chrises joining the discussion, or else things might get confusing. :)

Though my years of experience in developing countries in the area of SWM are
few, my common sense tells me that landfills should be financially viable. I
can refer to a case in the Philippines, Batangas Bay to be precise, where
spearheaded by the IMO a new privately operated landfill was supposed to be
resurrected. The only real issue of importance of this whole undertaking was
its feasibility study: it is, or is it not an interesting business?

Obviously, the enterpreneurs were least interested in the (social) side
effects of their new landfill. Among other consequences was to have as much
waste (household, industrial, commercial and to a lesser extent hospital)
collected and disposed of in order to meet their daily quota to break even.
This would seriously endanger the local recycling businesses in the area
since it was not found interesting enough to work with these families, or
junkshops, and have a recycling compound on or right outside the landfill
site  - several researches clearly showed that these junkshops were taking
out considerable volumes of materials from households and commercial
establishments. With an intesified/improved service collection to the
landfill, these junkshops would face the threat of being pushed out of the market.

That having said, nonetheless, the private sanitary landfill would meet
international technology standards to properly dispose of waste (or at least
I hope), something the (provincial) municipality wasn't able to comply with
after having found out that it simply involved too high an investment. If the
point of viability hadn't been stressed so much during its initial planning
phase the new landfill would be just another dumpsite operated within the
local municipality's budget. True, this dumpsite could very well be
financially viable, but is this what we are looking for?

Not to deviate too much from the subject, I believe composting can still be
an interesting activity when there are opportunity gains (measured in
monetary units) to be obtained from not-landfilling, the idea Manfred Fehr
referred to in his earlier message. But you can only do this if (organic)
waste disposal if more expensive than composting, even if this latter
activity is not sustainable an sich. Now in order to promote composting as an
alternative in India for example, it would be more practical when composting
is a profitable business in the first place. What good does it do when
composting, though a safe way, is costing us money in the long run?

It would be interesting to know whether there are case studies where
composting is (partly) financing landfill management.

greetings,
Rogier