Plastic in my garden

Not sure why I was inspired to write this. Probably because I haven’t been posting enough doomer material on here lately. But…I’ve been getting into gardening lately. Tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, beans, potatoes, beets, radishes, kale, a bit of corn that is being viciously devoured by ants… It’s all very small scale. Rewarding but it’s not gonna feed the family. The fact that I’ve eaten potatoes all my life yet had no idea what they look in the wild and how beautiful they are as plants…really hit home for me: I know nothing about what sustains me and keeps me alive. It‘s sorta like living with brain damage.

Anyway, the soil we have in our backyard is clay heavy (or I think it is) and gets boggy after heavy rains because we’re near a creek and water from from the surrounding area drains right though us. So to grow food I’ve been working mostly with raised beds and a couple of terraced planters that were already here when we moved in. That means I’ve been dragging hundreds of pounds of earth and compost home since spring. Some of it I buy, some it comes from the municipal compost program run by Beacon, our city. The government here collects yard clippings from residents, composts them in huge mounds, and then grinds them up at a facility near the local sewage treatment plant. There’s always a supply of finished compost that anyone can shovel into their car…as much of it as they want or need.

It’s a nice service by the city. It’s good for the environment and introduces as much of a closed loop ecosystem as is possible — with organic waste cycling right back into the place where it came from rather than being shipped far away. But there is a small problem. The compost is full of plastic. Every time I’ve gone there I’ve noticed various plastic bits in the soil — mostly chunks of bags by the looks of them, but harder stuff, too. Who knows what it is. I try to pick out the bits that I can see but it’s basically impossible to catch them all or even most of them. I’m sure some of the pieces are too small to see clearly.

I guess people here scoop up bags and other plastic-y items with their waste and the composters don’t bother to sort things out and just dump everything into one pile. But I’m sure that even if they tried they wouldn’t be able to catch it all. There’s plastic in everything these days. Labels, zip ties, even the little stickers they put on fruit in the store…

It’s a widespread problem, too, not just confined to our little city. You can find articles and studies and reddit posts complaining about it: plastic has fully infested our compost stream, whether the compost is produced by a small town or a major corporation, whether its from food scraps or yard waste…it doesn’t matter.

So my little backyard garden has plastic in it, leeching chemicals into my beautiful tomatoes. I’m sure yours does, too — if you have one.

Obviously I’m not the first to introduce plastic into the ground around the house. I keep finding bits of the stuff buried all around the property. We’re surrounded by it. It’s inescapable. It’ll be there basically forever, breaking down and releasing petrochemicals into food and water for generations to come…that’s on top of whatever other chemicals are also leeching off various toxic building materials, asphalt, flaking paint, solvents…

I’d like to think that my little garden is safe…that it’s not polluted like the industrial ag that produces our food. But there is no real escape. There is at least one consolation, though. My food tastes better…better than anything you can get at the store. So what if there’s a little PFAS in it. We’re all doomed to carry these chemicals in our bodies, like scars.

—Yasha

PS: I’ve known about some of the “issues” surrounding compost for a while. But this is the first time I’ve come across it on a personal level.

Top: Me with the compost pile. I was too lazy to take a picture of the plastic bits I found. Bottom: A photo of my what will I hope will be my fall potato crop, grown with tiny bits of plastic. [shrug emoji]

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