Never mind the foul odor, it is “black gold”

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me” ? Henry David Thoreau INING is destructive to the environment.

That statement says just what mining is - far from glamorous. But its output can make every fiber in your body vibrate and exclaim with excitement – “gold.”

Well, that is just one reason why people create subways deep into the Earth and retrieve gold at great cost.

There is another kind of mining operation that can restore the environment and produce its own kind of “gold.” It is called black gold mining.

The full extent and potential of “black gold mining” has yet to be explored in our country and it is best undertaken, not in the jungle, but in an urban setting.

In a regular mining operation, you blast and tunnel deep into solid rock underground to bring out the gold ore.

With black gold mining, you collect trash and make them rot on sunlit space. Depending on your motivation and objective, you turn organic matter into cash or fertilizers for food crops through composting. Any which way you take, cheer up, it is good and safer than mining ore at thousands of feet below the ground.

Composting is an old science and farming practice. Its appeal will not die out. That alone should make it glamorous and interesting to anyone.

I guess not all who read this will take my word, and agree, but the time has come for all citizens especially those in urban areas to compost their trash and help sustain life. Urban dwellers cannot expect to live simply as consumers and trash makers out of the Earth’s resources. By

Mcomposting their organic waste, they are at least responsible individuals who compost and return their wastes back to the land that nourishes them.

For instance, Baguio City is one of the top waste producers of the country. People from all over the country, from all walks of life, visit the City. Where people go, they bring along their wastes or generate it.

In 2016, Baguio was reported to collect some 405 tons of wastes daily.

A Sun Star Report said that forty-five percent of the collected wastes are kitchen waste, 17 percent, paper; 16 percent, plastic; seven percent, grass and wood; and five percent, metal. That should give you a total of 69 percent of the waste collected daily as organic matter.

It is really a shame to just keep collecting and piling organic waste on the public dumps in a wasteful manner.

Take the case of kitchen wastes. Getting food from the farm to our plates uses so much of the nation’s land, energy, and freshwater to grow them. It does not make sense to let this wastes continue being handled as we do now.

Imagine the cost needed to collect hundreds of tons of solid organic waste every day. How much does it cost to transport that waste to its present destination in Tarlac Province? How about the fees paid to have those waste transported and disposed of, not counting labor cost?

Current science has also found out that solid wastes exacerbate global warming because when food buried inside a landfill decomposes without exposure to air (anaerobic digestion), it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

My cousin who was city born and bred got