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Beloved Reader,

Welcome to the CompostingInSingapore Blog. I’m Joseph and I’m one of the co-founders of Project Kainosis™ which owns and operates this blog. This foreword has been written to give fullness to your understanding of our work and writings, and also a chance for you to connect to us across space and time. We thank for your time here, and we hope you have enjoyed yourself whilst learning something new! As always, we look forward to providing you with honest insights through entertaining writing.

This blog is a project by Kainosis™, that aims to cut the amount of food waste going into the general waste system. The ultimate aim will be to get the attention of the Singapore government to secure some funding, or even better, to become a part of community action by private enterprise!

To understand everything better, I will suggest a few pages that you can read at your own time: Firstly, it might interest you to understand the general structure of Kainosis™ and the reasons for its terminology. It should help answer questions pretty well like “what is Kainosis™?” or “are you a company and/or affiliated to the Singapore government?” After that, you may find out more about Kainosis™ and its founders (that’s me and my fiancé) and, if you’re so inclined, we’ve put up a page explaining our raison d’être as well.

Other things you can read would be the Kainosis™ Composting Manifesto - I know, I know.. Big words, sounds grand. But it’s really just about stating (not setting) the standards and type of composting we are attempting. At some time, I may expand it to a library of sorts with some terminologies set as standards, but for now just a statement of the key elements we’re working with will do. We’ll complement that with some writings about our current thoughts about the composting industry, so expect this collective section to be quite dynamic. On a side note, if static pages get edited, I promise I’ll find out some way to get information out to you – perhaps via RSS or the like. I’m of yet undecided.

Which brings me to my own personal foreword – this page you’re reading now. As you’ve noticed by now, I like to keep my language informal and as time goes on I am certain I will begin to ignore certain grammatical norms and start writing in the style that I stubbornly haven’t been able willing to shake since my youth. So do let me know if any of my writing doesn’t endear to you (no I am not being sarcastic here), and I will do my best to accommodate. Thankfully Michelle’s writing is crisp and entertaining and I feel blessed to have her balance things out. So do be honest and don’t be a digital stranger! We promise you honest writing and sincere opinions, no matter how challenging.

CompostingInSingapore is a blog chronicling our attempts to build various types of compost piles. While truly that seems to be the most boring statement alive, there is certainly a method to this madness. There may be a plethora of composting resources available, but through our research, we found a distinct lack of resources relevant to our local tropical climate. To the average composter this may not seem like much of a problem, but to say that the weather in South-East Asia is tropical is an understatement:

First and foremost, the humidity is nothing like Florida or Hawaii as most international friends might first assume. The weather is much closer to that which produces Primary rainforests like that in the Amazon. Simply put, there is a reason why the US marines absolutely detested fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. The local rain is certainly no foggy mist of gentle morning rain that one can get by with an umbrella. Any Singaporean will tell you that umbrellas are good only for the upper half of your body.

Putting my rant on the local weather aside, suffice to say my point is that the weather alone makes almost all composting advice moot. Some other cultural factors add on to the complexity of composting in Singapore. For one, a majority of Singaporeans live in public housing apartments – relatively close living areas that stop just short of being communal. Any proposed composting solution would have to be absolutely odorless, pest-free, and clean to be left indoors.

It would be apt now to briefly discuss the varied commercial composting solutions available. Commercial (domestic) composters in general speed up the composting process by introducing heat and aeration – this also creates the effect of a more fool-proof composting process. I shall not elaborate too much here, but the main aim of composting is to create a high temperature environment in the presence of enough moisture and aeration. This not only rapidly creates compost, but destroys pathogens (if any) and allows the compost pile to take on almost any organic material.

However, for the purpose of CompostingInSingapore, we will cover only raw vegetable-based composting. The reason is that of all the possible problems and limitations, food separation is actually the easiest to deal with. Commercial (domestic) composters would have allowed composters to just mindlessly compost without minding C/N ratios, temperatures or moisture levels etc. However the high costs involved would discourage all but the most motivated composters. To understand this, one would have to understand the culture specific to Singapore.

Image taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Singapore is a relatively new and admittedly over-achieving young nation which has achieved modernization long before society was ready for it. As such, domestic issues have a tendency to reflect the tension between a society trying to make sense of new innovations and other world views brought in by a globalized society. Despite its (debated) developed status, the population is still mostly concerned with pragmatic issues lower down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – something that is more symptomatic of developing economies but is still prevalent within the shine and gleam of this cosmopolitan island nation. Composting is hardly an area of concern, much less recycling for that matter. Yet the amount of waste is a real and rather urgent concern – Semakau landfill has a very limited lifespan, and land-strapped Singapore will be hard-pressed to find another site for landfill requirements.

Organic waste is simply wasted on landfills which are hardly the best conditions for composting. The result is slow decomposition which gives off terrible smells while it slowly pollutes the environment. Of course that applies only to the food waste that is not intercepted and incinerated before being dumped at Semakau again (hardly a very sustainable alternative). Other countries have dealt with the problem by instituting the need to separate organic (specifically food) waste from general wastes. Notably, citizens also pay for per bag of waste – something which certainly has driven interest in composting.

**A mild correction is needed here: since the time of publication, I have come to learn that organic waste (in fact almost all waste) is incinerated before being landfilled. While I could not articulate it well then, the real problem with food waste is the high moisture content which incinerators have to put up with.**

So all that in mind, we return back to our Singapore situation. With a looming waste management problem, the only way out seems to be for the government to once again strictly enforce new waste management systems like those in European countries – something I’m certain might get the government labeled as being draconian again. Rather, two options exist: a domestic approach to food waste management or a more centralized institutional approach.

Notably the local government has already begun composting operations through IUT Global. It collects food waste from food centers to an industrial composting plant which creates various grades of fertilizers. For the record here at Kainosis™, we feel that IUT Global is doing a wonderful job and we would put our money behind IUT‘s operations anytime. (Here’s a freebie: IUT is pretty much front and center in rapidly improving Singapore-EU business relations). On the other hand, CompostingInSingapore is a targeted approach at the domestic food waste problem. There are two main areas of motivation for us: Domestic food waste accounts for above 40% of total food waste, and food waste is the third largest contributor to the total waste in Singapore.

Putting it all together, domestic food waste is a serious problem with no clear solution. The belief here is that simply taking punitive measures like intrusive laws or privatizing/monetizing to encourage waste reduction and separation goes against the social care that Singapore stands for. The holy grail for the situation here is a more subtle approach of behavior modification by improving perceptions and increasing motivations. All this brings us a full circle back to the need to develop a simple and unobtrusive form of composting in order to complement a holistic approach to encourage proper food separation/disposal. And then, people will naturally start composting!

CompostingInSingapore is an attempt to mediate this design problem. Through this blog we’ll keep you the readers updated on how our own experiences of composting the Project K way is going, and we’ll also regularly posts our thoughts so you can slowly get a sense of the philosophy here at Kainosis™.

God bless,
Joseph Solomon Tay
Founder, Kainosis™
Contributing Writer, CompostingInSingapore Blog