The Philosophy of Growing Compost -- Choshi, Choshi: The Compost Tale of the Circle of Returning Life (December 2000)

The Philosophy of Growing Compost -- Choshi, Choshi: The Compost Tale of the Circle of Returning Life (December 2000)

In the year 2000, Japan had lost the art of dealing with waste to the extent that it was ridiculed as a "country of garbage. Mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal - the debt accumulated in the name of growth has now manifested itself in urban expansion and rural exhaustion, and the remaining life of final disposal facilities is only one year. Incineration or landfill? In the same year that dioxin lit the flames of the policy of choosing between incineration and landfill, the Basic Law for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society finally set the country on the right course.

However, laws alone do not change society. What really changes society is an invisible "way of looking at things," in other words, an idea. This idea was quietly sprouting in Choshi City, Chiba Prefecture, unbeknownst to anyone.

The people of Choshi saw raw garbage and feces and urine--things that the city had always hated and pretended not to see--as "nourishment that will nurture life again. Together with the Agricultural Resource Utilization Production Association, they mixed them with charcoal and fermented them to make fully mature compost. The compost is then supplied to farmers, and the vegetables are returned to local supermarkets. This was the moment when the dining table and the garbage bin were connected by a single link.

Return as compost. This was in direct defiance of the modern notion that waste is worthless. Charcoal, which suppresses odors and pathogens, is not only a technology, but also a way of caring for the local community. The compost cycle that links farmers and consumers is truly an expression of ethics. This was not a policy. It was the implementation of citizens' ideas.

Its structure is nature and man, life and death, dirt and nutrition. It was an effort to quietly build a bridge over the opposing concepts that had been divided. In the soil of Choshi, it quietly sprouted. It was not a system, but a flower of thought. And its fragrance still breathes in the winds of the community.