There Is No Waste in Creation

What Decomposition Reveals About Waste, Transformation, and Return

This is the second essay in a series exploring Judaism and composting.

I spend a great deal of my working life handling things other people have finished with: apple cores, coffee grounds, carrot tops, eggshells, wilted vegetables, leaves, straw, stems, peels, pits, bones, and the remains of meals.

We have an efficient word for all of this: waste. The word tells us that a material’s useful life has ended. We wanted something from it, we got what we wanted—or failed to—and now we are done with it.

But stand beside a compost pile long enough and that category begins to fall apart. The bacteria do not know they are eating garbage. Neither do the fungi. A piece of apple that has become useless to me may be an abundant source of energy and nutrients to other organisms. Those organisms consume it, transform it, reproduce, die themselves, and become part of still more transformations. What we call waste enters a biological community in which the end of one usefulness continually becomes the beginning of another.

Perhaps one of our problems with waste begins with the pronoun:

Useless to whom?

A World Called “Very Good”

The Torah’s creation story does not begin with human beings deciding which parts of the world have value. Again and again in Genesis, creation is called good. Light is good. The earth brings forth vegetation and it is good. The waters teem with living creatures; the land produces animals. Then, at the end of the sixth day, God looks not at one isolated creature but at the whole created order and declares it tov me’od—“very good.”

That does not mean Judaism teaches that every physical thing must remain forever in its present form. Living things are born and die. Plants wither. Fruit rots. Bodies decompose. Mountains erode. Creation is not a collection of beautiful objects preserved under glass; it is a world of continual change.

In fact, an astonishing rabbinic interpretation of tov me’od moves directly toward this problem. Bereshit Rabbah preserves a teaching associated with Rabbi Meir that plays on the Hebrew me’od, “very,” and mot, “death,” arriving at the startling interpretation: “and behold, death was good.”

That is not an easy teaching, and it should not be sentimentalized. Human death is painful, and Jewish tradition certainly does not ask us to pretend otherwise. But embedded in the teaching is a recognition that a living world cannot consist only of beginnings. Life also contains endings, succession, decomposition, and return.

Maimonides later invokes Rabbi Meir’s interpretation when discussing the physical order of creation. Individual material beings do not remain forever; one passes away and another succeeds it. Mortality and material change are not interruptions of the created world. They are among the conditions within which that world continues.

As a composter, I find this strikingly recognizable, because decomposition is not what happens after nature has failed. Decomposition is one of the ways nature works.

What Happens After Life

Walk through a forest and look down. The ground is covered with material that is no longer alive in the ordinary sense: fallen leaves, twigs, bark, dead roots, perhaps the remains of insects and animals. A tree eventually falls and may lie on the forest floor for years. Yet biological activity has not stopped. Quite the opposite.

Fungi enter dead wood. Bacteria metabolize organic compounds. Invertebrates shred and consume plant remains. Other organisms eat them. Nutrients held inside once-living tissue are gradually transformed and become available to other parts of the ecosystem. The physical form may be ending while biological usefulness continues.

A compost pile is a concentrated and deliberately managed version of this larger process. Put food scraps and appropriate carbon-rich materials together under the right conditions, and microbial communities begin working almost immediately. Carbon provides energy and building material; nitrogen helps support proteins, enzymes and microbial growth. Oxygen, moisture, physical structure, temperature, particle size and the proportions of the ingredients all influence which organisms thrive and how decomposition proceeds.

When those conditions are right, the pile may become remarkably hot. Push a long thermometer into active compost and the temperature can rise well above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Nothing has been plugged in. There is no heater buried beneath the pile and no flame inside it. The heat is metabolism—the collective activity of immense communities of organisms too small for us to see.

I never tire of that. You can take material someone regarded as garbage, create the right biological conditions around it, and within days feel heat radiating from microbial life.

The apple core is not simply disappearing. Its material is being transformed. Some carbon is metabolized and released as carbon dioxide. Some becomes part of microbial bodies and other organic compounds. Nutrients change chemical form. Microorganisms reproduce, die, and themselves become part of the material. As the readily decomposable compounds are consumed, the microbial community and temperature change. With sufficient time and proper management, the mixture stabilizes into mature compost—a substance profoundly different from the raw ingredients that entered the pile.

This is one reason I am cautious with the familiar phrase that composting “turns waste into soil.” It is beautiful, but the biology is more interesting than that. Compost is not simply instant soil, and matter does not magically remain in one closed container. Energy moves through living systems; carbon and other elements change forms and move among organisms, atmosphere, water and soil.

The deeper wonder is that something can cease to be useful in one form without ceasing to participate in life.

What Do We Mean by “Waste”?

This is why the familiar phrase there is no waste in nature is both illuminating and, if taken literally, too simple.

Ecosystems are not perfect zero-waste machines. Materials can accumulate. Nutrients can move from one ecosystem into another. Some compounds remain unavailable for long periods. Natural processes can create conditions harmful to particular organisms. Nature does not operate inside the neat circular arrows of a recycling symbol.

But the phrase points toward an important truth: living systems are extraordinarily good at finding further uses for material whose previous use has ended.

A fallen leaf is finished as part of a tree’s canopy, but not as organic matter. A dead root is no longer drawing water into a plant, but it leaves carbon and channels in the soil. Manure is the end product of one animal’s digestion and the beginning of another biological process. A fallen tree may be dead as a tree while remaining habitat, food, moisture reservoir and, eventually, decomposed organic matter for years.

The mistake is not that human beings recognize endings. There really are endings. The mistake is assuming that the end of usefulness to us is the end of usefulness altogether.

That assumption is buried inside the word waste. I eat the banana and call the peel waste. I drink the coffee and call the grounds waste. I want the carrot root and call the tops waste. I rake leaves because I want a neat lawn and call the leaves yard waste.

What I often really mean is simply: I am finished with this.

That is not the same thing.

And the distinction matters because our declaration that something is worthless usually determines what we do with it next.

Judaism and What Remains

Jewish tradition contains an interesting resistance to the idea that the person who possesses something is necessarily the only person capable of determining its value.

Consider the agricultural laws of pe’ah and leket. The Torah tells a farmer not to reap every last corner of the field and not to retrieve every piece of the harvest that falls. The vineyard is not to be picked completely clean. What remains is left for the poor and the stranger.

These are teachings about justice, not composting, and there is no need to turn every agricultural mitzvah into an environmental metaphor. But notice the change of perspective. To a landowner focused solely on maximizing his harvest, an unreaped corner might look like unrealized production and a fallen stalk like something missed. Torah says not to gather them. They still have a destination. They still have claimants. Their usefulness did not end with the landowner’s ability to take them.

The principle of bal tashchit, which I introduced in the first essay and will explore more fully in the next, approaches the question from another direction. Jewish law develops a prohibition against needless destruction precisely because usefulness carries moral weight. Maimonides explicitly includes the needless destruction of food within that principle.

Together, these teachings encourage a habit of mind especially relevant in a disposable society: do not be too quick to confuse “I am done with this” with “this has no value.”

That is not merely a lesson about garbage. It is a challenge to the way we understand possession, usefulness and our place within systems larger than ourselves.

The Strange Human Category of Garbage

Modern garbage makes the problem unusually vivid.

We combine materials from entirely different biological and industrial systems and expect one category—trash—to describe them all. Food scraps are mixed with petroleum-based plastics, broken glass, synthetic textiles, multilayer packaging, electronic components and substances created through industrial chemistry. We place an apple core beside materials whose persistence and behavior bear almost no resemblance to it and call the entire mixture garbage.

But the apple core did not become biologically useless when it entered the trash can. We simply placed it into a human system that makes its next useful transformation much more difficult.

This is one reason composting feels to me less like the invention of a new sustainability technology and more like the correction of a category error. Organic material belongs within biological processes. We created systems in which enormous quantities of it are mixed into garbage, hauled away and buried.

The problem is not that the banana peel has nowhere to go. Biologically, it already has somewhere to go and something to become. We are the ones who created a system that interrupts that journey.

I explore the physical consequences of that interruption—landfills, methane, municipal green bins, industrial organics processing, and what changes when we compost close to where we live, work and play—in “There Is No ‘Away.’” Here the more basic question is: Why do we so quickly decide that organic remains are waste in the first place?

Returning to Dust

Psalm 104 offers a beautiful way of thinking about this.

The psalm is an extended meditation on creation: springs running through valleys, animals drinking, birds nesting, grass growing, trees flourishing, lions seeking food, the sea filled with creatures. Then, in the space of two verses, it moves through death and renewal. God takes away the breath of living creatures and they perish and return to dust; God sends forth breath, life is created, and the face of the earth is renewed.

The psalm is theology, not a lesson in decomposition ecology. But its vision of creation is not static. Creatures are fed, creatures die, they return, and life appears again. The world it praises is alive precisely because it is always changing.

That is close to what a compost pile teaches physically. The things entering the pile cannot remain what they were. If I insist on preserving an apple core forever as an apple core, I have prevented the transformation I am trying to encourage.

A peel disappears as a peel, a stem as a stem. Eventually, the distinction between yesterday’s coffee grounds and last month’s leaves becomes difficult or impossible to see. The original forms are lost, but something new becomes possible through their loss.

This is where composting challenges an ordinary understanding of preservation. Caring for material does not always mean keeping it unchanged. Sometimes the best way to preserve its value is to allow it to become something else.

That is a very different idea from disposal.

Waste Is a Relationship

If we take this seriously, waste begins to look less like a permanent property of an object and more like a description of a relationship.

A banana peel is not inherently waste. It becomes waste within a human system that has no further use for it. Change the relationship and its identity changes: put the peel in a landfill and we call it garbage; put it into a properly managed compost system and it becomes feedstock.

That may sound like semantics, but language shapes behavior. If we believe we are handling garbage, our objective is to get rid of it. If we recognize that we are handling a biological resource, the question becomes how to use it well.

None of this is an excuse to waste food. Quite the opposite. As I argued in the first essay, composting food waste is a last resort. If food can still nourish someone, its best use is still as food. Save it. Eat it later. Share it. Find another appropriate use for it before allowing it to become waste.

But eventually we reach material whose usefulness as food for us really has ended. That is precisely when another kind of usefulness can begin.

The shift from What do I want from this? to What can this become now? may be one of the most important lessons composting offers.

It is also deeply compatible with a Jewish understanding of ourselves as participants in relationships that began before us and will continue after us. We did not create soil, invent decomposition, design bacteria, or create carbon, nitrogen, water and the astonishing capacity of a seed to become a plant. We encounter all of these things in the middle of their stories.

Composting allows us to participate responsibly in what happens next.

There Is No Waste in Creation

So what do I mean when I say there is no waste in creation?

I do not mean that every natural system is perfectly circular, that nothing is ever lost, or that every substance human beings create can safely be returned to the earth. Those claims would be false.

I mean something more modest and, I think, more demanding: the living world continually demonstrates that an ending is not necessarily the end of usefulness.

Jewish tradition gives us several ways of noticing that. Genesis looks at the created whole and calls it very good. Bereshit Rabbah preserves the astonishing suggestion that even death somehow belongs within that goodness. Psalm 104 places death, return to dust, creation and renewal within the same vision of a living world. The laws of the harvest remind us not to assume that everything within our reach exists only for our use. Bal tashchit warns against destroying what still has value.

Composting lets us encounter all of those questions materially.

A banana peel stops being food for us and becomes food for microorganisms. Plant remains lose their recognizable forms and enter a vast decomposer community. Microbial activity produces heat. Complex materials are broken apart and transformed. Over time, stable organic matter develops, and finished compost can be returned to soil where its organic matter and nutrients participate in another phase of biological life.

Not everything that remains after us is waste. Sometimes we have simply stopped following the story too soon.

Perhaps when we reach the apparent end of something, the first question should not always be How do I get rid of this?

Sometimes the better question is:

What is this useful for now?

That question will not eliminate waste, and it will not make every material harmless or useful. But it can change our relationship with what remains.

And if we follow organic matter far enough, we may discover that what we called the end was only the place where another use began.

Sources

• Genesis 1:31 — God sees the whole of creation and declares it tov me’od, “very good.”

• Bereshit Rabbah 9:5 — the teaching associated with Rabbi Meir interpreting “very good” through the startling idea that “death was good.”

• Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 10 — mortality, material change, Rabbi Meir’s teaching, and continuation within the created order.

• Psalm 104:29–30 — creatures return to dust and the face of the earth is renewed.

• Leviticus 19:9–10 — pe’ah and leket: portions of the harvest and gleanings are left for the poor and the stranger.

• Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim u’Milchamot 6:8–10 — the extension of bal tashchit to needless destruction of useful things, including food.

• Jewish Farm School, “Composting & Cycles” — Jewish educational material connecting natural cycles, composting, Shabbat, Shmita and renewal.

• Hazon, Food for Thought: Hazon’s Sourcebook on Jews, Food & Contemporary Life — Jewish sources and educational framing around food, agriculture, ethics and responsibility.

• Cornell Composting, “Compost Chemistry” and related compost science resources — microbial decomposition, carbon and nitrogen, oxygen, moisture and biologically generated heat.

• U.S. Forest Service research on decomposition ecology — decomposition, nutrient cycling and the ecological role of dead organic matter.

• USDA Agricultural Research Service research on compost microbiology — microbial succession, thermophilic activity and stabilization during composting.

Previous essay: Composting Is a Jewish Act: What Jewish Tradition Can Teach Us About Waste, Soil, and What We Return to the Earth.
Next essay: Bal Tashchit: The Jewish Prohibition Against Waste.