The danger of depending on waste products; resiliency, sustainability.

I'm building a lot more gardens this year due to the coronavirus disruptions. I had planned to mulch them with cardboard and woodchips; it isn't foolproof, but as a first year strategy to suppress weeds and allow for the planting of winter squash it works fairly well. I found, however, that wood chips and large cardboard were almost impossible to source. Due to economic damage, people must be holding off on getting tree trimming done. None of the tree trimming companies have wood chips. (Part of the problem is probably also higher demand as more people start gardens; sites like "Chipdrop" are still showing activity, but not enough.) The city maintains a free mulch pile; I checked it, and it was all gone. Could be that there was just tons of demand, or that the city employees that ran the chipper got laid off, or both. I posted on social media asking people in my immediate area to let me know if they are having tree work done; so far, nothing.

Same with cardboard. Bike and appliance stores are shut, contractors are working less. There is more small cardboard than ever, but very few large sheets.

It made me think about how much embodied energy is actually contained in these "waste" products. By all means use them if you have them, but in a low energy future we'll probably have to switch over to using a hoe, just like I will probably have to this year.

While I'm not responding so much to the whether or not we should rely on waste products, I have some suggestions for where to find some. Big box stores like Costco have sheets of cardboard that separate the layers on pallets. They are typically completely willing to give you some, as they just throw them out, and they are not used to pack up people's groceries.

I can't get wood chips delivered here, so I only get chips when I have trees taken down. But this year I bought a small wood chipper to deal with my shrub branches. We will see how happy I am with it.

If you can get your soil in good shape without, more power to you. Good luck.

And if you think that's annoying, imagine running a large operation built atop a waste stream as a primary input, and having it vanish on you, right while everything else goes to hell too.. I am sure there will be some really interesting examples of this sort of antergy.

And yet, failing to utilize such inputs while available doesn't seem very permie either..

It's almost like there are issues at any point of contact between a resilient and sustainable system, and one that is not..

Yep, that's the problem. To use a resource efficiently, one really has to optimize a system for it. Then, when the resource goes away, the system falls apart! How to prevent this?