Think composting is simple?

To the average observer, the huge piles of earth way back behind Weston Nurseries look pretty nondescript ― even boring.

A closer look, though, reveals a thin cloud of steam rising from the top ― evidence that under the surface, at temperatures up to 145 degrees, microscopic bacteria are doing their jobs.

“It’s cooking,” Weston Nurseries operations manager Jeff Meola said from the base of a large mound of compost on a recent overcast day. “We want to expose the pile to as much air as possible.”

Every month, Meola has an employee devote about five days to turning the piles ― called windrows ― over with a front-end loader to make sure the compost is “cooking” properly.

Those windrows and their bacteria provide area towns and farmers with rich, organic soil that can be sold or used in agriculture, gardening or erosion control.

It’s the state’s job ― through a partnership between the Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Agriculture ― to make sure those tiny bacteria don’t cause a large odor problem, like what happened at Northborough’s S.A. Farm.

“Managing waste materials is challenging,” said Gerard Kennedy, director of the agriculture department’s Division of Agricultural Conservation and Technical Assistance. “We try to work with farmers through different issues so they know what they need to do.”

While individuals can compost at home without a permit, business, municipalities or farms that want to do so need permits from either the environmental or agriculture departments.

According to the most recent figures, 10 MetroWest locations are registered with the environmental department as active composting sites, most of them public works departments. There are 216 registered sites statewide that churned out nearly a half million tons of compost in 2008.

“Today, over 90 percent of our leaf and yard waste is either composted or recycled into mulch or things of that sort,” said Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Joe Ferson ― a stark contrast to 25 years ago when most of that waste was burned or sent to landfills.

Ferson said that after the initial composting registration is issued, the department doesn’t routinely inspect the sites unless there’s a reported problem ― most of which are odor-related.

During an inspection, employees look to make sure the windrows are far enough from wetlands, water supplies and neighbors. In addition to the sniff test, they look to see if the piles are between 120 and 145 degrees and also look for “rutting” ― grooves near the piles from tires that can allow standing water to sit near the piles.

In addition to turning piles to encourage aerobic bacteria, McGovern said the piles should also be kept moist and be mixed with the right materials. Generally, the rule is three parts “brown” ― leaves rich in carbon, for example ― to one part nitrogen-rich “green” materials like grass clippings.

For large piles, some composters insert pipes into the pile for ventilation, she said, to avoid rousing odors by turning the piles.

As opposed to municipalities or businesses that register with the DEP, farmers looking to compost must apply for an agricultural exemption from the agricultural department. Kennedy said the department conducts annual site visits to make sure farmers are adhering to the rules, and turns enforcement over to the DEP.

“We have an interest in making sure farmers can compost,” said Kennedy. In addition to being good for the environment, some composters ― including one in Rutland ― are using anaerobic composting of manure as a source of energy.

Most farmers do not bring in food waste to composting piles, however they are allowed to do so. Farmers registered with his department can bring in up to 10 tons of vegetative materials from off-site daily, Kennedy said, as well as up to five tons of food material ― scrapings from hotel or restaurant plates, for example.

Northborough’s S.A. Farm owner Santo Anza Jr. ― who authorities allege kept accepting solid waste even after his agricultural composting registration was not renewed ― seems to be an outlier, as Ferson said instances of gross negligence are not prevalent.

“It fluctuates like anything, but it’s not something we’ve seen a spike in recently,” he said.

Authorities allege Anza, in addition to not being registered, had severed animal heads and trash in his compost piles which he allowed his animals to pick through at risk to their safety. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of violating the Massachusetts Solid Waste Act and animal cruelty and is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Monday.

Though Anza’s collection of food waste is alleged to have been unlawful, McGovern said there are plenty others going about it the right way.

Europe's pile of garbage suddenly got smellier

Something strange happened in Europe on Tuesday, stranger than most of the strange things that have happened during the sovereign debt crisis.

Someone in Europe took out the trash. Almost immediately, he realized he'd made a mistake. If anybody saw Europe taking out the trash, this particular trash, they'd realize Europe was sitting on a reeking pile of junk that no landfill could hold.

It all started with a largely predictable move by Standard & Poor's: it downgraded Greece's bonds to "selective default." The reason was the debt restructuring Greece is hashing out. Creditors, including private bondholders, stand to lose 70% of the loans they extended to Greece.

The downgrade propelled the European Central Bank to declare that Greek bonds could no longer serve as collateral for loans. With this, the bank opened the lid on the trash can and let the stench out.

With that move the ECB, one of the three pillars of Europe's rescue efforts, was saying (not in so many words ) that it refused to risk losing money if Greece didn't repay the loans it was taking from the bank. Not on so many words, it was saying that Greek bonds are a bad gamble. The collateral - in a word - stinks.

That prompted a metaphoric howl by rank and file investors: Central bank! You have printing machines, but we don't! You're saving yourself but we're supposed to roll over and accept the risk of loss.

But no, that isn't what the ECB actually meant. Greek bonds are on the bench, the bank explained. Once the second bailout pledged to Greece (after Greece humiliated itself, crawling on its belly with its face in the dust ) is delivered (if it ever is ), the ECB will get guarantees covering 35 billion euros from its partners in the bailout, covering any Greek bonds that do serve as collateral backing loans by the ECB.

If your head hasn't begun to spin by now, well done. The Greeks certainly got the heebee-jeebies because the aforementioned guarantees will be delivered (if they are indeed delivered ) only in mid-March, but their bonds have been suspended from collateral status as of Tuesday.

What that means is that any bank wanting to borrow from the ECB based on Greek bonds as collateral will be rejected. Therefore, banks heavily laden with Greek debt could run into a liquidity crunch and collapse.

But that isn't at all what the ECB meant to happen. There are Greek banks with piles of Greek debt the size of Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill, and not much else - which means the ECB decision was a death sentence. How embarrassing - that very day the ECB started its second round of three-year, 1% interest loans to EU banks but now the Greek banks can't use it. Drat. What to do?

So the ECB looked around and noticed the national central banks with no real monetary authority. "Them," it decided. "Let them help the Greek banks with emergency liquidity assistance until the 35 billion euros come through." Once the billions came through it could resume accepting garbage as collateral because it would be safe from losses, the ECB figured to itself.

So the ECB stuffed local governments with bridge loans - an inelegant, strange and amateurish solution but mainly a move smelling of improvisation by the the world's second most important monetary establishment after the Fed.

This story of the ECB and the Greek bonds made no waves. The markets preferred to continue their momentum and hope the three-year cheap-loan fire hose that the ECB wielded will wash the filth off the euro zone.

It might not seem consequential, but when you add another story - the referendum Ireland announced on the new EU treaty - we get two destructive elements for European unity.

If Ireland votes against the new treaty, which is supposed to be Europe's road out of the crisis, the euro zone will fall apart. It would be ironic if the Irish, who so obediently accepted austerity and budget cuts, unlike the militant Greeks, were the ones to burn down the European house.

Rubbish piles up at Cape train stations

Mounds of rubbish are piling up at several Cape Town train stations, particularly those on the Khayelitsha line, as cleaners are on a go-slow because they have not been paid since December.

Owners of contract cleaning companies say they face ruin and can’t pay workers’ salaries because Prasa Corporate Real Estate Solutions (Prasa Cres), a division of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), has not been honouring its obligations to pay them.

“My 46 staffers were not paid because I’ve not been paid. About R120 000 is due to my company every month and I can’t provide a service if I don’t get paid,” said Yusuf Abdullah, owner of Yusuf’s Cleaning and Horticultural Services.

“I can’t buy consumables or pay accounts. It has been going on for the last 18 months and I can’t cope any more.”

Another cleaning contractor, Reginald Fisher, who owns Wavecrest Enterprises, said: “I employ 10 people on the Muldersvlei line. I get paid R36 000 a month and pay salaries of R2 200. The last time we got paid by Prasa Cres was in December. I’m in trouble with the SA Revenue Service (Sars) and the Department of Labour because I’m unable to pay VAT and UIF. I’m facing ruin and don’t know what to do.”

Abdullah’s workers at Khayelitsha station said while they did not blame him, they faced hardship as their salaries of R2 300 to R2 500 were their only income. Some said they were forced to borrow money to survive.

“I’ve worked since 2009 and although the salary is low, it helps. I’m the breadwinner in my family where there are seven children and three adults,” said Khayelitsha mother Nosango Mki, 59.

Worker John Kopani said their go-slow was out of frustration while Khayelitsha father Ernest Moses said: “We want to be paid on time. Yusuf is not the problem, it is Prasa Cres.”

On Tuesday bags of rubbish were piled up at the train station where toilets were filthy and rubbish bins overflowed.

Metrorail regional manager Lindelo Matya said he was aware of the unpaid payments to cleaning contractors and that there was a payment backlog at Prasa Cres head office.

“There were problems with the system. The Prasa Cres chief executive and chief financial officer have met with the companies and there is an undertaking to pay them by the end of the month,” Matya said.

Prasa Cres chief executive Tumisang Kgaboesele said the problem was due to a number of “challenges” at the company’s head office in Gauteng.

These included suppliers’ invoices that were not properly processed because to a lack of capacity at the office, and collusion between some contractors and Prasa Cres’s staff. There were instances in which payments were made for work not done and services rendered without proper authorisation, he said, and added that Cape Town contractors were not the only ones affected by late payments.

“We’ve started a forensic investigation. Cash flow management has also been a challenge. Prasa has R38 million available in December to address backlogs as far back as April and as we speak, we’ve paid everything up to November. Currently we are processing payments for December and January,” Kgaboesele said.

Meanwhile, a small group of SA Transport and Allied Workers Union members on strike protested outside Cape Town station, saying they wanted the Prasa management to address serious issues of accountability within the company.

Matya said train services were unaffected and while no action would be taken against the strikers, the “no work, no pay” rule would be applied.

Sitting on property cash piles

UK's businesses, these are straitened times. The economy is shrinking, unemployment is rising, consumers aren't spending and the banks - in many cases, anyway - aren't lending, so directors are being forced to make every penny count.

The irony is that many businesses, or certainly those that own commercial property, will have been sitting on a sizeable cash benefit from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) all along - but one that they've not been made aware of. This cash benefit comes in the form of unused capital allowances.

According to research by Deloitte, and this correlates with our own experience, more than nine in ten owners of UK commercial property - from the smallest newsagent to a 30-storey office block - will be due a rebate from HMRC through unused capital allowances tax relief.

And because this tax relief can be attributed to any building of any age, there are billions of pounds of net tax rebate languishing unclaimed in the UK's commercial property stock. It would be impossible to give an exact figure but we estimate that it's in the region of 65bn-70bn.

To date, thousands of commercial property owners have made successful claims, with the average claim in excess of 100,000 and the biggest amounting to tens of millions. But these thousands own only a tiny percentage of the estimated 1.4 million UK commercial properties that are out there.

Finance directors will almost certainly be familiar with capital allowances. They're a form of tax relief available to anyone incurring capital expenditure buying, building or making adjustments to commercial property.

But why is so little known about the tens of billions of pounds of unclaimed capital allowances? Firstly, HMRC, understandably, isn't that keen on alerting too many people to it, especially at a time when the Treasury's coffers are all but bare.

Secondly, the problem, historically, has been that identifying capital allowances within commercial properties is extremely complex, so much so that even accountants only scratch the surface.

Indeed, while accountants will claim on more obvious items such as shutters and curtains, fire extinguishers and carpets when a client buys a commercial property, generally speaking they will not drill down to the items where the far more significant costs to a business lie. These might include air conditioning or heating systems, lighting and security systems, plant and machinery items.

The issue for accountants when a client buys a property is that they will not have receipts for all the potentially qualifying assets within that property. Therefore they simply can't progress it any further.

Specialist capital allowances firms, on the other hand, use thousands of different matrices to work out the purchase price of such and such an item in a building in a particular area in a particular year. They enter a building and essentially undertake a forensic audit, drawing on a far more detailed understanding of capital allowances practice and law.

On 6 April, new capital allowances rules are being implemented, where any tax rebates will be based on the previous owner's purchase price of the building, not the price at which the current owner bought it. Therefore, if the value of a property has increased, companies planning to buy a commercial property should do it before that date or they could lose lose a significant chunk of their potential tax rebate. Of course, if the value of the property they are buying has dropped, they are potentially better off waiting until after 6 April.

UN Rights Council piles pressure on Syria

Senior diplomats at the UN Human Rights Council on Monday ramped up pressure on Syria to allow aid to civilians caught up in the bloodshed while warning the regime it will be held to account for "atrocities" against its people.

Council president Laura Dupuy Lasserre told delegates meeting in Geneva that it hoped for a "positive response" from Syrian authorities so that help could be delivered to those affected by the violence.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, one of around 90 government ministers and senior officials at the gathering, said his country wanted to see the regime dragged before the International Criminal Court.

"The international community should prepare the conditions for a referral to the ICC," he said.

British Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne also warned that those responsible for rights abuses since President Bashar al-Assad's regime launched a brutal crackdown on protesters in March would be held to account.

Browne called for "impartial, neutral access" for humanitarian groups and urged the council to pass a resolution proposing an extension of the mandate of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, established by the UN to investigate the situation there.

"Those responsible for the atrocities should be in no doubt -- they will be personally held to account for the appalling crimes they have committed," he said.

The Human Rights Council will on Tuesday hold a special debate on Syria after Russia -- which has angered the West over its vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions on the crisis -- gave its agreement.

Russia said the debate must take place in a "constructive and de-politicised manner," warning that any document produced at the meeting would be "counter-productive".

Russia and China hit back on Monday after US State Secretary Hillary Clinton last week criticised their stance on Syria as "despicable".

Iran, which is not a member of the rights council but holds observer status, had lodged a formal objection to the debate, the meeting was told.

The European Union welcomed the debate, saying the gravity of the situation called for an immediate response from the very beginning of the council's current session, which runs to March 23.

"The Human Rights Council must send a strong and clear message to the Syrian people that the international community supports their legitimate demand for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that full and unimpeded access for humanitarian organisations and medical personnel must be guaranteed," said the EU delegation to the UN in a statement.

"The Council must continuously put the situation in Syria on the top of its agenda throughout this session."

More than 7,600 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad's rule erupted in March last year, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation said at a press conference on the fringes of the meeting that it hoped for an end to the "bloodbath."

"We hope that this bloodbath and killing will stop," said secretary general of the 57 member-state body Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

"Every day scores of people are killed, blood is shed ... and we don't see any signs of reconciliation," he said.

"We have from day one been calling on the Syrian regime to stop violence, to engage with the opposition in dialogue and accelerate the reform process."

The Commission of Inquiry last Thursday gave UN human rights chief Navi Pillay a list of Syrian military and political officials suspected of crimes against humanity that will be discussed on March 12.

The panel said it documented a widespread and systematic pattern of gross violations by Syrian forces.