iStock photo.
By Nancy Pollard
After owning one of the best cooking stores in the US for 47 years—La Cuisine: The Cook’s Resource in Alexandria, Virginia—Nancy Pollard writes Kitchen Detail, a blog about food in all its aspects—recipes, film, books, travel, superior sources, and food-related issues.
ALL I KNEW about composting was what I read in gardening magazines and observed in more ambitious friends’ backyards. I tried a very small composting drum on my deck and was overwhelmed by the odor of failure. How is it, I wondered, that composting is an effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Landfills are the single largest human source of methane emissions in the world. Composting can diminish the effluvia, and it reduces or eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers. With little knowledge of this, I separated glass, plastic, and paper and cardboard, but food waste either went down the disposal or in the general trash. I was awakened by the sophisticated programs for recycling and composting in EU countries. Even before the Resident Wine Maniac and I moved our household to Italy, I found it interesting to note that my daughter, who already lived there, had to separate in her home: organic waste, general waste, paper and cardboard, glass and metal containers, and, finally, plastics. There are separate public dumpsters in Bologna for organic waste, glass and metal, and dirty diapers. The rules are less stringent in the UK, but many localities utilize municipally collected food waste to be recycled into bio-energy.
Watermelon compost from CompostAlex, in Alexandria, Virginia.
Being Part of a National Movement
Composting volunteers for Rustbelt.org, in Cleveland.
Publicly and privately supported composting services are part of a larger movement comprising individual municipal efforts, which are not nationally tied together under an agency. City governments across the country are supporting one or many composting services, such as 1) New York City Composting Project, 2) Seattle and King County’s Tilth Alliance, 3) Boulder County’s programs, 4) Austin’s Composting programs, 5) Alexandria, Virginia’s CompostAlex. Some of those programs are large- scale and spread across a community, for both curbside pickup and commercial-business organics (food/yard) recycling, while other programs support what is known as Community Composting. Community Composting tends to be smaller in scale than a large business or government program, and can describe anything from a neighborhood doing its own composting, to a small business fulfilling the needs of a specific community, to a nonprofit engaging in compost and farming/gardening activities.
Take a look a few other community composters : 1) LA Compost located in Los Angeles, 2) Rust Belt Riders located in Cleveland, 3) Compost Now located in Raleigh-Durham, Asheville, and Cincinnati, 4A) DC’s Food Scrap Drop-off, and 4B) DC’s Parks and Rec Community Composting program. Both the large-scale composting adoption and smaller-scale community composting are independent movements and represent a growing trend of our society becoming involved with composting personal food scraps. The emerging “umbrella” of compost movements is taking shape, and people are stepping up to lead so that composting becomes part of our society’s normal infrastructure.
If you don’t have a program in your neighborhood, use this information to get one started! Remember, we used not to separate paper, glass, and plastic for recycling and now we do.
Carol,
I think that the actual composting done for Alexandria is done by the folks in PG County! We may composting stations now,
Nancy
Perfectly true. My problem was with the current tools and knowledge at hand, I couldn’t make even a small amount of compost on my deck. That was why I loved the new program in Alexandria of bring your organic waste to a collecting point. This is the law in Italy – they have organic waste dumpsters along with ones for plastic, paper/cardboard, glass/metal. So I am hoping that this will also be legislated in the US.
Nancy
Prince George’s county in Maryland has adopted a great compost program. They give you a small container for your kitchen (I keep it on the floor) and a mini trash can to put out once a week for pickup
I love doing this small thing for the environment after years of throwing EVERYTHING in the trash before recycling — who knew back then? I wish more would do their part…. The compost bags are cheap on Amazon I like they take greasy pizza boxes
Agree with Alan. Composting for the purpose of enriching the soil of personal garden landscapes, sans chemical fertilizers is one such incentive. Anyone who creates a vegetable garden needs to know that soil enriched with composted waste leads to vastly improved, healthier crops over soil amended with the majority of manufactured fertilizers. Organic gardening is one thing, biodynamic gardening, even on a household by household scale, is the gold standard.
Composting is a worthy activity. It will not succeed at the scale necessary to effect meaningful outcomes until the steps required are simplified for adoption by most folks. This article talks about why it’s a good thing to do; what’s needed is an article about how simple composting can be, in the “ the perfect is the enemy of the good” sense of things. Put otherwise, simplifying people’s lives will win more converts than exhorting people to a higher calling.