Well, we've finally gone and done it: we're composting! Ever since we moved here with our little back yard we've talked about composting our garbage. Finally, Debbie went to a workshop at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and then drove out to Fresh Kills to pick up a composter. The NYC Dept. of Sanitation -- New York's Strongest! -- subsidizes composters in order to reduce the size of the landfill. Which is a big issue; food waste accounts for "27.6 million tons per year, or 11.7 percent by weight" of the Municipal Solid Waste stream. Which is why we're doing this. I mean, it'll be nice to have some compost soil for the garden, but really we're just trying to reduce the amount of garbage the family produces.

You might think that food just biodegrades in a landfill, but it doesn't. Landfills are airtight, and without air, food can't break down the way it normally would. So that banana peel will just stay a banana peel for a long long long time. Those biodegradable forks made from potatoesor corn? If you're just throwing them away, they may as well be plastic.

So Saturday we built the composter (the plastic parts just slide together to make what is essentially a big box), dug a shallow pit for it, and put wire netting on the bottom to keep out the critters. The boys had a great time filling a bucket with our "browns" (leaves from the garden) and we ceremonially dumped in our first load of kitchen waste!

Now we just wait for the worms to discover their new feast....

M E-L posted this on October 21, 2007
It is filed under Community

It is also indexed with the following tags: Composting | Environment | Garbage |