Community Composting is all about bringing people in your community together, whether it's an existing community group such a neighborhood association, church, school, community garden or workplace; or a group coming together solely for this purpose, to divert their food waste, yard trimmings, and other organic matter, from landfill, and compost them instead.
Community members can compost at home and use the compost in their own gardens. However, at-home composting doesn't generate enough heat to break down animal products (like meat, cheese, or bones) or biodegradable packaging. So the benefit of coming together as a community is that together you will have enough food waste to employ a local composting company to come and pick up your food waste from a centralized location, and these companies have the equipment to break down all food waste and compostable materials into useable compost!
If your group is affiliated to a community garden the finished compost can even be used to fertilize your soil. Many municipal composting programs return composted food waste back to local farmers, creating higher-yield crops and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.
Community Composting is all about bringing people in your community together, whether it's an existing community group such a neighborhood association, church, school, community garden or workplace; or a group coming together solely for this purpose, to divert their food waste, yard trimmings, and other organic matter, from landfill, and compost them instead.
Community members can compost at home and use the compost in their own gardens. However, at-home composting doesn't generate enough heat to break down animal products (like meat, cheese, or bones) or biodegradable packaging. So the benefit of coming together as a community is that together you will have enough food waste to employ a local composting company to come and pick up your food waste from a centralized location, and these companies have the equipment to break down all food waste and compostable materials into useable compost!
If your group is affiliated to a community garden the finished compost can even be used to fertilize your soil. Many municipal composting programs return composted food waste back to local farmers, creating higher-yield crops and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.
Since we have a community compost already established, our goals are to:
- Expand the program to more than just Iowa Food Cooperative Members. Part of the way we are going to do this is by making a promotional and educational video for the community about the importance of composting. We also want to drop the current price of the composting kits.
- Help Iowa Food Cooperative producers get involved with composting by using the funds to buy them free trials of compostable products. The main reason they do not use it presently is the cost! In the span of their free trial, I hope that we can find other sustainability grants to get them even more funding for the long term.
- When it is safe to, we would like to take an Iowa Food Cooperative field trip to the composting facility to get a tour of how it works.
- Eventually, we would like to establish a website that the main goal is sustaining a community compost in the Des Moines area.