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.
Our Middle School is up and running with composting stations. We will be adding a Compost Tumbler for the community to use there as well. At the High School we have saved over 100 take out containers from the landfill. We’ve also used compostable cutlery to cutdown on plastic waste. Over all our class has composted more than 100 lbs of food waste. We have a compost worm farm on site as well. Students are excited to share our sustainability progress with the community.
Students met September 5th with our Middle School Chapter. We discussed distributing compost containers next meeting. Students worked on worming composting and discussed various sustainability challenges. We plan to present our work at the 2024 VA FCCLA conference.
Timeline: project will begin September 5th will all high school and middle school students involved. Students will be brainstorming prior. As soon as composters and bins are ordered we will get going.
Budget: compost turner, 6 compost kitchen containers, 2 large compost containers for middle and high schools, compostable containers and disposable silverware, PR materials.
Impact: we plan to start with secondary education and collaborate with agricultural classes. We are working with local farmers market to do educational demonstrations. We will weigh and have measurable goals of compostable materials.
Location: Yes we have permission from school administrators.
We have identified students at the middle school and high school level who are helping with the sustainability aspect of the project.
Students in class and our CTSO will all be working on this project.