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.
Vision: Divert waste from landfill while making compost to use in local gardeners. We will raise awareness of the benefits of composting and providing community compost drop-off points throughout the neighborhood.
Plan for getting started:
-Raise awareness and promote composting throughout our neighborhood.
-Recruit additional community composting sites throughout the West End ( and beyond)
-Procure 50 5-gallon buckets with lids and "Waste Free West End" Stickers to put on buckets
-Deliver branded buckets to households to collect kitchen scraps to be delivered to 936 white st or other communal compost pile.
- Record # of people, # of buckets of compost collected, and # of buckets of finished compost distributed for the next 3 months.
Budget:
$400- 50 5 gallon buckets with lids
$250 x (number of community sites)- Supplies provided for each community compost site ( wheelbarrow, shovel, compost aerator , or something similar that site manager requests)
$200 - 100 branded stickers
$80 commissioned educational art work for lid
Covid plan: All activities will take place out side.