Talking Trash With The Cyclists Behind This Compost Startup

An eco-preneur hits pay dirt with a bike-powered pick-up service in the heart of Austin, Texas.

Last year the world generated more than 1.3 billion tons of food waste. Tons. That’s more than 20 pounds of food per person per month that floods into landfills and emits harmful methane gasses. Some cities have gone to bat on the problem by creating civic compost programs. For example, Seattle recently passed a law mandating that all food scraps be kept out of residential garbage and offers weekly pickup of food waste bins. And in Austin, Texas, there’s a similar pilot program, but expansion to the entire urban area could take up to 10 years.

Until then, small business and private networks are popping up to fill in the gaps, including Austin’s Compost Pedallers, a startup that offers bike-powered, carbon-neutral food waste pickup. Since its founding in 2012 by Dustin Fedako, Compost Pedallers has diverted 500,000 pounds out of the waste stream a la community composting. Their 650 subscribers within a five-mile radius of downtown Austin pay $16 a month for pick-up services. Anyone who signs up simply finishes, say, his or her morning coffee and tosses the grounds into a green 5-gallon bucket that the Pedaller crew cleans and delivers once a week. Once banana peels, egg shells, and other nonanimal waste accumulates, the bucket goes out on the porch for pickup. Then one of the company’s nine cyclists arrives in style on a cargo bike and dumps the residential food scraps into large bins strapped to the front of their ride or in a bike trailer that follows behind. At the end of the daily route, the haul goes to the company’s garden partners—called compHOSTS—like Springdale Farms. These hosts add the scraps to their personal compost piles and—with guidance from Compost Pedallers’ how-to handbook—transform the waste into usable material for their growing operation. So far the operation has kept an estimated 70 tons of methane out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Read more here.

Increased Focus on Compostable Products for International Compost Awareness Week

BPI, USCC Announce Increased Focus on Compostable Products for International Compost Awareness Week

Healthy soil and global food security are intertwined, as are composting and diversion of food residuals. The US Composting Council and Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) are solidifying their partnership to facilitate increased food scrap collection, diverting valuable materials from the waste stream for high quality compost manufacturing.

BPI will become a benefactor member of the USCC, the two groups announced today. This is the highest level of membership support for USCC, and builds on the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two organizations.

"USCC and BPI have been partners for more than a decade, and the Benefactor membership and MOU formalize that commitment," said Steve Mojo, BPI executive director. "The compostable products industry and composting have a symbiotic relationship as certified compostable materials need composting to close the loop at the end of their life, but they also help to increase the tonnage of food scraps that are diverted from landfills to composting."

BPI and its members have been major supporters of the USCC’s Compostable Plastic Task Force, an industry project to encourage compost manufacturers to work with product designers and developers so that end-of-life impact in composting is considered as decisions are made about compostable plastics. BPI’s benefactor membership solidifies its continuing support for the Task Force by creating an annual budget for the working group.

In the MOU signed between USCC and BPI, the organizations set out these major goals for the coming years:

• Promoting the appropriate use of certified compostable products for collection and recovery of food scraps, yard trimmings, and other organic waste streams.

• Developing and providing resources and information in order to educate all stakeholders, both public and private, about the role and performance of certified compostable materials, and the importance of scientifically based standards;

• Promoting the use of professionally produced, high-quality compost;

• Promoting the development of municipal source separated organics (SSO) collection programs and processing infrastructure

"This is a more formal representation of more than 10 years of support by BPI," said Rod Tyler, president of USCC.

A key element of the partnership is for BPI to encourage its members to join the USCC by continuing to offer a significant discount on BPI fees, and for USCC to work with BPI members through the Task Force to ensure that new products are compatible with composting facilities.

About BPI

The Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) is a 503-(c)6, not-for-profit organization that educates, advocates, and certifies compostable materials to be safe for large-scale composting. It then licenses companies to use BPI Compostable Logo on products and marketing materials, helping consumers and composters make informed choices. It is the largest certification organization for compostable products in North America. All certified products meet ASTM D6400 or D6868, based on testing in a BPI-approved laboratory.

About USCC

The US Composting Council, a national organization dedicated to the development, expansion and promotion of the compost manufacturing industry, was established in 1990 to encourage, support and perform compost-related research. The USCC promotes best management practices, establishes standards, and educates professionals and the public about the benefits of composting and compost utilization. The USCC seeks to enhance compost product quality, train compost manufacturers and stimulate and develop compost markets. USCC members include compost manufacturers, marketers, equipment manufacturers, product suppliers, academic institutions, public agencies, nonprofit groups and consulting/engineering firms.

Full Disclosure Statement: The GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW received no compensation for any component of this article.

This article is for your information only and the GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW does not (necessarily) approve, endorse or recommend the product, service or company mentioned.

6 Reasons Backyard Compost is the Best Soil Enhancer

One of the easiest things you can do to boost your garden soil’s health, composting takes only minutes a day and will cut down on your energy and water bills, too!

By the end of last summer, my compost piles were heaped with organic matter: spent tomato plants, giant leaves from zucchini, and long spirals of vegetation created by watermelon and cucumber plants. Add grass clippings and trees’ leaf debris to that, as well as kitchen scraps, and the mix was ready to stew through the winter months creating a new, rich compost to add to gardens and flower beds.

There are many reasons compost is the best renewable resource for enriching soil. Here are six of my favorites.

1. Compost Reduces Pollution
According to Stan Slaughter, named Grassroots Compost Educator of the Year in 2000 by the United States Composting Council, approximately 16 percent of residential trash is food waste. Breaking down in landfills, food waste slowly produces methane gas, which is then released into the air. While there are a limited number of programs working to siphon methane gas from landfills and use it as alternative power, the processes are inefficient, capturing only about 10 percent of the gas being produced.

These same food products increase the load put on sewer and water treatment plants when put down garbage disposals. The most efficient way to handle non-meat food scraps is through backyard composting.

2. Your Backyard Heap Is Energy Efficient
Many municipalities offer composting of woody brush, leaves and other organic matter. However, these processes are energy-intensive, requiring the use of heavy machines and large spinners to compost garden waste. Homeowners wishing to take advantage of city composting services require fuel to haul it home and personal energy to load, unload and distribute to beds.

Commercially produced composts also have the carbon footprint of travel from wherever they are composted to retail stores to the home of the person wishing to add it to their garden beds. Composting at home not only saves you a trip, it saves you money by gaining new organic material through recycling kitchen, garden and yard waste just steps from your back door.

Read more: http://www.hobbyfarms.com/crops-and-gardening/6-reasons-backyard-compost-is-best-soil-enhancer.aspx

6 Problems With City Composting—And What You Can Do About It

From space constraints to to foul odors, composting in the city isn’t easy, so take matters into your own hands.

Composting is an efficient way to create a self-reliant system where kitchen scraps and yard waste are broken down and transferred back into the soil. The process is simple, but urban dwellers might have their own set of unique challenges composting in close quarters to neighbors. Laura Matter, Garden Hotline program coordinator for Seattle Tilth, points out a few of the issues they might have to contend with while turning their waste into a valuable garden amendment.

1. Smell

If your compost smells, typically this means your compost pile has too much green matter, which can include fresh kitchen waste and green grass clippings.

"The higher the nitrogen, the higher the smell potential,” Matter says.

To remedy the problem, include an adequate amount of brown materials, such as dried leaves or straw. You’ll also want to chop everything you add to the pile as small as you can, and turn it frequently—Matter recommends once a week, if possible. The more you do, the faster you’ll have beautiful compost to add to your garden.

If smell becomes too big a problem for you or your neighbors, you might consider another composting strategy.

"We like to tell people to think about food and yard waste in separate settings,” Matter says. Food waste in a traditional compost system is often the cause of unpleasant odors. If this is a problem you face, she recommends composting the food waste in a worm bin or food digester.

A worm composter can be built from easily purchased materials, such as plastic storage containers, to create a simple system. You add kitchen scraps to a base of shredded newspaper and cardboard to provide the proper environment for the red wigglers, which chow down on your food scraps.

"[Red wigglers] live in leaf litter on the forest floor. They are not a soil worm,” Matter says. As long as you keep them happy in a space where they’re not too hot or cold, they make quick work of most food waste with practically no odor. Because they take up very little space, worm bins can be kept practically anywhere you would place a kitty litter box.

You can make a simple food digester by drilling holes in the bottom third of a garbage can (preferably metal to keep out wildlife). Partially bury the bin, so the holes are covered, toss in kitchen scraps, and cover with the lid. There is more smell associated with this type of composter, but it is contained by the lid.

Read more: http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-gardening/backyard-gardening/6-problems-with-city-composting.aspx

Turn your spoil into soil

Don't let your food waste, your vegetable peeling, go into the waste stream, not even the composting one of the municipality; make your own compost or give them to someone who composts

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

First of all let me say that, to all intents and purposes, you should try to reduce your food waste in the first instance but, and I know that well enough, there is always some that spoils or that cannot be reused.

And then there are the peelings and trimming. True, many of them could be rendered down into vegetable stock but who of us, nowadays, really has the time to do that – at least not all the time.

The best way that I have found, in dealing with food waste, if there ever is any, and with vegetable peelings, is to feed them to my chickens, who produce eggs for me, and the droppings then make, together with other things, such as waste paper, that also go into the composter, soil that is rich in nitrogen.

Keeping chickens, I know, does not work everywhere but where it does it is better still than just simple composting as it is a total win-win situation.

Earlier I suggested that you don't let your scraps go into the composting stream of the municipality but rather, if you cannot use them, give them to someone who makes compost for his or her garden.

The reason I said that is that the municipality uses your compostable materials and makes, well, compost from it which, in most cases, then is sold.. if you have a very benign local government they may give it to anyone willing to pick it up but in most cases it is a for-profit operation and thus why should you or I provide the materials for free.

You can make compost in many ways, from a simple heap, which will take longest to rot down, via a composter, where things happen a lot quicker, to a compost tumbler, which can produce rich compost soil within the space of a few month. A small tumbler can even be used on a patio or a balcony to make great fertile soil.

And what to do with this soil? Well, you grow a garden, even a small one, in planters and, even if you like flowers, you should grow food crops, mixed with flowers, if you so desire, to reduce at least some of your impact and your food miles.

Happy composting... the scraps, not you...

© 2013

Don't throw out your leaves!

Do-it-yourself leaf mold is great to improve your garden's soil

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Instead of raking the leaves in your yard and garden together, putting them into plastic bags and setting them on the curb to be picked up and added to a landfill, where most will end up via the municipal waste stream unless your council operates a green waste recycling scheme, turn them into leaf mold.

The dark, crumbly finished product of leaf mold is a great soil amendment and conditioner and if we are going to be dealing with droughts in our gardens in the future, which no doubt we will, increasing the moisture retention of our soils is important. Leaf mold is better still than wood chip mulch in this department as it improves the soil much better and quicker.

Finished leaf mold can be used as a mulch to suppress weeds and trap moisture, blended into the soil of garden beds, and added to container gardens and making leaf mold is, in fact, ridiculously easy. If composting seems too complicated and involved for you: give making your own leaf mold a try. All you need to create leaf mold is a space, leaves, water and time.

The easiest way of making leaf mold is to rake all of your leaves into a pile in the corner of your garden or yard. Once you’ve gathered the leaves into place, wet the pile down and keep it moist for the next six months to a year. If your leaf mold pile is at risk of being thrown about by kids, pets or the wind create pen to keep it in place.

Make a round or square frame out of chicken wire, reclaimed wood or similar to the DIY compost bins the designs of which you find all over the Internet. You can also put the leaves, ideally shredded, into black plastic bin liners, moisten them and then tie up the bags.

If you have a mulching mower you can speed up decomposition by riding over your leaf mold pile and shredding the leaves into smaller pieces.

A few years ago while watching one of those cable documentaries on the drug trade, I saw a cocaine farmer use a weed trimmer to shred cocoa leaves to process them faster. And you know what? It works! After you’ve corralled all of your leaves in place you can run a weed trimmer through the pile to break it down. Shredded leaves not only break down faster, but you have room for more leafs and taller piles.

All leaves you collect in autumn are good candidates for making leaf mold, though some are better than others when it comes to breaking down and decomposing. Smaller leaves, such as birch, alder and Japanese maples, can break down in as little as six months. Oak and hornbeam leaves similarly break down rather fast.

The bottom of your leaf mold pile can be ready to be mixed into your soil, used as a mulch, or mixed into your favorite container gardening soil mix in as little as half a year. Therefore, take some time this season to rake up your leaves – and those of your neighbors – to improve the soil in your garden. You will be keeping valuable organic matter out of landfills and preventing your neighbors from making burn piles this autumn.

The leaves have sequestered carbon over the year and this carbon is released into your soil when added to it and will feed your plants. So thus you should not waste it.

If you grow your own – vegetables that is – in the way that I do in “containers” of various sorts you can use the so-called lasagne gardening method and, in fact, add the leaf mold after six month to the bottom of the container and spread a thin, about four or five inches or so, layer of soil and compost above in which you sow your seeds or plant your plugs.

Waste not want not is the old adage and it applies also to those autumn leaves.

© 2012

Reuse before composting

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Do you know your bin is full of reusable refuse? Instead of composting fruits and vegetables immediately, there are ways that you can give them a final reuse before tossing them to be turned into great garden soil.

For cooking:

Use citrus or orange peels to make an infused olive oil. Add the rinds to your extra virgin olive oil to give it a new flavor, one that you, so far, cannot even buy.

Don’t throw away vegetables leaves. Cook them up and blend them to make into soup.

You can also use those leaves, plus many other bits of vegetables to make into vegetable stock.

The rind from all kind fruits and vegetables give a special flavor to dishes. For example, stuff a chicken with a mixture of scraps of fruit and veggies and during the cooking a very subtle and different flavor will infuse into the meat. The plus of this is that the baking actually helps the scraps break down faster later in the compost pile.

For skin & beauty:

If your skin is dry, use papaya skins or pulp. Papayas are full of vitamin A and papain (an exfoliant) which helps remove all dead skin cells. Carrots, spinach and melon contain a lot of vitamin A too. You can make use of those things too by rubbing them on the dry parts of the skin.

If you have smelly feet, rub the fruit peels on it.

To make your hair darker, don’t use chemical products but potato peels. Boil it 30 minutes and strain out the peels. After your shampoo rinse your hair with this water. This natural hair dye will gradually and naturally darken your hair.

For home:

To polish metal you can make use of citrus rinds; orange, lemon, lime, etc. As they are full of citric acid they make for a great cleaning and polishing agent. To speed up the process, mix it with a little baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) or a little ketchup.

Ketchup on its own also is great for cleaning silver and copper.

Therefore I always drain the ketchup out of the bottles before throwing them and keep that as a cleaning agent for metals.

If you rub a banana peel against the leaves of the plants it would give them a special shine. Banana peels can also be used as a natural fertilizer. They also can be used to shine shoes.

This is but a small list ands there are many more things that can be used in this way. But I doubt that most people even as much as suspect that those bits of household waste I have mentioned here could be so useful.

Reuse is also most beneficial in other quarters and not just as regards to compostable household waste. Every piece of potential waste should be put under scrutiny as to whether it cannot be reused, reworked or upcycled before every it should go on the trip to the recycling bin and the recycling center; and I mean every piece.

© 2011

Wrexham signs £40m PFI recycling contract

WREXHAM County Borough Council has signed a £40m private finance waste contract with Waste Recycling Group.

The 25-year contract will enable Wrexham to meet its 2010 recycling targets and landfill diversion targets up to 2013.

The funding comes from the Welsh Assembly Government.

The contract will include the construction of a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) where kerbside and bring site recyclables will be sorted, baled and prepared for sale to recycling processors.

A state of the art enclosed composting facility is also proposed which will allow compostable waste streams to be recycled. The proportion of residual waste that is not recycled will be sent for treatment in appropriate facilities off-site.

Total capital investment in construction of the new facilities is expected to be approximately £17 million. The new facility will handle kitchen waste and cardboard.

Subject to planning permission, it will start in 2009 after the new facilities are built. Council leader Aled Roberts said Wrexham already had a recycling rate of 31% and that residents “can not do any more on their own.”