[/caption]Bob Ewing - One of the first steps towards building sustainable, local economies is to change how we view garbage. Instead of seeing waste or something that needs to be thrown away, we need to accept that there is no such place as away and what we call garbage could well be a resource. Food is a prime example.
Last week we talked about diverting edible food from the garbage to the table. This week we will take a close look at compost.
What food items can we compost? Place the following in your compost bin:
• All vegetable and fruit wastes, (including rinds and cores) even if they are moldy and ugly
• Old bread, donuts, cookies, crackers, pizza crust, noodles: anything made out of flour!
• Grains (cooked or uncooked): rice, barley, you name it
• Coffee grounds, tea bags, filters
• Fruit or vegetable pulp from juicing
• Old spices
• Outdated boxed foods from the pantry
• Egg shells (crush well)
• Corn cobs and husks (cobs breakdown very slowly)
When you compost food waste, you not only divert items from the waste stream, but you actualize the true potential of those items; in the case of composting, you turn food scrapes into food for your garden. Composting produces a rich, organic feed for your soil and well fed soil will grow strong and healthy plants.
For home gardeners, whether they grow in containers or raised beds, compost will help the garden grow. Those heritage seeds you bough will flourish in the well fed bed. Lets take a look at composting on a large scale.
Rutgers University serves over 3.3 million meals and caters more than 5,000 events each year. The University is well known for its food recovery system which was started in the 1960s.
Rutgers had a food waste problem, one they solved by diverting food scraps to a local farm for use as animal feed.
The leftover food is put into a trough which delivers it as well as used napkins to a pulper. Excess water is removed and the food scrapes are pulverized. The result is deposited into barrels and is stored in a refrigerator until a local farmer hauls them to his farm.
Water from the system is recycled to transport more scraps to the pulper.
The farm is less than 15 miles away. The farm uses the pulverized food scraps, averaging 1.125 tons per day, to feed hogs and cattle.
The farmer charges $30 per ton, as opposed to the approximately $60 that Rutgers pays to haul a ton of trash to the landfill.
The school saves money and the farmer gets a valuable commodity for his operation.
On a local or community scale, thin about a cooperative that offers gardening services to the public and sells its own brand of compost. The compost comes from the food scrapes generated by the cooperative members and perhaps from a local restaurant or two.
A little imagination applied to this scenario could create a business opportunity all because we looked at waste as a resource rather than something to be cast aside.
