What’s hot and dirty on campus right now? Ha, you wish. Composting, of course! Thanks to Usdan and Summerfield’s staff and all of your support, we are now composting almost all pre- and post-consumer waste from our two biggest dining halls. Many halls and houses now have compost buckets, and a few backyard composters on campus collect and decompose personal scraps. All of the compost is driven to Long Lane Farm where our two giant composting machines (Earth Tubs™) break it all down to fertilizer. The rich black soil that comes out nourishes Long Lane’s delicious vegetables with nutrients and keeps our waste (and the fossil fuels needed to truck it around) to a minimum.
Up ’til now, though, you’ve had to bring the compost to us (or to the dining hall), because we haven’t had enough small, or backyard, composters to break down all those nutritious scraps near where most of us live. THAT, though, is about to change. With a very generous allocation from the SBC and help from the Physical Plant staff, EON will purchase ten backyard composters to be placed, well, in your backyard.
Starting just after spring break, we’ll install the Green Machines — 11 sexy cubic feet of composting power — in convenient (non-smelly) locations all over campus. Their recycled plastic design is one of the easiest models to turn — the essential process of aerating the compost to keep it decomposing — and they’re solid enough to last well into a (hopefully) much greener future. With the increased supply in compost comes the potential for local fertilization of campus gardens and beds (again, reducing the fossil fuels needed to truck in dirt) and partnerships with the Traverse Square community garden and other community garden projects nearby.
For our part, EON will be ramping up our dispersal of individual compost buckets (for FREE!) so that every hall and house that wants one can begin composting (you can find out how to get one now by e-mailing compost@wesleyan.edu). Once you have yours, just separate all your food scraps (minus meat and dairy) and collect them in the bucket. When it’s full, take it out to the closest Green Machine, and dump it in. That’s it. Even give it a turn, if that’s how you do. From there, the composters will be emptied by EON or Physical Plant, their beautiful soil used nearby or taken to Long Lane Farm. It will take awareness, and a very little amount of effort to separate our food scraps and carry our buckets the short distance, but our cumulative impact will be huge. Take a look at all the food scraps in your trash, if you use your kitchen, to see what I mean.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a quarter of our national waste stream is composed of food and yard waste annually. That’s 50 billion pounds of perfectly decomposable waste that’s trucked millions of miles and dumped in overfilled landfills. Composting is such an ingenious solution because it removes or limits the unnecessary transport of organic waste by keeping it, and all its nutrient-rich benefits, on site. Composting here at Wesleyan can also provide a practical, local deposit for all of our carbon-rich landscape waste (ever noticed how completely the leaves get herded away in the fall?), since compost needs about 20 to 30 times more carbon (leaves, paper, etc.) than nitrogen (food scraps) to decompose properly. It’s cheap, too. The cost of soil and fertilizer paid by Physical Plant each year can be augmented by the rich soil coming out of the Earth Tubs™ and, very soon, the Green Machines.
Like any effective approach to environmental problems today, we have to mobilize to make composting happen, to reduce the astronomical (and unnecessary) amount of organic waste that ends up in landfills and shrink our personal ecological footprint. While buying the Green Machines will make composting readily available to us, their presence alone doesn’t make us a greener community. We, as the most food-secure nation in the world (we have displays made of food at Usdan), have the choice to recycle our waste responsibly and locally. If each of us makes a personal change, even as small as carrying a bucket of food scraps to our nearest Green Machine, we can substantially reduce our disproportionately negative impact on the global environment. So get excited! Help revolutionize our waste system and make the Wesleyan environment a more responsible, efficient place for Middletown and the rest of the world. Stay tuned for information on where the bins will be, and keep composting!
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