Composting Made Easy

You may know there are many reasons to compost: creating rich soil that needs less chemical-laced fertilizer, saving money on gardening supplies, reducing the amount of garbage that gets mummified in landfills, saving fuel from trips to the dump, the list keeps going. Composting could have a big impact on the amount of trash we generate. A third of all landfill waste across the United States comes from garden clippings and kitchen waste. Instead of being trashed, those items could be put to use to create healthy soil. Starting a compost can be an intimidating prospect, but just a few tips can get you started in no time. 

• First you need a bin to house your compost. Green Irene offers both indoor and outdoor composters. A well-managed compost should have no smell, so housing your compost indoors won’t be an issue. 

• Some people use worms in their compost, also known as vermicompost. Worms create very rich soil, and these composts don’t have to be turned since the worms do the work for you. But you can be very successful without worms as well, so if you’re not a fan of worms don’t worry. We’ll leave vermicomposting out of the discussion here.
   
• The biggest key to composting is knowing what and how much to put in. You’ll be adding two different types of material: “greens” and “browns.” Greens are nitrogen-rich scraps like fresh grass clippings, vegetables and fruits. Browns are carbon-rich materials like twigs, dried leaves, newspapers, and hay. In general, you want have slightly more brown material than green material, although composting is more of an art than a science. 
   
• Many things in your home can be composted. In addition to the thing listed above, you can compost:
  • Tea bags (remove the staples)
  • Coffee grinds (if you use a paper filter, you can compost that too)
  • Saw dust
  • Wood chips
  • Fur/hair
  • Corn husks
  • All yard waste
     
• While you can compost many things, some things should not go into your compost. The following items will eventually breakdown, but they will take a long time and their smell may attract bugs. They’re best avoided: 
  • Grease and oil
  • Dairy products
  • Meat and bones
  • Citrus peels from lemons, oranges, etc. 
     
• Your compost should be fairly moist, about as damp as a rung out sponge. If your compost is too dry, try sprinkling it with some water. Avoid making it too wet, however. Overly-wet composts can start to smell. 
   
• Things biodegrade much faster when they’re hot. If you have an outdoor compost, try locating it some place that gets a lot of sun. For cooler climates, try moving your compost indoors (or into the garage) during the winter months.

San Francisco Approves Ambitious Recycling Law

Commentary: While Green Irene fully supports government efforts to reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions, you can also play a key role in reducing waste by using the Green Irene Composter, which allows you to compost your  food waste. Green Irene has an indoor and an outdoor composter conveniently designed for you to easily compost your food. The end product, deemed “gardener’s gold,” is highly nutritious soil that can help you grow garden plants. You can purchase the composters at ShopGreenIrene. To learn more about recycling and composting in general, contact your Local Eco-Consultant today!

Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal for the most comprehensive mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. It’s an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.

“San Francisco has the best recycling and composting programs in the nation,” Newsom said, praising the board’s vote on a plan that some residents had decried as heavy-handed and impractical. “We can build on our success.”

The ordinance is expected to take effect this fall.

The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Failing to properly sort your refuse could result in a fine after several warnings, but Newsom and other officials say fines will only be levied in the most egregious cases.

Fines for almost all residential customers and many small businesses – anyone who generates less than a cubic yard of refuse a week – are initially capped at $100. Businesses that don’t have proper bins face escalating fines up to $500.

There is a moratorium on fines until at least July 2011 for tenants and owners of multifamily buildings or multitenant commercial properties to get people used to composting. Buildings where recycling carts won’t fit can get a waiver.

“In any scenario there will be repeated notices and phone calls before we even start talking about fines,” said Jared Blumenfeld, head of the city’s Department of the Environment. “We don’t want to fine people.”

The proposal, hailed as an effective way to cut about two-thirds of the 618,000 tons of waste the city sent to landfill in 2007, drew resistance from some apartment building owners when details emerged about a year ago. And some residents were upset over the possibility of inspectors checking their garbage.

The ordinance calls for garbage collectors to leave tags on containers when they spot incorrectly sorted material, but those collectors are only going to view what’s on top of the container and have no intention of going through them, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for San Francisco collectors Sunset Scavenger Co. and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co., subsidiaries of Recology, formerly Norcal Waste Systems.

“Our role is to pick up the garbage and to make recycling as easy and convenient as possible for our customers,” Reed said. “Our collection drivers will not become enforcers.”

City officials would levy any fines, and the legislation doesn’t provide funding for new trash inspectors.

“It doesn’t create trash police,” Blumenfeld said.

Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle. Continue Reading.

Common Sense Steps Toward Sustainable Landscaping

The mantra of reduce, reuse, and recycle does not apply only to the indoors. It applies to our outdoor areas as well! Our approach to how we care for our home landscapes has a significant impact on our overall environmental impact. Simple choices, from mowing and watering, to plant selection and pest control, all add up.

The easiest way to reduce your outdoor environmental impact is to reduce the size of your turf area. Adding or expanding planting beds, garden space, or patio areas all allow you to reduce the many inputs (water, fertilizer, fuel) and waste (clippings) involved in keeping a lawn.

For the lawn that remains, make wise choices regarding its care. A great first step is to grow one of the many lower maintenance turf grass varieties that require less water and fertilizer. When mowing, make sure your mower is operating efficiently, or better yet, use a zero emission reel mower. And instead of taking your clippings to the curb, either compost them or leave them on the lawn where they can return nutrients to the soil.

Since roughly half of residential water use goes to landscaping, this is a prime area to consider for reduction.

• Water your lawn wisely by using well-maintained, efficient equipment.
• Water early in the day to reduce evaporation losses.
• Water slow and deep for less runoff and healthier plants.

Further reductions can occur by:

• Mulching your flower beds.
• Selecting well-adapted, healthy plants and placing them appropriately.
• Collecting rainwater for later use.

Home energy use can be reduced by careful placement of landscape plants. Trees that shade the home can significantly reduce summer heat gain. Shading your air-conditioning units allows them to operate more efficiently. In the winter time, chilly winds and heat loss can be reduced by well-placed conifers.

Increased demand for organic products has led to many options for low-impact fertilizers and pest controls. Give them a try, and you may be surprised at how effective they are. Plus, by having a toxic free and biodiverse landscape, natural controls such as beneficial insects can thrive and help keep the pests in check. Earthworms will also work for you by aerating your soil and adding their fertile castings.

Re-use can be a creative adventure. Brainstorm a new way to use the stones from that old wall that finally collapsed, or the wood from that ancient cherry tree that sadly went down in the storm. Keep your neighbors in mind too. What may seem to you like a worthless pile of stones may be the perfect material for their dream project. Plus, they may be aching to get rid of something that you could use.

The most important example of recycling in the landscape is composting. Composting takes readily available materials from your landscape (leaves and clippings) and, instead of using energy to send them to overflowing landfills, turns them into a high quality product. Compost provides a wide array of essential minerals and nutrients, improves soil structure, improves drainage, and increases the soil’s water-holding capacity. All this with no cost, no packaging, and no trip to the store.

With a Green Home Makeover, your Green Irene consultant will be happy to give you more details on these and other tips to help us green the world, one home (and office) at a time.

Cities Joining the Curbside Composting Bandwagon

Commentary: Green Irene can help you compost if your city does not already have curbside recycling. We carry indoor and outdoor composters that can help you reduce your waste right away and generate rich soil for your plants. OurGreen Home Makeover can also help you look at waste more broadly and help you figure out how to reduce it, even at cost savings! So, find your Local Eco-Consultant today to get a Green Home Makeover and ShopGreenIrene to get your composter!

Curbside recycling programs have become so common, that most of us take them for granted. Simply toss your soda cans, beer bottles and newspapers in the right bins and your city or county will make sure they get recycled.

But will the day ever come when we can compost our food scraps just as easily? In some U.S. cities, that day is already here, and there is a growing movement afoot to make curbside composting as easy and common as recycling has become. That’s good news, considering that the average American throws away about 100 pounds of food scraps a year—and that adds up more than 7 percent of the waste stream.

Though many people assume that food scraps and other biodegradable items eventually break down in the garbage dump, in reality, U.S. landfills allow for very little decomposition, says Darby Hoover, a resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Landfills are sealed off to prevent contamination, so our banana peels, coffee grounds and egg shells are usually deprived of the oxygen they need to break down—and putting it all in plastic bags doesn’t help.

But, given the right conditions, much of what we throw away could readily be converted into nitrogen-rich compost, which can be used to increase soil quality for gardening and farming. And in fact, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of organic matter that’s composted instead of landfilled: Nationally, the rate is now 20 percent, up from only 2 percent in 1990, according to the U.S. EPA. But that’s thanks mostly to the increase in local yard trimming and leaf collection programs. Food waste collection has been much slower to catch on.

As more and more cities and counties are beginning to offer curbside composting, states are finding ways to encourage these local programs. Here are some highlights:

• San Francisco residents can put almost all of their food waste—even meat and dairy—in bins for pick-up, thanks to an innovative residential composting program that began in 1998 (restaurants there have been composting even longer—since 1997). The scraps are put in biodegradable bags, which are now widely available. The resulting compost is sold to California’s famous vineyards to grow grapes and the revenue helps offset the cost.
• Inspired by San Francisco, other US cities are catching on: In 2005, Seattle began curbside composting as part of its Zero-Waste Strategy. Boulder, Colo., Austin, Texas and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn. have recently begun doing so, too.
• Facing a decline in available landfill space, Rapid City, S.D., instituted an ambitious co-composting program in which organic material is sorted from the general solid waste stream and combined with biosolids (human waste) collected from the water treatment plant. The combined sludge is then processed and converted into agricultural compost.
• Other states are also looking into ways to foster more composting. In Minnesota, for example, where many small local programs have been initiated by towns and even school districts, the legislature is considering ways to implement even more says Ginny Black, of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Of course there are some factors that can limit the amount of organic waste that gets composted. For example, even though there are many potential uses for the finished product, like storm water management and erosion control, right now, there still aren’t that many facilities than can handle large-scale processing. But the same was once true of recycling plants. “There is really a lot of untapped potential for municipal composting—we’re going to see a lot more in the future,” says Hoover.

Excerpted from Earth911.