Legends of compost
Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, ecologists from the University of Pennsylvania, spent half of each year in the late 1990s in Costa Rica working toward protecting tropical forest ecosystems. They became concerned about a heavily deforested area in the Guanacaste Conservation Area (GCA) and hatched a clever, simple plan for healing the seven-acre decimated area – cover it with compost.
Just north of the GCA was the Del Oro orange juice factory. Like all food facilities, Del Oro had waste to dispose of, and in 1997 Janzen and Hallwachs worked a deal in which Del Oro would donate a section of their land to GCA in exchange for using the deforested area as a place to dump their orange peels and waste pulp for free. The deal was seen by environmentalists as a win-win for GCA and Del Oro.
One thousand truckloads, or about12,000 metric tons, of orange waste was spread over the barren area until a competing company complained in a court filing Del Oro was desecrating an area of national importance, and the court sided with the complainant.
So the application of organic matter to the barren land stopped, and nothing else happened there until the summer of 2013 when graduate student Timothy Treuer of Princeton University visited the site. “It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines,” he said, “I couldn’t even see the seven-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site.”
Treuer brought along another Princeton student, Jonathan Choi, who observed, “While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I’d have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself.”
Other researchers responded and did science things to evaluate and calculate the differences between the orange waste site vs. unadorned areas nearby, and their measurements indicated the soil in the orange waste area contained a richer array of nutrients, the trees contained more biomass, and there was a greater variety of tree species.
The Princeton contingent concluded that the GCA experiment indicated a sensible plan would be for private enterprises and environmentalists to work together to make the best use of the leftover plant material.
In the United States, there are local recycling facilities that accept or even pickup leftover food waste so it can be composted. Not all local governments provide such a service which has led to the creation of subscription services, whereby enterprises like Bootstrap Compost of Boston, and beyond, that pick up leftover food scraps from residences for composting.
Once a customer applies, Bootstrap drops off a five-gallon bucket to be filled with compostable food scraps that Bootstrap will not only retrieve but replace with a new empty one, plus give the customer some compost made by everyone’s food scraps.
With the help of local farms, Bootstrap diverts thousands of pounds of organic material from the waste stream daily. The farms get compost in return, and the balance goes to schools and community gardens.
But that’s not all, folks. In Traverse City, Michigan, nine-year-old Carter Schmidt and his father were inspired by Bootstrap ten years ago, and Carter began collecting five-gallon buckets of compost material from his neighbors by riding a bicycle pulling a trailer. Some of neighbors assist in providing sites for composting, but much of the material goes to Carter’s Compost World HQ where he has a worm compost operation. When the worm castings are ready, his family uses some on their farm and the rest go to his neighbors.
A community fundraiser provided Carter with resources for buying other trailers for his team of riders. “I think composting is a great thing to do to help the Earth because food scraps really don’t belong in the trash,” he said. “Composting is nature’s way of recycling and probably the most environmentally friendly form of recycling there is.”