As the Worm Turns
If you’re a crazy recycler like me — the kind who fishes the lime out of the empty Corona and considers tossing empty water bottles sacrilegious — then you’re a prime candidate for composting.
Yes, your apartment is small, and you’re way busy. But if you have time to separate plastic from paper, what’s a few kitchen scraps to you?
You don’t even have to get into the whole worm business. You can just make better use of your food waste, one of the largest chunks of trash in NYC and worldwide. (Reasons on why this is bad, below.)
Some cities pick it up at the curb, just like your metal, paper and glass. Here, you have to take egg shells into your own hands, and dispose of them yourself. A countertop pail, like a steel or bamboo one from 3R Living or the new Green in BKLYN, makes a pretty home for your coffee grinds and garlic peels, but a takeout container, kept in your freezer, works just as well. That’s the storage method of choice for Kate Zidar, who started the North Brooklyn Compost Project, one of a handful of places in the city that accepts residential food scraps. While the Fort Greene Greenmarket and the Lower East Side Ecology Center booth at the Union Square Greenmarket will take your scraps year round, most community gardens that compost accept them only from May through November (ask your local one if they do). This year, when NBCP begins its scrap drop-off on May 16, Zidar is asking anyone tossing to volunteer — say by repairing one of the million street trees being planted as part of Plan NYC. In return, you get a bag of compost (and a clean conscience). She recommends freezing scraps because it’ll buy you a half hour of time en route to the drop-off before they begin dripping. It also keeps away the fruit flies.
If you’re not daunted yet, you can also buy worms and start (indoor) composting yourself. A pound of these fuglies runs about $20, which you can order through The Brooklyn Kitchen until the end of the month — the first spot in Brooklyn to offer them. Otherwise, they’re available at the LESEC, along with worm “condos.” Jo Micek, also of the North Brooklyn Composting Project, estimates it takes a week for her worms to plow through 2 to 3 pounds of food waste, and 3 months for them to turn it into compost, which she uses on her indoor plants and gives to friends with yards.
Does it smell? It shouldn’t if you compost the right stuff, and the NYC Compost Project lists a ton of free resources that make it hard to mess up, like the demonstration at Borough Hall this Thursday, 5:30-8:30pm, or at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Plant Sale May 5-7. (The BBG has a great online guide, too.) You can also learn through volunteering at NBCP Saturdays noon to four, or workshops at the LESEC.
If you’re still wary, you’re not alone. Even Elizabeth Royte, Park Sloper and author of Garbage Land and most recently Bottlemania, finds composting indoors impractical (especially since she can do it in her yard). “There are three people in my family, we eat lots of veggies, and all our meals are cooked and eaten at home seven days a week. I’m not prepared to give up that much counter or floor space to the number of worms I’d need.” But she reiterates the reasons why composting makes sense: “It keeps weight off city trucks (we pay by the pound to empty them at landfills), it saves space in landfills, it avoids the generation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and leachate in landfills, and it makes something nice to go back on the earth.”
Sent by Nicole. Photos from top by denali2001 via Flickr, ryanlachica via Flickr, and longdistancehiker via Flickr.
Published on April 21st, 2009 under Everything.
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