Greening Your Eating?

Did you know that 15-35% of municipal waste is a combination of food and paper that is soiled with food? In California, where landfill space is extremely tight, and towns are required to divert up to 75% of their waste from landfills, they actually provide special bins to residents for kitchen scraps.

The bins are picked up each week and the material taken to commercial compost facilities. The resulting material is spread on farm fields as a valuable soil amendment. Shoot, in some places, the compost is bagged and sold in stores!

We may not have curbside compost service in our area, but that is no reason to toss vegetable scraps in the trash. Rather, more folks could be composting them!

Kitchen compost can be added to the backyard compost pile, where it will decompose along with the grass and leaves from the yard. Avoid placing meats and fats in the compost bin, but all manner of vegetable and fruit material is fair game. Egg shells, corn cobs, pineapple rinds will all break down eventually, but the smaller they are chopped up before going into the pile, the faster the microbes and other decomposers can do their work!

And composting isn't limited to residential folks. Think about restaurants, and the amount of food waste that is generated just during the food preparation process. If the vegetable and fruit waste materials were kept separate, and placed in their own disposal container, they could easily be collected for composting.

One Woodstock restaurant is already doing just that: Expressly Leslie's on the Woodstock Square - a vegetarian restaurant that specializes in Middle Eastern food - separates all their compostable material. A local vermicomposter (person who composts food using worms) picks up the food scraps for his worms. Well, except for the lemon rinds -- his worms don't like lemons. Leslie even switched to compostable materials for serving the food to dramatically reduce the waste the restaurant generates.

So, what's keeping you from composting your kitchen scraps?