Warm compost spurs excitement about No Impact Week

A Sunday Afternoon post:

Friday at 11:45 am my outlook calendar popped up to remind me to bring the 10th floor compost bag down to the 8th floor so that the week's 'compost stars' would have an easier time bringing the large load to Union Square Green Market for drop off.

I'll start by explaining this compost business, and then go into why this related to No Impact Week, which starts today. At least three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I am certain- maybe even Saturdays and Sundays, although I'd have to check on this) the Lower East Side Ecology Center (LES Center) has a station at the Union Square Green Market where anyone who wishes can come and deposit their compost in one of several garbage bins that will be taken at the end of the day back to the center to be maintained and eventually turned into nutrient rich compost soil, which you can also purchase at the Union Square stand. This is just one of the many stellar programs the LES Center runs, and for the purpose of this post, the only one I'm going to ramble on about (...well, at least in this post..)

So, cool, a few times a week I can bring a bag of frozen food waste from my apartment and drop it off on my commute to work- awesome. Awesome for many reasons.

1: Composting is a really amazing way to reduce the amount of landfill space need.

2: Composting creates amazing fertile soil that can be used to grow new things and avoid buying scaring chemical fertilizer.

3: Keeping food waste in the freezer to keep until it's ready to be distributed reduces reason for roaches, mice, and other not-so-welcome house guests to come around.

4: Keeping a bag of food waste makes it easy to evaluate just how much of your food is processed and/or animal based. It's sort of like the bag of trash I'm collecting today- it helps me to see what exactly I'm consuming. I like the idea that when most of my food waste is going into the compost bag I am not only eating healthy hearty vegetables and feeling sweet, but that I didn't put a bunch of packaging into the garbage and was not consuming methane intense meat or dairy (yes, I know, the New York Times just made the point in a recent article that soy may be just as bad of a gas releaser- we'll talk about that later).

5. Being able to drop off your compost allows you to still contribute without having to keep a home worm bin (which the LES Center also can set you up with if you'd like) that ultimately takes a lot more work than most people have time, energy, or interest to give.

So, to shorten this lengthening post, I'll explain simply that the Eco-Committee at NRDC is a group of staff members who have taken it upon themselves to see that we're doing everything we can in the office to reduce our environmental impact. Each week on Friday the compost collected over the week from each floor is brought down to the bottom floor and wheeled over to the Union Square drop off by a willing (and awesome) pair of volunteers. While tying up the bag to bring down to the bottom floor this past Friday, I started to think just how lucky I am to be able to do that sort of thing at my work place and how excited I am to see my daily lifestyle choices in a new light as I participate in No Impact Week.

Monday, tomorrow, is trash- I will write more later on how today's experiment of keeping a bag of my trash worked out...