Compost Party

This Sunday I participated in Queens composting history with a pilot project headed by Western Queens Compost Initiative (WQCI). Man did I smell funky afterwards. It's amazing what people will throw out and what people eat. Avocado pits, perfectly fine onions, limes, lemons and oranges that were never eaten, a giant blue potato, coffee grounds, carrots, loaves of bread, mint from the yard, etc etc.

We managed to combine TONS of food scraps along with leaves and woodchips/shavings to create a compost pile sitting on top of two forced air vents. Hopefully this project will show that we can compost locally and with less labor in order to utilize important environmental resources we spend so much energy and time to dispose of in landfills in Pennsylvania that end up polluting our land and water. Read below for all the details provided by WQCI.

What do you get when you mix 15,000 lbs of food scrap from GrowNYC Greenmarkets, 8000 lbs of wood chip, 1,600 lbs of leaves from Astoria Park Alliance & Socrates Sculpture Park, 1,600 lbs of shavings; the combined wisdom of Earth Matter..., Red Hook Community Farm, and Gowanus Canal Conservancy compost operators; the technical expertise of O2Compost; the skills imparted by the US Composting Council's Compost Operator Training course instructors; the social media coverage of Shorty Awards recipient for Food, and LA school garden magnate, Mud Baron; and the loving touch of Jeanne Hodesh, Michelle Hughes, Peter Tzellos, Tanya Bley, Jae Lee, Sonya Pena, Julia Koullias, Becky Thorp, Justin Lau, Peter Richter, Nick Knoll, Josh Gallaway, David Buckel, Erik Martig, Chris Bivens, and Charles Beyrer?

A: A 20ft long, 15ft wide, 6ft high answer to urban ag, street trees, sustainable materials allocation, natural resource conservation, and direct environmental action at the community level.