Conservation 101: the Compete to Conserve Blog

A New Year = a New Chance to Set Sustainability Goals

Have you been thinking about doing more, getting involved, and being more green? Thanks to involved Compete to Conserve members like you, everyone can make small changes every day that add up to create real impact. You don’t have to be an environmentalist or an expert — just someone who cares.

Here are new year’s resolutions you can join in our Challenges section to make a difference in 2009:

Julie New Year’s Resolution: Support the Community where I live (patron local businesses, buy locally made products, invest in organizations promoting what helps my ‘hood, etc.)

Cris New Year’s Resolution: Get involved in my local green organizations. Plant some trees. Clean up some beaches…etc…

Mickipedia New Year’s Resolution: Start composting in 2009.

Read Anne’s 12 week story, “My Urban Compost Odyssey” from her personal challenge separate and Green bin my organic waste in the kitchen

Up for a New Sustainability Competition?

Join our new Competition Challenge yourself to keep 5 sustainability resolutions for 2009!

We invite you to post your “green” resolutions in our new competition and then join new challenges to support your resolutions throughout the new year. With your support and involvement, Compete to Conserve can help even more people reduce, reuse, and recycle in 2009.

Here’s to a healthy, happy, and sustainable new year!

1. Compost Your Jack-o-Lantern
You can also save, wash, and roast the pumpkin seeds for a treat.

photo credit: tanakawho

2. Buy a Second-Hand Costume (and Donate It or Use It Next Year)
You can pick up high quality next-to-new costumes at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other second-hand stores for less than $5. Sure beats paying $40, and you’ll conserve resources in the process. Don’t let your costumes’ lifecycle end there: pass them to a friend next year or donate to a retail charity and use your donation as a tax deduction.

3. Buy Less Individually Wrapped Candy
Let’s face facts: are you really going to get 400 trick-or-treaters? If you’re buying candy to satisfy your own sweet tooth, skip the small individually wrapped candies and opt for something with less packaging.

4. Turn Out the Lights
It adds ambiance to the night and saves energy, too.

5. Look for Any Opportunity to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Be mindful of your consumption during holidays when our desire to celebrate often leads to falling off the conservation bandwagon. Reuse costumes and decorations where you can. Recycle plastic cups, use compostable utensils, or use your regular flatware. Question whether you really need the Halloween merchandise that’s pushed at us each year. And just because something’s small doesn’t mean it can’t make a difference–I’ve even recycled tiny cardboard candy boxes from the kids’ treat bags.

More conservation ideas for Halloween from some of our favorite bloggers:

“Turning Halloween into Zero Waste Hallo-green,” My Zero Waste, October 16, 2008:
http://myzerowaste.com/2008/10/turning-halloween-into-a-zero-waste-hallo-green/

“Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Oh My!” Low Impact Home, September 30, 2008: http://lowimpacthome.org/2008/09/30/halloween-thanksgiving-christmasoh-my/

photo credit: salsaboy

“Can’t we just throw away these banana peels?” my exasperated husband asks as I point him to our new compost container. “Do we really have to keep our trash in the fridge?”

Composting doesn’t come easily in our household. While it’s a natural circle-of-life for people living off the land, for most apartment dwellers and urbanites, composting is like de-feathering our own poultry. Messy, smelly, and hard. We know our great-great-great grandparents did it on the farm, but they probably would have preferred the convenience of plastic sacks and trash chutes, too.

“All this stuff is biodegradable, so what difference does it make?” my resident conservation skeptic presses. Now I love the idea of composting as much as the next person, but I don’t think it should be done at the expense of one’s relationships. So I wave off the occasional eco-transgression for the benefit of family harmony.

Still, I’d like to participate our our city’s composting program more, so I’ve created quick cheat sheet to help convince even the most stubborn of skeptics. Please feel free to share with your own:

10 Reasons Why Composting Matters

1. Composting diverts valuable materials that would go wasted in landfill. According to the EPA, 23% of the U.S. waste stream is food and yard waste.
2. We’re running out of safe places to stash our trash–whatever is diverted for re-use or recycle is good.
3. Biodegradation occurs slowly, if at all, in most landfills.*
4. Burning trash creates air pollution and is illegal in many municipalities.
5. Building a new landfill is expensive, up to $10 million, according the the U.S. Department of Energy.
6. Food and yard waste are the largest producers of landfill methane emissions. These emissions are toxic and can explode if not managed properly. Reducing landfill means reducing these emissions.
7. Compost adds nutrients to soil and helps it retain water, helping growers conserve water.
8. Compost can prevent soil erosion.
9. Compost can clean contaminated soil by absorbing hazardous materials like volatile organic compounds, heating fuels, heavy metals, and more.
10. Compost can reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizers and pesticides that are costly and harmful to people and the environment.

*Landfills are tightly packed places, designed to prevent harmful waste from seeping into ground water. In landfill, biodegradable materials do not get the conditions they need to biodegrade: air, moisture, and helpful living organisms. In landfill excavations between 1987-1995, University of Arizona researchers found still-readable newspapers dating back to the 1940s and intact hot dogs and heads of lettuce from the 1960s!

More resources:

An easy-to-understand primer on landfills on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Kids site:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/saving/recycling/solidwaste/landfiller.html

The EPA on composting’s environmental benefits:
http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/rrr/composting/benefits.htm

photo credit: Matt Callow

As pumpkin patches across the country hitch up their hayrides and welcome the harvest with visitors, eco-friendly sites are posting hints and tips to remind readers to choose and use their gourds wisely.

This isn’t going to be much different. In fact, in my search to find options of what you can do with pumpkins—aside from showing off your creative carving prowess—I found that many regions of the US and UK are promoting composting. Pumpkins in a landfill can produce weeds and, believe it or not, sprouts. Only to be covered with someone’s torn up sofa or old alarm clock.

Whether you put the post-holiday pumpkin into a curbside compost bin or into your home kit version, the gourd holds valuable nutrients that can make good fertilizer. In fact, one site even recommended that you just plant the jack-o-lantern shell into the garden, to decompose at will.

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Slow Food Nation '08 in San Francisco.

Slow Food Nation ’08 came to a close in San Francisco yesterday, leaving, organizers hope, very little waste.

Festivals, fairs, amusement parks, and sporting events are notorious for the amount of garbage left in their wake. Along with porta-potties and drunken dudes, trash is an unfortunate reality associated with otherwise joyous county fairs and street fairs. That’s what made Slow Food Nation’s commitment to zero waste such a welcome relief. (”Zero waste” strives to eliminate waste, regarding trash as a resource that can be reused or re-purposed.)

Bins, Staff Made Zero Waste Easy

The weekend-long festival was like Disneyland for foodies with a conscience. Featuring a farmers’ market, a bevy of speakers, a large “Victory Garden” of fruits and vegetables growing outside City Hall, and lots of “slow food” from local restaurants, Slow Food Nation also sported plenty of easy-to-find bins for separating waste into three categories: recyclables, compostables, and landfill. Vendors were careful to offer only items that could be composted or recycled.

The festival also hired a helpful, energetic, friendly staff to help festival-goers place the right items in the right bins. Contamination continues to be the bugaboo of recyclers, so adding a human element no doubt aided organizers’ efforts.

Who Else Is Moving Toward Zero Waste?

Of course, while Slow Food Nation as an organization goes to great pains to not be elitist, the festival was clearly populated by people who already have an interest in sustainability and zero waste practices. More interesting, and maybe even more valuable, would be seeing these efforts in practice at events like the Sonoma County Fair or a 49ers’ game, where larger and more diverse population segments come together.

The Sonoma County Fair did host a “sustainability pavilion” this year, but the fair’s sustainable efforts seemed to end there. When I attended, garbage bins were overflowing with heaps of non-biodegradable utensils and food scraps and food-soiled papers that could have easily been reclaimed and composted.

Still, bit by bit, various festival organizers across the country and trying to make love for a good party compatible with zero waste. Alameda County, across the Bay, employed zero waste practices in its last county fair. Walworth County, Wisconsin, published a case study on their efforts to encourage less waste. And this year’s Silver Lake street fair in Los Angeles worked to get vendors to switch to biodegradable carryout containers and to get people to “think before you toss.”

More resources:

Slow Food Nation ‘08:
http://slowfoodnation.org/

Case Study: Walworth County Fair, Wisconsin:
http://www.besmart.org/publicplacerecycling/Case-studies/Walworth-County-Fair/wc-fair.html

“‘Wasted’ at the County Fair,” on Mom Goes Green:
http://www.momgoesgreen.com/%E2%80%9Cwasted%E2%80%9D-at-the-county-fair/

“The Greening of a Los Angeles Street Festival,” August 24, 2008, The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-sunsetjunction24-2008aug24,0,1134965.story

“Slow Food Brings Many Issues to the Table,” August 29, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/29/MNKQ12K54L.DTL

photo credit: Sue Richards

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council approved an experiment by the city’s Bureau of Sanitation to begin a table scrap collection program within select areas of L.A., giving hope not only to the reduction of landfill waste, but also to the minimization of sewage waste and wasted energy caused by the common practice of disposing food scraps into garbage disposal units.

The experiment will begin with the distribution of 2-gallon kitchen pails to about 5,000 households in the areas of Harbor Gateway, Lincoln Heights, and South Los Angeles.  Once these pails are filled with various food leftovers, its contents are to be dumped into the large green bins outside of each home that are currently collected for various yard trimmings.  The food and green waste combined, would then be delivered to a composting center near Bakersfield.  The program will start next month, following the lead of other regions within the state, including the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to a study conducted by the City of Los Angeles in 2002, single-family homes generated over 230,000 tons of food waste, while multi-family homes contributed almost 149,000 tons, adding up to about 380,000 tons of waste that could be turned into compost.  A  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report indicates that yard trimmings and food waste make up 23 percent of U.S. waste stream.  Although there has been surge in yard waste recovery from 1988 to 2000, only 2.6 percent of food waste was composted in 2000, compared to 56.9 percent of yard trimmings that were recovered for composting, indicating a larger need for food waste programs throughout the country.

While there are an assortment of regional composting programs and educational information available to U.S. residents, the reality is that not enough people are used to or comfortable yet with the idea of food recycling as they are with the recycling of cans, bottles and newspapers.  The benefits of composting food and organic waste cannot be ignored though, when you consider the amount of greenhouse gas that is emitted by its decomposition in a landfill or the amount of money that is wasted on disposal fees, hauling costs, fertilizers and pesticides.

For more information on Composting Programs in your region of the country, visit the EPA’s website: http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/composting/live.htm

There is also a really cool website, “Composting 101,” that can provide you with tips to create your own composting program in your own back yard (no pun intended!): http://www.composting101.com/

Additional Resources:

Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/valley/la-me-scraps13-2008aug13,0,6358339,print.story

City of Los Angeles Solid Waste Planning Background Studies Summary Report:

http://www.lacity.org/san/solid_resources/pdfs/rfp-swirp-appendix-b3.pdf)

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/composting/basic.htm

National Resources Defense Council:

http://www.nrdc.org/enterprise/greeningadvisor/wm-composting.asp