Bangalore produces over 2000 to 3000 tonnes of waste everyday. The centralized government composting plant can handle only 500 tonnes per day. The rest reaches dumps that are illegal.

In just five years the Daily Dump team has helped over 4,500 customers in Bengaluru to compost household waste in terracotta pots, and these customers keep around 5,522kg of organic waste out of landfills every day. What is remarkable about Poonam Bir Kasturi’s waste management process is its simplicity, and the cleverly designed terracotta pots add a touch of earthiness to it.

Poonam Bir Kasturi with her terracotta pots.

Bengaluru’s Poonam Bir Kasturi, a former student of the National Institute of Design, has one obsession: that of managing kitchen waste. She is the brain behind Daily Dump, that turns our daily garbage into nutrient waste. Since waste management is not “sexy enough” for most people, she has designed attractive and innovative terracotta pots in which the waste can be managed.

See the article about Poonam here.

See the Daily Dump website here.

Neighbourhood composting on the streets of India

Composting for apartments/flats in India

Composting at home in India

Pee Wee returns with the 5th book in the series

By Larraine Roulston
2011

Pee Wee, the endearing little red wiggler, describes the joy of composting. ‘Pee Wee’s Magical Compost Tea’ illustrates the benefits of making and using compost tea. Each book contains resources and ideas for teachers.

For a Waste Reduction Week activity, the children in Ms. Palmer’s class explore the benefits of brewing and applying compost tea. All the while, Pee Wee and the compost critters plan to host a compost tea party of their own inside a rotting Jack O’Lantern.

See the series here.

Vancouver’s Inner-city farms uses restaurant produced compost to grow food that is delivered back to that restaurant

September 22, 2011
News, Canada, BC

A Vancouver company grows vegetables in front yards donated by homeowners, reports the CBC’s Bob Nixon.

See the video clip here.

Inner City Farmers here.

Worm Farmer – 2nd part of the series

Link to video.

September 21, 2011
News Canada BC

A retired Vancouver animal scientist uses containers full of worms at his home to convert compost into soil, reports the CBC’s Bob Nixon

Link to video here.

Composting food in an electric composter – 1st part of the series

Link to video here.

September 20, 2011
News Canada BC

A Vancouver restaurant is recycling almost all of its scraps, reports the CBC’s Bob Nixon.

Link to video here.

Sundews (Drosera): These sticky plants are great for trapping fruit flies and fungus gnats.

At City Farmer, we get a “horde” of calls about fruit fly problems on our Compost Hotline. The staff have a variety of answers and some of them were reproduced in the Globe and Mail newspaper last week. (See below.)

Our Bug Lady, Maria Keating added one more excellent suggestion, a small Sundew, a plant trap, that can be kept in the kitchen right next to your food scraps bucket. It’s sticky tentacles are ready and hungry for those annoying insects, which often show up on rotting food.

International Carnivorous Plant Society says: “The carnivorous sundew plant, botanical name Drosera, has about 130 species. All of the species of the sundew plant are beautiful and many look like fireworks, but they are deadly to the insects that fly near to them.

“One thing that all carnivorous sundew plants do have is the gel like substance at the tips of the tentacles that cover the leaves. This gel is a sticky substance that the insects that fly too near the plant get stuck on. The plant can then eat it.

“The plant is called sundew because of the gel like substance on the tentacles. The gel makes the plants look as if they have morning dew on them all day long, especially when it glistens in the sun.”

Pops Predatory Plants here.

International Carnivorous Plant Society here.

Five steps to a kitchen free of fruit flies

By Vivian Luk
Globe and Mail
July 16, 2011

Filling an indoor organic-waste bin with fruit peels, coffee grinds and meat scraps is one way to do right by the environment, but it is also a recipe for a fruit-fly problem. Fruit flies are, as the name implies, attracted to ripe fruit, and often the produce you bring home from the grocer contains fly eggs that may hatch in a matter of hours. In the summer, when compost can become stinkier than usual, fruit flies are all the more attracted to those rotting banana peels and will breed by the hundreds. Here are some ways to keep those pests out of the kitchen.

Minimize waste volume: Hold only one to two days’ worth of food scraps in a tightly sealed bin. Less food equals fewer flies.

Freeze them: Toss the contents of the organic-waste bin into the freezer before you dump the material outside. The cold temperature will kill any fruit-fly eggs.

Layer them: Place a used paper towel or brown paper bag over the scraps to soak up moisture and keep odour at bay. Food rots more slowly when there is no liquid.

Take it outside: Wrap up scraps in pieces of newspaper, paper towels or an old pizza box and take them directly to the outdoor green-waste bin.

Trap them: In a small container, combine half a cup of fruit juice, two drops of vinegar and two drops of liquid dish soap and seal the container with plastic wrap. Poke holes into the wrap with a toothpick and place the container beside or on top of the bin. The fermenting vinegar and fruit juice will attract adult flies and the soap will kill them. Empty the container every three to four days.

Link to story here.

The Speedibin

In 1989, City Farmer was asked by Metro Vancouver to come up with an idea to prevent rats from accessing compost bins. Pest control experts said that the answer was to “build them out”. So a new compost bin had to be invented, with four impenetrable sides, plus a lid and base to prevent entry by rodents.

Inventors came up with plastic, wood and metal bin designs. One excellent metal bin, the “Speedibin”, was created by Fred Francis of Victoria, BC. A small number of his bins were manufactured, but because plastic bins flooded the market at a much lower price, the metal bins didn’t survive.

Now Fred’s daughter Joyce has resurrected the “Speedibin”. For those who have been visited by a rat or want a very strong bin, this metal composter is a wonderful alternative to plastic.

The Speedibin website is coming soon, here.

To purchase, email Joyce McMenamon directly: pjmcmenamon@telus.net

If it is successful, there are plans to expand it to all neighbourhoods next year

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun
July 12, 2011

Excerpt:

It can take years for recycling programs to catch on. It took 15 years for Vancouver’s blue-box recycling program to achieve a 77-per-cent participation rate. San Francisco, which brought in its food-scraps program in 2000, has a 30-per-cent participation rate. Seattle, which began diverting food scraps in 2005, has a success rate of 50 per cent.

But the incentive is there, says Chris Underwood, Vancouver’s manager of solid-waste management. Fully 35 per cent of the city’s garbage – or about 129,000 tonnes – is made up of kitchen and compostable wastes, he said. Of the more than three million tonnes of garbage produced in the region, 55 per cent is already diverted to recycling and composting.

The vast majority of the city’s compostable garbage comes from commercial operations, including restaurants and food processing facilities. Those companies will be targeted at a later date in the third phase as part of a larger campaign.

The first phase has met with only limited success. About 12 per cent of households recycle raw vegetable and fruit scraps, well down from the 35 per cent the city is shooting for. That may be in part because nearly six in 10 Vancouver homes already have a backyard composter where they dump their vegetable and fruit scraps, Underwood said. “They don’t see a need to put them in the green cans because they already do it themselves,” he said.

Read the complete article here.

My Garden Bag

At this time of year, our Compost Hotline in Vancouver receives lots of calls from residents who want to buy soil or compost for their gardens. We have to scramble to update our resource list so we can advise people about the various soil mixes that are on the market.

Most people who order a large quantity of soil will receive it as a pile dumped off the back of a truck. MyGardenBag.com is something different.

Here’s how it works.

Visit their website here.

Bayview mulch has been a boon for private backyard gardens, too.

By Matt Baume
Grist
22 Feb. 2011

Excerpt:

Sanjay Bhas founded Bayview Greenwaste in 1998. The company, located on the city’s southern waterfront, collects plant waste — for a fee — and then grinds the organic matter into mulch that it gives away for free to anyone who wants it. Nonprofits, municipalities, private citizens, schools, and power plants (which burn organic matter instead of coal) count themselves among the company’s beneficiaries.

At Hayes Valley Farm, Bayview’s raw material was essential. Volunteers began by laying down a layer of cardboard, followed by ground-up organic matter, a process known as sheet-mulching. “As far as I know, it’s the largest sheet-mulching project ever done,” said David Cody, one of the Hayes Valley Farm’s founders. “It takes a forest hundreds of years to make an inch of topsoil. Hayes Valley Farm will make two feet of topsoil in less than five years.”

Read the complete article here.

Community composting – is this it?

By Colleen Kimmett
Open File
February 14, 2011

Excerpt:

When Michael Levenston was offered the chance to bring a dragon into his demonstration garden in Kitsilano, he was skeptical. After some convincing, the Red Dragon–a cherry-red electric composter–found a new home.

“So far it’s working like it’s supposed to,” Levenston says. “I’m very excited about making clean, good quality compost.”

The Red Dragon–about the size of a bar fridge–is the smallest of a line of electric composters distributed by GreenGood Composters. It runs on 60 to 80 kilowatts of electricity per month (about four dollars’ worth), and can turn up to 100 kilograms of food waste into several kilograms of compost in 24 hours. It was so effective, in fact, that City Farmer recently started using a larger version, the White Dragon.

The composters are being used at restaurants and other businesses, as well as large public institutions like schools and even military bases, says Brian Leung, director of GreenGood’s Vancouver office. The advantage is that they allow on-site composting with no smell and no rodents.

The machines do this by heating food waste and mixing it regularly. Heat evaporates the water in the waste, which is usually 80 to 90 per cent of its weight and volume, and also kills any harmful bacteria in the compost, meaning it can be safely used in the garden.

“Most of the units now are being sold in Korea as well as in Japan,” explains Leung. These countries have banned food scraps from the waste stream because they simply don’t have the space to expand landfills.

Read the complete article here.

GreenGood Composters here.

Compost supplies all 500 plots and common areas and still produces leftovers for school gardens

By Jeff Spurrier
LA Times
Nov. 24, 2010

Excerpt:

When Warren Miyashiro started gardening at Ocean View Farms in 1985, he looked around for compost to amend the sandy soil. Finding none, he bought a bag from a garden store — his first, he says, and his last.

Miyashiro, a master of compost, has spent decades building a system here that is the envy of other community gardens. After years of tweaking it, he’s almost satisfied. It supplies all 500 plots and common areas and still produces leftovers for school gardens.

Miyashiro began by chopping up plant material with flat bottom shovels and searching Hollywood horse stables for manure. Now he has a Toro mini-tractor, three shredders, three teams of gardener-volunteers and tons of fresh bedding from stables in Mandeville and Sycamore canyons, delivered a few times a month by the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation, which benefits because there’s less waste to bring to a landfill.

Read the complete article here.

Trying out a mid-scale composter at our Compost Garden in Vancouver

We finally started up the White Dragon composter and have been adding garbage bins full of food scraps to it from a local restaurant for the past three weeks. We’ve successfully been using its younger brother, the Red Dragon, a smaller, family sized bin, for the past 12 months. Both bins change food scraps into compost in 24 hours using microbes in a heated holding tank in which stirring wings mix the material a few times every hour.

The White Dragon Making Compost

The photos attached show the White Dragon in its handsome wooden shed; microbes in sawdust about to enter the Dragon as inoculants; a scale for weighing the food scraps; collection bins behind Bishops restaurant two blocks away; and the delivery of the organic waste.

Over the next 12 months, we will be measuring the electricity used by the machine, the weight of the food scraps fed to it and the weight of the finished compost removed from the machine. We will also be looking at the finished compost quality, and any odour issues or noise.

Visit the manufacturer’s website here.

See the Red Dragon at our garden here.

And here.

How we compost at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden

Sharon Slack, head gardener at our Demo Garden, explains briefly what you need to do to make excellent compost at home. Using just your fruit and veggie scraps, some leaves and some garden waste, you can have great finished compost in 5-8 months. This cold composting method lets you use whatever organic waste you have on hand.

Sharon demonstrates how to use a compost aerator and what to do if a rat shows its face.

You can see a slide-show of Sharon’s compost method here.

And this link goes to the Here’s the Dirt compost brochure.

And of course if you have more questions, call our Compost Hotline at 604-736-2250.

For City of Vancouver residents, the bins can be purchased here.

Uniting a community in Northeast Baltimore through gardening

Hamilton Crop Circle is seeking seed money to help our various projects grow!

Some money will be allocated to developing worm composting systems other funds will be allocated to building greenhouses for year round produce production. Our projects will become sustainable economic engines thanks to start up funds.

Local Composting Program:
Hamilton Crop Circle works with area restaurants to collect compostable materials at no charge, reducing waste, while creating natural fertilizer.

Roof Top Gardening:
HCC is developing a system of rooftop gardening projects in the industrial and mercantile sectors throughout Baltimore City to produce locally grown food.

Feeding the hungry:
Recognizing the need to provide fresh food to Baltimore’s needy HCC has forged a partnership between Our Daily Bread and the Baltimore Farmers Market to donate fresh foods weekly.

Educational Growth:
By developing microfarms at area schools, HCC is educating young people about where food comes from, and how to grow it. The gardens are ideally watered by the school’s rooftop cistern. The vegetables find their way to the cafeteria and the science room.

See their blog here.

The Red Dragon has surprised us!

Six months ago, we sceptics reluctantly agreed to test out a plug-in composter from Korea at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’d already had a bad experience with one electric bin and were quite sure that this one would act badly too.

We put in the required mix of sawdust and microbes supplied with the bin, added some water and plugged the attractive machine into the wall. Then periodically we put in food waste brought from home.

Open the lid and this is what you see.

Surprisingly, the waste had turned into compost the next time we looked inside. From food waste to black compost in a jiffy, 12-24 hours! There was evaporating moisture, a pleasant odour and the quietly turning metal prongs that every so often mixed the waste. No worms, no carbon/nitrogen ratio; we simply emptied the kitchen scraps bucket, closed the lid and were done.

We watched this process over the winter. Brian, David and John, three others on the ‘Red Dragon Team’, also tested the machine at their homes, adding more food than us and even dog poo. All of us have had ‘surprising’ success.

After six months, these small buckets contain 4/5 of the harvested compost from the Red Dragon. The composter comes with a black scooper to empty the bin and a scraper to clean the inside walls.

A soil test from the lab shows a compost that can be used safely in the garden.

Visit the manufacturer’s website here.

See The Red Dragon arrives at the garden in October.

Feeding food scraps to livestock in World War II

This practice is not common today and it is banned in most countries due to animal health concerns. But in England during the war, the activity was promoted and seniors, who grew up in England, remember the Pig Man.

Revised extracts from ‘A Sheltered Childhood ~ Wartime Family Memories of an East Acton Child’
Contributed by Brian Brooks
The Brooks family lived at 18 The Green, East Acton, West London.

“Not only paper and metal had to be salvaged but now food swill to feed animals, such as pigs, as well. This would help meat rationing. A round metal bin and lid, nick-named the ‘Pig Bin’, was put by the lamppost opposite The Bye, beside the path to the public air raid shelter on The Green. This was for everybody’s food scraps and meat bones. The bin was emptied every few days by unhappy-looking POW’s in a very smelly lorry.
The bin became very dented and the lid wouldn’t fit on properly. It also split and smelly yellowy gunge oozed out. People started to avoid walking too close to it because of the smell, unlike the flies which loved it. It was my job (more war work for me!) to take the food scraps to the pig bin.

This wasn’t bad on cold days but on hot days the bin stunk really bad. Clouds of bluebottles would be buzzing around it, which then dived onto your bucket and buzzed round your head. It was a mad scramble to empty the bucket into the bin, get the lid back on and escape while holding your breath. Pheww! All the other kids would be watching and laughing out loud. Yuk! But their turn would come!”

Source.

A Little Boys Memories by scholarKipper

It was very frightening some times when the pig man came because I don’t think his horse had been trained to other traffic, and at the slightest noise, or if a dog ran into the street near to him, he would rear up and gallop off down the street pulling his cart full of swaying pig bins behind him. The problem was, the street was a dead end and across the street was a fence of iron railings with spikes on the top into which he would crash. This would upset him even more, because he could not escape at all from his heavy cart. The bakers horse was by far the most docile, and the baker had always got a piece of bread for me to feed it with. But the best time was with the grid cleaning lorry, it would amaze me how much rubbish came out of each grid, but I suppose that all depends how much us kids dropped down! One of our favourite things was scrumping apples from the local farm (this is where the pig man kept his pigs), but you had to be so careful of getting caught, so we used to go at dusk when it would not be so easy to see us.

Source.

‘War on Waste’ and the Communal Pig Bin

In the ‘war on waste’ people saved kitchen scraps for the communal pig bin or to feed hens for eggs. A Ministry of Food advertisement summed up the situation in this poem about pigs:

‘Because of the pail, the scraps were saved,

Because of the scraps, the pigs were saved,

Because of the pigs, the rations were saved,

Because of the rations, the ships were saved,

Because of the ships, the island was saved,

Because of the island, the Empire was saved,

And all because of the housewife’s pail.

See Australian ban on Swill Feeding today here.

See New Zealand ban on Feeding Food Waste to Pigs here.

Providence resident transforms vacant lot into vegetable garden

By Frank Carini
ecoRI – Rhode Island Environmental News
Apr. 27, 2010

Excerpt:

PROVIDENCE — Than Wood spent much of the winter befuddling real estate agents with a simple question.

He asked the agents if any of the property owners they represented would be interested in renting unused land to an urban farmer. None of the nearly two dozen middlemen he spoke with seemed to grasp the idea of growing food where a building once stood.

The East Providence native was looking for a vacant city lot, preferably on the West Side, that he could rent. He told each agent that he wanted to turn the barren lot into a vegetable/fruit garden.

“I spoke with a lot of real estate agents who just didn’t get what I was asking,” said the 25-year-old Wood, who spent last year as Rich Pederson’s apprentice at the Southside Community Land Trust’s City Farm. “They basically told me no way … that the property was for sale only.”

Wood was persistent, though, and found a loophole. Using a city-managed database, he contacted the property owners directly. He found a willing participant who had a vacant lot on Westminster Street, a few blocks away from Wood’s apartment on Sycamore Street.

Wood is paying $80 a month to turn the site of a burned-down home into a garden. He plans to sell its bounty at the city’s Armory Farmers’ Market beginning in June.

See the rest of the story here.

Vancouver allows food waste into yard trimming containers for pickup

Gerry Bellett,
Vancouver Sun
April 21, 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver is marking Earth Day, Thursday, by allowing homeowners to put food waste into their yard trimming containers.

Mayor Gregor Robertson said, Wednesday, that the curbside pickup service for 110,000 households is the beginning of an attempt to reduce the city’s landfill waste by 40 per cent by 2020.

The food waste will be turned into compost-based soil by a Richmond company, Harvest and Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre.

“Starting tomorrow we will begin by accepting just uncooked fruit and vegetable scraps, eggshells, tea bags, coffee grounds and filters. By 2011 all food scraps including meat and fish will be accepted,” said Robertson.

The new program is expected to divert 6,100 tonnes of food scraps from the landfill. When fully implemented the program will divert 15,700 tonnes to composting, said the mayor.

Photo by Michael Levenston

“Thirty-five per cent of a family’s garbage is food scraps,” he said.

“We are seeing a lot of support and enthusiasm for the city’s green agenda. Composting is a direct way people can make a difference in realizing the city’s goal of being the greenest city,” said Robertson.

See the rest of the article here.

Vancouver’s Residential Food Scraps Collection program website here.

Fruits, Vegetables: Just Phase 1 of project

By Frank Luba
The Province
5 Mar 2010

Vancouver has made it easier for residents to be nice to the Earth on April 22 — which just happens to be Earth Day.

Starting then, people that live in single-family residences can start pitching their fruit and vegetable waste into their yard waste bins so it can be composted.

The initiative, passed by council Thursday, is still dependent on negotiations with Metro Vancouver and Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre over use of the company’s composting facility.

That negotiation is subject to confidentiality, but Coun. Andrea Reimer said there will be a “marginal increase” over the cost of landfilling the waste.

Long-term, Reimer said, “the financial arguments are quite compelling.”

Kitchen waste represents about 35 per cent of waste. Composted instead of buried in the landfill, the diverted waste could extend the life of the landfill by as much as 35 per cent.

Because Vancouver has its own landfill in Delta, it only charges $30 per tonne to cover its costs.

When the landfill is full, Vancouverites will be charged what commercial operators pay — currently, $80 per tonne.

Composting fruits and vegetables is just Phase 1 of the plan. Phase 2, in 2011, will allow residents to put all their waste in with yard trimmings — including meat, dairy, cereal products and food-soiled paper like pizza boxes.

If 85 per cent of residents participate in the program, a staff report suggests that composting fruits and vegetables will reduce landfilled waste by 6,100 tonnes annually.

Composting all food waste will divert an additional 9,600 tonnes.

The plan makes a lot of sense to Michael Levenston, executive director of the City Farmer non-profit urban-agriculture group.

“Anything that turns something that would otherwise be buried in a landfill into a useful product is a good thing,” said Levenston.

The first phase of the project carries a $230,000 cost for communication and promotion. Another $75,000 is allocated for Phase 2 communication and $240,000 is being set aside to fund additional local-scale or backyard composting this year.

Metro Vancouver is currently running test projects for composting of the full range of kitchen waste in neighbourhoods in Coquitlam, Delta, the Township of Langley and West Vancouver.

Port Coquitlam began diverting food waste on its own and has seen a significant reduction in garbage.

Comparing a five-week period in January and February 2009 with the same period this year, the reduction was 231 tonnes.

By ProjectHDesign

Factsheet prepared by the City of Vancouver, 2010

Composting conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates nutrient rich soil. The City of Vancouver engages residents to work toward these goals, offering educational programs, subsidized home composters, and a yard waste composting facility.

Organic Matters

Long used by subsistence farmers and home gardeners to create soil high in nutrients, composting is now also a tool for reducing the amount of organic waste going into landfills. When organic materials are left to decompose in landfills, they create methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Knowing that landfill space is at a premium, and aiming to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, the City of Vancouver made composting an important part of its waste reduction strategy.

The City has implemented a variety of composting programs that are successfully diverting food scraps and yard trimmings out of the waste stream – freeing up capacity at landfills and building better topsoil.

Cleaning Up the Waste Stream

Most urban organic waste can be removed from the waste stream through composting infrastructure, programs and education. Over the past 20 years, the City has pursued this consistently through:

• promotion and education on home composting and collection of yard trimmings and leaves, through City Farmer, the Compost Demonstration Garden, and a compost hotline

• drop-off depots and residential collection of yard trimmings and leaves

• construction of a $2.4 million compost facility at the landfill

• subsidizing compost bins for home owners and compact worm composting bins for apartment dwellers

Rethinking and Reusing Garden Waste

Each year, the City’s compost facility takes in over 45,000 tonnes of yard and garden trimmings from residences, streets and parks, and creates 18,000 tonnes of compost. The compost is used to enrich the soil in City parks and boulevards, and every May residents are encouraged to pick up a free cubic metre of compost.

Grow Natural: Save Time, Money and the Environment

Since 1990, the City of Vancouver has promoted backyard composting by distributing compost bins designed for urban areas. This discourages composting in open heaps of kitchen and yard wastes, which generate unpleasant odours and rodent problems.

Backyard compost bins have already been distributed to some 42,000 Vancouver households that have yard space – about 46 per cent of such households now use backyard composters, which diverts an estimated 6,000 tonnes of organic materials from the landfill every year. The City provides apartment dwellers with more-compact worm composters, including a one- hour instructional workshop at the Compost Garden, at nominal cost.

The City extensively promotes and supports home composting, primarily through a contract with City Farmer, a non-profit urban agriculture advocacy society. City Farmer runs the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden and the Regional Compost Hotline, and promotes home composting through a variety of direct social marketing methods. It interacts each year with about 16,000 people, including school children, seniors and the disabled.

See brochure here. Very large download 6MB