Community Composting in Shorewood

Shorewood’s composting options have expanded greatly since I first started this website. With generous support from the Village, we now have a subscription-based curbside collection service with a healthy enrollment of 250 households and climbing (inquire here). Many Shorewood residents continue to compost in their own yards (see here for advice on how to get started). And for those who want something in between, we have three community gardens with composting operations available for self-drop.

The community composting sites in Shorewood have undergone renovations since they were first established several years ago. The sites at Atwater and Shorewood High School are relatively small and are designed to accept kitchen scraps from community users and handle a small amount of garden trimmings from the rented plots on site. Lake Bluff has the largest garden, and thus requires a larger operation to handle all the garden trimmings from season to season. The purpose of this post is to remind residents of these options, encourage their use, and explain the signage and protocol for each site.

Atwater Community Garden

The compost site at Atwater is small but well-suited to nearby residents who want to dispose of kitchen scraps and mingle with the garden trimmings on site. Signage points users to make contributions to the first plastic bin. Please make sure you return the cover to its original position and secure it with the wood/brick weights on hand. Follow the community-wide guidelines on yes-no items. For those who want finished compost, a screen is on hand to sift out larger, not-full-decomposed plant debris.

SHS Community Garden

This site has three rodent-proof Earth Machines on hand for resident drop-off. Simply unscrew the lids, dump your kitchen trimmings, and resecure the lid. Gardeners may avail themselves of the cylindrical bins intended for weeds and other garden refuse from the rented plots. This plant mater is integrated with the kitchen feed-stock to make a small amount of finished compost at the end of the cycle.

Lake Bluff Community Garden

The largest of the three (required by a sizable load of vegetative waste) sites is at Lake Bluff’s Community Garden. This site has signage that points residents to use the marked, plastic bin for kitchen material. Sawdust and leaves are provided to cover contributions. These carbon sources help tamp down odors and absorb excess moisture.

The covered wooden structure in the middle of the system handles the large volume of garden refuse annually produced from plot tenants. As at the other sites, plant material is mixed with kitchen scraps in appropriate ratios, going through several turnings, to produce a decent quantity of finished compost at the end of the cycle. For those who want finished compost, a screen is on hand to sift out larger, not-full-decomposed plant debris.

If residents have questions about any of these sites or want to get started but need more information, email me at wegotleaves@gmail.com.

Top Five Compost Solutions for Small Spaces

A question I get a lot (most recently, from my wife’s colleague) is: “How can I get started with compost if I don’t have much space?” The best answer is to find a community compost site in your area, which allows you to take advantage of local, responsible disposal of a valuable resource (organic matter) without committing to your own operation. I manage the community compost sites in Shorewood (see this earlier post) and help out at a Kompost Kids site in the River West neighborhood of Milwaukee (see this map for more options), so I am a true believe in community composting. Failing that option, however, here are my top five solutions for new composters:

1. Build a small scrap-wood box (2 x 2) with or without a lid. This can be tucked neatly behind a garage or next to a woodpile. You can even integrate it into your garden/yard space. (Make sure the wood is untreated!)
2. Outfit a lidded trash can (drilling holes in body for ventilation) and either bury it a few feet down or keep it movable. (You can assure skeptical spouses that it won’t smell, even less than the trash does.)
3. Purchase a small commercially produced bin (they have some very small options).
4. Use a worm bin in the basement. (Year round, but will not handle high volume.)
5. Approach a community garden in your area and see if they will let you string four pallets together or maybe they already have something going.

Good questions to ask yourself when you are evaluating the options include:

• What will I do in the winter?
  • Some people like to alternate a worm bin in the winter with a small outdoor option for warm months.
  • If you are exploring buried/partially underground options, make sure your setup is available in snow.
• Do I need the finished compost product or am I just looking for cleaner disposal?
  • A lot of the small-space options are best for disposal only.
  • Some small-space options do not yield a fast or excellent product.
• Do I want to mix with yard trimmings or is this just for kitchen scraps?
  • Yard trimmings in combination with kitchen scraps give you a better product but will require more space, maintenance, etc.
  • Kitchen-scraps only mixed with a little shredded paper will not require much space for small families.

 

Organics Collection Made Permanent

After successful conclusion of our year-long pilot program (and 7-month extension through 2018), Shorewood leaders voted to make permanent this trend-setting initiative, marking Shorewood as (1) the first community in southeastern Wisconsin to memorialize a policy commitment to organics recycling and nutrient recovery; and (2) the smallest community in the state to undertake a program of this importance.

Since the pilot began on June 1, 2017, Shorewood diverted over 69,440 pounds through May 31, 2018, nearly 32 metric tons. Our setout rate remains a solid 70% per week on average. Weekly per customer collection spiked from 28 to 35 pounds in May, suggesting an increase in yard waste demand. The program is removing on average 1,600 pounds from the Village waste stream on a weekly basis, generating a CO2-emissions equivalent of removing two cars from the road permanently.

Customer satisfaction has been overwhelmingly positive, with 97 out of the original 100 households extending from June 1 to December 31, 2018. Our waiting list easily replaced the three customers who dropped service following the pilot extension. Other feedback indicates the 32-gallon cart is right-sized for customer demand. As a further measure of enthusiasm, over 300 bags of compost were sold at “Spring Compost Bonanza,” with many pilot customers taking advantage of 40% discount, completing the journey of nutrients from garbage cans to garden beds.

In short, survey data and customer feedback support the firm conclusion that this pilot successfully demonstrated interest, demand, and enthusiasm for curbside organics collection.

Following Board approval of permanent adoption, Village staff resumed active marketing and enrollment of the program, a process that has already added 100 customers to the program and with the potential for an additional 100 subscribers for the 2019 budget year. A maximum of 200 subscribers per year will be added going forward.

Shorewood’s bold vision statements of 2012 and 2015 called for the study of a municipal composting program in line with the value our community places on sustainability, and the 19-month pilot study has put Shorewood on the small map of Wisconsin municipalities taking this important step in waste reduction, garnering positive press for Shorewood and lending credence to Shorewood’s claim to be an eco-municipality. A permanent, expanded program helps cement that progress and sets an example for neighboring communities.

Shorewood Composts!

It’s official: Shorewood composts. Years of lobbying and advocacy have finally paid off. In March of 2017, the Bucket Exchange ended its collection operation in favor of a formal, municipal compost pilot undertaken in Shorewood that offers curbside service for mingled kitchen scraps and yard trimmings. In partnership with the Recreation Department, however, We Got Leaves is still committed to maintaining the three community compost sites established at our school gardens for use among residents who do not subscribe to the pilot.

The community of Shorewood, WI, just north of Milwaukee’s northern border, is piloting the feasibility of curbside compost collection. A limited subscription service will launch on June 1 for 100 enthusiastic households in this village of 13,000 people. Pickup service will be weekly from April through October, going to biweekly from November through March. The Village of Shorewood furnished 32-gallon rolling carts with locking lids to subscribers, and the collection vendor Compost Crusader provided kitchen caddies and an initial supply of 3-gallon BioBags. Some subscribers are sharing a cart with neighbors to reduce costs and maximize efficiency. Collected scraps will commingle kitchen trimmings (including cooked meat and seafood, dairy, and spoiled food) and ordinary garden waste. The Village also contributed a small subsidy to offset billing and administrative costs on the vendor side in order to keep the monthly subscription fee at a competitive $12.75 per month. The organics will be tipped at Blue Ribbon Organics in Caledonia, WI, and converted into compost for the landscape and home gardener market.

Shorewood hopes to learn about the economics of and customer demand for curbside organics collection. The Village currently offers regular yard waste collection in paper bags and carts (available for purchase at $10), but the contracted yard waste facility does not permit foods scraps. The local Conservation Committee, which advises Village leaders and staff on sustainability issues, is hoping to demonstrate that curbside compost collection is a way both to reduce overall landfill waste hauling costs and improve the resource recovery rate, which currently hovers at 32 percent. The pilot runs for one year.

More information can be found here.

Compost: A Story of Return

As I prepared my third batch of 2016 compost for distribution to members of my Bucket Exchange network, I reflected on the compost process as a study in return. I’ve written elsewhere on the need to replenish ordinary garden soil from season to season with both nutrients and organic matter. Otherwise, home gardening becomes just another extractive enterprise, not as depleting and harsh as mountaintop removal or deepwater oil drilling, obviously, but any time you pull out without putting back, you are essentially mining the growing medium. Sure, we can buy bags of soil, peat moss, or even commercial compost trucked in to our garden supply stores at some cost and distance, but so much the better if we can self-recharge on site and keep the ingredients local. That tight looping from disposal to recovery is the essence of the We Got Leaves model of community composting.

As my bucketeers source separate kitchen trimmings from their cutting boards and fruit bowls, they are initiating a process of return no different in kind from a cherry tree creating its own future sustenance by producing more blossoms, leaves, and berries than could possibly be expected to grow into the next generation of trees. This “waste” rots and feeds the soil that houses the entire underground apparatus, which sustains the mature tree, itself bent on yet more overproduction year after year, and is utterly self-renewing. Similarly, our local kitchen residuals get combined with fallen leaves no one else wants, and gentle manipulation converts these surplus materials into something we can return to the vegetable beds where the process began and indeed starts again. Continual return.

Each time I empty my terminal compost bin (May, June, July, and September) the material has aged down to a usable blend of nutritious organic matter loaded with worms and microbes. Some rough screening fluffs it, helps me remove produce stickers and other inorganics that find their way into my bins, and separates out the larger woody material and still-intact avocado pits, yielding consistently about 1.5 cubic yards of delicious product four times a year. My 25 or so customers produce collectively between 400 and 500 pounds of waste per month, which in my compost piles around town sequester carbon and represent the emissions equivalent of removing a car from the road for half a year. Our modest experiment in local disposal is a small but optimistic story of return.

We Got Trash

In the freeze-and-thaw weeks leading up to the busy composting season, I did a little free-lance trash removal in the woods along the Milwaukee River. From regular bike rides to and from the large community compost site I manage in River West, I had noticed a depressing amount of accumulating litter along a major wind tunnel just south of Capitol Drive along Humboldt Boulevard, and one can only ride by so many times and not at least stop to fill a bag or two or six. The problem is, once you start, it’s hard to stop. And just when you think you’ve made progress, another windy day sends hundreds of Walmart sacks, chip bags, and other debris gusting into the great no-man’s land of our fragile watershed.

Modest first pull, late winter. Later yields were more ambitious.

Not surprisingly, food packaging, bottles, and single-use plastic bags dominate this scene, but I was also interested to find a few less-expected items: an entire muffler assembly, a window unit air conditioner (still in the box), a $5 bill. It makes you marvel that in this country of excess, there’s so much refuse blowing and shifting around at any given moment, you could wander a mere 10 feet into a windbreak stand of scrub trees and find both a small appliance and cash money without even straining eyes. The cash got pocketed; the muffler and air conditioner were hauled to the nearest curb, where I was pleased to see they did not remain. One man’s trash . . .

My wife called this strange little winter hobby “picking up other people’s trash”. But whose trash was it? Certainly, there are plenty of careless folks out there who toss the fast-food bag right out the car window. Other times, raccoons and other scavenging animals can spread trash they pull looking for food from dumpsters and rubbish bins far and wide. But I’m convinced the vast majority of the trash I was finding was literally blown in, the teeming detritus of our egregious consumerism. Nobody is to blame, and we are all to blame.

It’s not a hobby I can keep up, of course. It’s the kind of activity that doesn’t have convenient caps and benchmarks of achievement, and peace of mind is not easily achieved. And just when I was feeling overwhelmed by this self-imposed “responsibility,” I noticed that municipal workers were out the other day with bright reflective vests and trash pickers clearing the curbside of anonymous debris. So now that I’m back to processing other people’s compost, I will park my trash habit and hope that more verdant views and warmer temps will motivate neighbors and other rogue observers to pick up.

O Christmas Trees!

As if my poor wife needed another reason to think I’ve lost my marbles to compost, my new favorite winter hobby is collecting neighborhood Christmas trees while walking the dog and hand processing them with clippers into a rough mulch. The impulse came from the late-December observation that the 2-3 feet corridor spanning the front of the compost bins at the community sites I manage had gotten very wet, muddy, and unpleasant from an exceptionally wet and warm winter thus far and, of course, lots of compost turning.

How to absorb all that nutritious liquid and keep the shoes clean? I needed what Joel Salatin calls the “carbonaceous diaper” – the hay, sawdust, or wood chips that farmer’s traditionally used as bedding for animals, which, when mixed with nitrogen-rich manure creates an ideal compost recipe, while reducing odors and soaking up a lot of liquid. O Tannenbaum! So many quickly discarded trees free for the taking, so therapeutic to clip them into 4-6 inch pieces and cart them off to blanket the perimeter of my compost areas around town.

At first hearing, you might think it would take forever to clip up an average Christmas tree, but it only takes about 15 minutes to get down to the trunk. I myself was surprised. The denuded trunks stack easily and will be cut into logs in the spring for firewood. And now that I’ve begun, I’m finding it hard to stop. I’m even stockpiling a cart-load of tree mulch for the spring, when the thaws reveal a muddy mess around the community gardens where I convert neighborhood kitchen trash into black gold. The best part is that it’s piney smelling and still fragrant long after clipping, so my rough mulch serves a dual purpose as a natural deodorizer.

If you aren’t in burning need of a carbonaceous diaper as I am, there are lots of other ways to use Christmas tree mulch. Conifer clippings make an attractive and nutritious top dressing around acid-loving plants: raspberries, blueberries, rhododendron, and azaleas. And probably most tough perennial beds containing hostas and sedum would stand up just fine to the pH effects of acidic pine, spruce, and fir tree clippings. Don’t even let the snow cover hold you back. Just mulch right on top of the snow, and come thaw, your Christmas tree mulch will be lowered into place. Yes, holiday magic continues in January!

Sadly, a lot of the 25-30 million Christmas trees Americans buy each year end up being landfilled. Although many municipalities are finding creative and ecologically smart ways of disposing of trees (ours in Shorewood are composted with commingled yard waste out in Germantown), there is still the fuel cost and emissions associated with collecting and hauling them, often long distances, to their final resting place. If we routinely spend hours decorating these things and wrapping gifts to place underneath them, why not spend twenty minutes to convert them into a local product you can use on your own property and increase your biomass? It may be the best 20 minutes you’ve spent since the holiday sugar buzz wore off.

“Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash” by Elizabeth Royte

Although written over 10 years ago, Elizabeth Royte’s entertaining and punchy reportage on the New York City waste stream is as relevant in 2015 as ever. For better or worse, John Tierney’s recent op-ed (“The Reign of Recycling,” Oct. 4, 2015) in the New York Times has reprised a lot of the same conversations that motivated Royte to write the book in 2005, just a few years after the closure of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, which reigned until that time as the world’s largest dump. Tierney’s negative portrayal of recycling as an expensive and environmentally insignificant fad prompted fierce rebuttals from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and energized hot argument at dinner tables and over social media around the country. Given that Tierney’s original screed on recycling from 1996 formed part of the backdrop for Royte’s deep investigation into the pathways of New York City trash, now seemed like as good a time as any to give her book a thorough read.

It must be said that Royte’s inquiry, however well researched, came before organics recovery and curbside composting service began to make headlines as an economically viable and in some cases necessary complement to traditional dual-stream trash and recycling paradigms. Tierney, without evidence, claims that municipal composting garners no environmental benefit. He cites the struggling New York City pilot program in curbside collection, which relied largely on a now-closed Delaware compost facility. Even Royte’s treatment tends to give organics recovery short shrift and instead focus on landfill-bound solid waste and the problems and opportunities presented by various recycling modalities. She experiments with her own household compost bin, visits a community compost site in the outer boroughs, and tours a major commercial compost facility in California’s Bay Area, but in general, the bulk of the book is devoted to the two current preoccupations of trash versus recycling, which in all reality are still the focus of most municipalities around the country, even as European cities have embraced organics recovery more wholeheartedly as the smart standard.

The main value of “Garbage Land” is to quench our curiosity about what happens to refuse after the packer trucks come and haul it away. She quickly dispatches the blithe ignorance many of us share that once it leaves the curb, it disappears. On the contrary, our stuff stays with us. It becomes part of our atmosphere (through offgasing), it enters our groundwater (through leaching), and it insinuates itself into the food chain. And Royte does a very good job digging into all the aspects of where and how our stuff goes (if not away, then somewhere else). As her subtitle suggests, she literally follows the trash from her household receptacles to their final resting place, whether landfill, recycling center, or hazardous waste transfer station. She explores the manufacturing second life of some of the common items in her recycling bin. Like Tierney, she finds that glass recycling leaves much to be desired in terms of efficiency and economic sense. She agrees with Tierney that recycling’s best hopes still lie in paper fiber and metals.

Unlike Tierney, however, Royte does not give up on the possibility that technology improvements, solid waste economies, and municipal policy will eventually move us toward better habits, tighter models, and less wasteful industrial processes. Her best insight is one that’s hard for most to hear: that modern recycling practices and smarter trash disposal will never fully exonerate us from the simple notion that the single best way to waste less stuff is to consume less in the first place. We can tinker around the edges by buying responsibly, choosing products with less packaging, prefering materials with recycled content, and bringing our municipalities on board to facilitate the efficient recovery of available materials whenever possible. But in the end, if we can learn to use less, reuse more, and get by with fewer material goods in the first place, our impact will be so much the greater.

Return of the Leaf Thief

My annual mission to put up enough leaves for the next year of composting is now complete. I use “put up” here in the precise sense of stockpiling something from seasonal abundance – usually preserving foodstuffs for the larder – very deliberately. In the same sense of a pig farmer salting or smoking meat for winter consumption, I don’t want to run out of brown material to mix with my regular flow of kitchen trimmings and coffee grounds and I confess that I do a fair amount of handwringing that I will (last year my supply petered out in mid-June, forcing me to switch to straw and wood chips).

Luckily, in my hardwood-heavy neighborhood, I’ve got an annually guaranteed bumper crop right under my nose. All that’s needed is a little effort, planning, and ample storage space. Just raking a few of my neighbors’ parkway strips the other day was enough to top me up another three bags, with a bonus jack-o-lantern feature I culled from someone’s curb while walking the dog adding some festive charm to my already sizable garage stash of 20-25 large trash bags.

This autumnal labor – frenetic in the moment, yet comforting in outcome – will keep my compost piles fluffy and carbon-blanketed all winter and into next spring and summer, if I’ve calculated right. I think part of the satisfaction comes from the acknowledgment that the tremendous energy trees put into unfurling their thousands of leaves each spring, although it easily dwarfs my own meager effort over these last few weeks, means a small fraction of those nutrients are being kept nearby, as close as possible to their place of origin; those deep-drawn minerals dry-packaged and bagged in the safety of the composter’s hoard.

Bucket Exchange Turns One

In September, we rounded out our first year of community composting in Shorewood, an anniversary that marked over three metric tons (exceeding 7,000 pounds!) of kitchen waste diverted from the landfill stream and converted back into a usable soil amendment that customers brought back to their gardens. In addition to my sizable backyard operation, two community garden sites are actively cycling kitchen trimmings back into garden beds while simultaneously helping to manage the mounds of pulled weeds and garden refuse produced annually by rental plots. Even as Bucket Exchange participants have come and gone – some graduating to home composting on their own – we’ve maintained an average Shorewood household diversion of 450 pounds reclaimed per month, and upwards of 700 pounds when you add in the buckets of coffee grounds coming in from a local office staff. These valuable organic residuals are combined with uncountable heaps of locally sourced wood chips, leaves, and garden trimmings to reach maximum efficiency and quality as the compost matures.

These are exciting benchmarks indeed, and I think the data speak clearly that Shorewood is ready for some sort of scaled-up compost program, either curbside collection service or a drop-off operation similar to Brown County’s. Although home composting will still appeal to many gardeners with the space or energy to handle their own household waste, my program shows that some people tend to appreciate the tidiness of someone else managing the compost process but acknowledge the ethical or environmental value of keeping organics out of landfills. Make your voice heard. If you have benefited directly from the program or have friends or neighbors who have participated, write our Trustees and tell them your thoughts. Help us make Shorewood become the first community in Southeast Wisconsin to add compost collection to its suite of public offerings.