About two months ago, I was composing my list of resolutions for the coming year — forty-three of them in all, thanks to the goal-setting-slash-social-networking site 43Things. I tried to think up things I’d been meaning to do but never seemed to get around to, and somewhere in the mid-20s of my list I added the following: compost my garbage.
For those of you who didn’t know already, I live in Manhattan. No yard for a compost bin; no car to tote stuff away to a municipal site. Composting my garbage wasn’t going to be easy — or so I thought.
Did you know: in 2002, 180,000 tons of food went into landfills — in the Portland metro area alone?
Nationwide, 48 million tons of food produced for human consumption is thrown out as waste. To put it into perspective, those 48 million tons we just threw out equals 27% of all the food produced.
Now, granted, a lot of that waste comes from grocery stores and restaurants, but if we’re only looking at what comes from our own fridge, Americans throw away an average of 163 pounds of food per person every year.
Source: USDA, “Estimating and Addressing America’s Food Lossesˮ
A couple years ago, I had read about vermicomposting: indoor composting using a small bin of worms that eat organic waste and turn it into worm “castings” (i.e. worm poop). So, worms — pooping worms — in my house. On purpose. Yeah, that’s not gonna work for me.
So, I needed to look elsewhere if I was going to stick to this resolution.
