Extreme Composters Get Creative in NYC
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uftgree...@gmail.com
May 14, 2009, 3:47:44 PM5/14/09
to CompostingNYC
Congratulations to Micki for helping compost get coverage! Too bad Amy
Eddings didn't mention the petition to bring back compost. GreenThumb
even has the petition on their site, http://www.greenthumbnyc.org/,
which surprised me. How can we get it up on more environmental sites?
Extreme Composters Get Creative in NYC
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/131957
by Amy Eddings
NEW YORK, NY May 14, 2009 —Most people who collect and compost food
scraps have a backyard or a garden to dump them in. But in New York
City residents without a pinch of earth are taking extreme measures to
compost. As part of a collaboration with northeast stations WNYC’s Amy
Eddings reports on what motivates these new urban composters.
The wide stoop of Dianne Debicella's apartment building looks like
many others in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It's got pots of plants on
the steps. What makes it stand out, though, is a tire-sized green
compost container.
Several months' worth of rotting food shifts inside the round
container, as Debicella spins it on its base. A cloud of fruit flies
emerges.
DEBICELLA: [laughs] I’’ve actually been trying to get rid of them last
two weeks. and nothing that i'm doing is working.
That's not good, especially when Debicella's landlord doesn't
understand that she's trying to save the planet.
DEBICELLA: He came up the stoop and looked inside the compost, and saw
a bunch of rotting vegetables and fruit. And he said, ‘you know, I’m
really happy to help you bag all of this stuff up that is in there and
put it on the curb.’
Debicella had to explain that she was composting in order to turn that
rotting food into a fertilizer for her potted plants her "garden." For
Debicella, who lives in a small, 550-square-foot apartment, her front
stoop is her great outdoors, her only forum for flexing her green
thumb. Composting is also her way of reducing the amount of garbage
she puts into the trash, and by extension, the greenhouse gasses
escaping from landfills.
She's not alone. An increasing number of New Yorkers are composting,
and going to great lengths to do so, not only in their backyards, or
their front stoops, but in their apartments, using worms.
JOSI: So if you hold the newspaper like this, you would rip the
newspaper into perfect strips, like this.
Teacher and composter Micki Josi is holding an after school workshop
at her middle school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She's showing about
eight adults and six kids how to turn a plastic bin into a home for
red wriggler worms, using shredded newspapers as bedding. 12-year-old
Mack Ferris had Ms. Josi as a teacher last year, and volunteered to
care for the worm bin over the summer. His mom was worried. She
thought it would stink.
EDDINGS: So is that a deterrent, do you think, from people doing it?
FERRIS: Not really. I guess if you get used to it? I didn't get used
to it, I almost threw up.
Okay, Mack's being a little dramatic. Composting, when it's done
right, doesn't smell. You've got to turn it frequently, like Dianne
Debicella with her rotating compost bin, or, in the case of worms,
keep the moisture level under control with newspaper. The Ferris
family forged ahead. Mack says they put the worms in an electrical
room in the basement of their co-op building in Park Slope.
FERRIS: We didn't want anyone to know that we had a worm compost. So
we put it in there, because only the superintendent goes in there.
EDDINGS: Did you tell the superintendent about it?
FERRIS: Oh, yeah. We told him not to touch it. We put a sign on it,
'Science experiment, do not touch.'
It worked. The worms, well-fed, quadrupled in number. At the workshop,
Mack Ferris got to "harvest" the compost from his worm bin. That
process, in a nutshell, means pulling the worms out of their poop, the
"compost", and setting them up with fresh bedding, and food scraps. He
didn't gag once.
Then there are New Yorkers who have no desire for indoor composting.
They donate their vegetable peelings, apple cores, and coffee grounds
to community gardens, to let them do the work.
It's Saturday in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and the weekly farmer's market
is buzzing with shoppers. Several gardens have set up five metal cans
here, to take compost contributions from the community. Jesse Leed has
brought a week's worth of old food.
LEED: I actually put it in a big Tupperware container in my freezer
and pack it up and bring it every Saturday. I have two bags in here.
EDDINGS: So do you have a big freezer?
LEED: No, but i guess i don't freeze a lot of stuff. Except compost.]
She lifts a lid, and dumps the frozen lump of food into a can.
Jesse Leed froze her compost-in-the-making, to cut down on fruit flies
and smells. But Chris Blake's contribution is slimey and gooey, after
a week of sitting in a plastic container under his sink.
BLAKE: It’s an interesting question as to why I bother to do it. I
just like the idea of making something that would normally be thrown
away into something that can be used into something good.
Few people, whether they live in the city or the country, go to this
kind of trouble Only three percent of food scraps get composted
nationwide. But composting programs across New York City are reporting
a surge in interest. Christine Datz Romero offers workshops at the
Lower East Side Ecology Center, in Manhattan. She attributes the
compost craze to Al Gore's 2006 documentary on global warming, "An
Inconvenient Truth."
ROMERO: Our workshops fill up, we have 50 people signing up and we
have to turn people away, it is just so popular, and people are really
eager to learn about composting.
Just as interest in composting is waxing, money for these education
programs is waning. New York City recently made deep cuts to its
budget. Among the casualties: the Sanitation Department's fall leaf
collection and composting program all those leaves went to landfills
and its funding for composting workshops offered around the city. But
intrepid composters like Dianne Debicella aren't giving up.
DEBICELLA: And it makes me feel a little less like I’m living in a
city, if I’m somehow dealing with earth and that it’s not just me
wasting stuff and throwing it away, that I’m seeing this process of it
moving from one thing to the next.
Soon, when it's decomposed enough, her old food will be moved from her
green plastic compost bin to her flower pots. And Debicella thinks
it's worth it -- fruit flies and all. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.
Northeast environmental coverage is part of NPR’s Local News
Initiative.
Eddings didn't mention the petition to bring back compost. GreenThumb
even has the petition on their site, http://www.greenthumbnyc.org/,
which surprised me. How can we get it up on more environmental sites?
Extreme Composters Get Creative in NYC
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/131957
by Amy Eddings
NEW YORK, NY May 14, 2009 —Most people who collect and compost food
scraps have a backyard or a garden to dump them in. But in New York
City residents without a pinch of earth are taking extreme measures to
compost. As part of a collaboration with northeast stations WNYC’s Amy
Eddings reports on what motivates these new urban composters.
The wide stoop of Dianne Debicella's apartment building looks like
many others in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It's got pots of plants on
the steps. What makes it stand out, though, is a tire-sized green
compost container.
Several months' worth of rotting food shifts inside the round
container, as Debicella spins it on its base. A cloud of fruit flies
emerges.
DEBICELLA: [laughs] I’’ve actually been trying to get rid of them last
two weeks. and nothing that i'm doing is working.
That's not good, especially when Debicella's landlord doesn't
understand that she's trying to save the planet.
DEBICELLA: He came up the stoop and looked inside the compost, and saw
a bunch of rotting vegetables and fruit. And he said, ‘you know, I’m
really happy to help you bag all of this stuff up that is in there and
put it on the curb.’
Debicella had to explain that she was composting in order to turn that
rotting food into a fertilizer for her potted plants her "garden." For
Debicella, who lives in a small, 550-square-foot apartment, her front
stoop is her great outdoors, her only forum for flexing her green
thumb. Composting is also her way of reducing the amount of garbage
she puts into the trash, and by extension, the greenhouse gasses
escaping from landfills.
She's not alone. An increasing number of New Yorkers are composting,
and going to great lengths to do so, not only in their backyards, or
their front stoops, but in their apartments, using worms.
JOSI: So if you hold the newspaper like this, you would rip the
newspaper into perfect strips, like this.
Teacher and composter Micki Josi is holding an after school workshop
at her middle school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She's showing about
eight adults and six kids how to turn a plastic bin into a home for
red wriggler worms, using shredded newspapers as bedding. 12-year-old
Mack Ferris had Ms. Josi as a teacher last year, and volunteered to
care for the worm bin over the summer. His mom was worried. She
thought it would stink.
EDDINGS: So is that a deterrent, do you think, from people doing it?
FERRIS: Not really. I guess if you get used to it? I didn't get used
to it, I almost threw up.
Okay, Mack's being a little dramatic. Composting, when it's done
right, doesn't smell. You've got to turn it frequently, like Dianne
Debicella with her rotating compost bin, or, in the case of worms,
keep the moisture level under control with newspaper. The Ferris
family forged ahead. Mack says they put the worms in an electrical
room in the basement of their co-op building in Park Slope.
FERRIS: We didn't want anyone to know that we had a worm compost. So
we put it in there, because only the superintendent goes in there.
EDDINGS: Did you tell the superintendent about it?
FERRIS: Oh, yeah. We told him not to touch it. We put a sign on it,
'Science experiment, do not touch.'
It worked. The worms, well-fed, quadrupled in number. At the workshop,
Mack Ferris got to "harvest" the compost from his worm bin. That
process, in a nutshell, means pulling the worms out of their poop, the
"compost", and setting them up with fresh bedding, and food scraps. He
didn't gag once.
Then there are New Yorkers who have no desire for indoor composting.
They donate their vegetable peelings, apple cores, and coffee grounds
to community gardens, to let them do the work.
It's Saturday in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and the weekly farmer's market
is buzzing with shoppers. Several gardens have set up five metal cans
here, to take compost contributions from the community. Jesse Leed has
brought a week's worth of old food.
LEED: I actually put it in a big Tupperware container in my freezer
and pack it up and bring it every Saturday. I have two bags in here.
EDDINGS: So do you have a big freezer?
LEED: No, but i guess i don't freeze a lot of stuff. Except compost.]
She lifts a lid, and dumps the frozen lump of food into a can.
Jesse Leed froze her compost-in-the-making, to cut down on fruit flies
and smells. But Chris Blake's contribution is slimey and gooey, after
a week of sitting in a plastic container under his sink.
BLAKE: It’s an interesting question as to why I bother to do it. I
just like the idea of making something that would normally be thrown
away into something that can be used into something good.
Few people, whether they live in the city or the country, go to this
kind of trouble Only three percent of food scraps get composted
nationwide. But composting programs across New York City are reporting
a surge in interest. Christine Datz Romero offers workshops at the
Lower East Side Ecology Center, in Manhattan. She attributes the
compost craze to Al Gore's 2006 documentary on global warming, "An
Inconvenient Truth."
ROMERO: Our workshops fill up, we have 50 people signing up and we
have to turn people away, it is just so popular, and people are really
eager to learn about composting.
Just as interest in composting is waxing, money for these education
programs is waning. New York City recently made deep cuts to its
budget. Among the casualties: the Sanitation Department's fall leaf
collection and composting program all those leaves went to landfills
and its funding for composting workshops offered around the city. But
intrepid composters like Dianne Debicella aren't giving up.
DEBICELLA: And it makes me feel a little less like I’m living in a
city, if I’m somehow dealing with earth and that it’s not just me
wasting stuff and throwing it away, that I’m seeing this process of it
moving from one thing to the next.
Soon, when it's decomposed enough, her old food will be moved from her
green plastic compost bin to her flower pots. And Debicella thinks
it's worth it -- fruit flies and all. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.
Northeast environmental coverage is part of NPR’s Local News
Initiative.
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