The Dirt on Compost for Earth Day

There's nothing like a shovel full of rich, dark, black compost. It's light and flakey and so so good for you. Well not exactly good for YOU. I mean it's good for the things you grow, and they're good for you -- the city trees and flowers that nurture the spirit and the air we breathe, or the home grown organic vegetables that nourish the body. Good fresh compost is something I think a lot about these days.

My compost obsession began as one of those innocent conversations with Adam Szpala, my household contractor. I am trying to complete the renovation of a century-old house in Jersey City, a project that I am slowly learning is actually never done. I felt it was time to move beyond the black plastic compost bin I got at Loews. This all seemed easy enough, "Can you make me a compost box for the back yard?" I asked Adam. "Sure," he said. "It'll be about 500 bucks plus a bit more for materials." And of course things escalated from there, as so often happens with "simple" household construction projects. 

Of course it couldn't just be a box, it had to be a three compartment affair, one for each stage of the composting process. It had to be constructed with space between the wooden side boards for good air circulation so the organic materials would break down. That probably was a good thing because it would mean using a bit less wood, which was of course the pricey cedar, not the much cheaper but totally toxic pressure treated wood. The box would sit next to the neighbor's garage. "We'd better put a roof on it so the compost doesn't become a sodden mess every time it rains," said my husband Rich, the compost king in our household. I could hear the cash register ringing with each decision. The backyard compost project kept growing and with it, the once modest price tag. The end result, while pricey, has been a sturdy long term productive compost center that will allow us to get really serious about our composting. The massed flowers in our front yard have become a neighborhood landmark. The compost we feed them no doubt contributes to the success of our daffodils, irises, lilies, zinnias, rudbeckia and dahlias that give us almost continuous bloom from April to September. 

According to the Lower East Side Recycling Center, the NYC Department of Sanitation collects 13,000 tons of garbage every day. Of that, approximately 4,940 tons are organic and could be composted into nutrient-rich plant food for the city’s trees and gardens. The average New York City household throws out over two pounds of food waste per day. That is a mountain of trash, and in a landfill, organic matter breaks down without oxygen, creating methane, a powerful, harmful greenhouse gas. By composting, we can take the organic matter out of the garbage equation and recycle it back into the earth. PlaNYC, New York's 2007 blueprint for a "Greener, Greater" city, envisioned the planting of 1,000,000 new trees in the next decade. Imagine if the organic trash in the city was transformed into compost to feed all of those trees instead of mouldering in landfills? 

In 2007 Two Twelve designed Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC branding, launch materials and plan document. Since that time, we have been committed to helping other public and private organizations communicate their sustainability goals and performance to constituents and shareholders. The information designers in our Visioning group have been busy creating reports, plans and tools for clients as varied as Building America's Future Education Fund, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and Citigroup.

We also have a Green Team at Two Twelve that keeps us on track with our environmental mission as we manage our design process and operate our work place. The Lower East Side Recycling Center helps us by making it easy to compost. We collect our organic waste in the office in a covered plastic container and when it fills we freeze it. Every week we take the container to the organization's collection site at the Union Square Greenmarket. They compost the waste that they collect and sell it cheaply as compost or soil to city gardeners. 

This week, we celebrate Earth Day. If you have not already, perhaps this is the time to start composting. The Lower East Side Ecology Center has lots of useful information - the basics about outdoor composting and also how to create an indoor compost bin. So think about getting off the garbage grid and making some of that rich dark black stuff for you and your plants.

More on Composting at David's personal blog, The Jersey City Observer