The Donation of Excess Food From Bates

Finally, after working this whole semester I have finally found an organization that is willing to accept and pick up donations of excess food from Bates. Enough food is wasted there on a daily basis to feed twenty people. The next thing we have to do is speak with the college. I know they will agree to it.

Stay Environmentally Friendly

An Introduction

Hello! This is a post to introduce myself – My name is Jay. I’m a first year at Sarah Lawrence College, and as a new member of the Compost Club I’m going to be writing updates on the blog from a compost newbie perspective. The idea is that hopefully as I learn more about composting and write updates about it, others can learn with me. I’ll be posting updates about how composting is going here at Sarah Lawrence, but also general information about composting, how it helps the world, maybe some current events… We’ll see!

Why am doing this? Well, I’m taking a class called Political Economics of the Environment with Marilyn Power (really awesome class), and after learning about so many of the terrible environmental issues going on in our world, it’s hard to not want to do something. Composting certainly helps with a lot of really big environmental problems like keeping our topsoil full of nutrients so we can continue growing food, lessening our reliance on synthetic fertilizers that leach into ground water and cause massive algae growths that choke up sea life, reducing waste and global warming effects…The list goes on. So hopefully I can help build support for composting and all the good stuff it does.

Alright, until next time.

Jay

Full Bin Now What?

Hmm... so the compost bin is full.... a screening of Dirt! The Movie will be screening this Saturday February 25 2012 at 6 PM in Titsworth Lecture Hall at Sarah Lawrence College. What next? We have this big event, raise awareness of the importance of dirt and compost underneath, and then what? That compost needs to get sold, and it needs to see use. What about donating it to a small community garden for starts? What about selling it?
     On a different note, did you know? Moss has been shown to decrease leaching of nitrogen fertilizers by as much as 95%? There was a study published about it in page

Why does SLC (Sarah Lawrence College) Say We Need Insurance to Sell Compost?

On the insurance, one thing I do not understand about insuring compost sales at SLC is if students can sell baked goods at SLC without using insurance and customers are actually eating these things then how can compost, an item that is not even going to be consumed going to prove a liability in comparison to other clubs that have made sales or even at the teahaus which sells baked goods. Yes AVI and farmers at Farmers' markets have insurance on their food sales but they are much larger scale yet student clubs doing bake sales don't need insurance so why should compost clubs need to do so? Especially when even the largest composting facilities in the country don't get insurance on their compost and they handle much more difficult food items than we do.

Dan Vecsi was a guy I visited who manages the Wilmington Organic Recycling Center, if I'm not mistaken one of the largest composting facilities on the east coast. He told me that insurance was not necessary to purchase for the sale of compost but was an option to look into. He did take regular soil tests and while these tests might be worth doing, I'm unsure of how important they would be for something at such a scale. I also called up the Lower East Side Ecology Center which sells compost in the farmers' markets at Union Square and they said that insurance for selling compost was not necessary as well.

Finally, what is important about allowing sales of compost at SLC is that composting is a grueling job. Why is it that in our society we would pay a student working in the music library or the gym 7-8 dollars an hour to check their facebook status and do their homework, but yet for a student who has to carry heavy buckets of smelly food waste day in and out, and stain several sets of clothes to carry this stuff, it should just be considered an unpaid job? This does not sound like a very just way of valuing one's work. It is a sad, unfortunate tiding to know that composting is such an atrociously undervalued service.

Our Composting Progress

As of this fall 2011 schoolyear we have

1. Sold 12 clothes drying racks
2. Composted nearly 1,000 pounds of food waste
3. Secured a new grant from Sarah Lawrence College (SLC)
4. Created a compost club at SLC
5. Collected 70 members on email list and have 5 people actively showing up and committing to the club
6. Have complete support for composting on a small scale at SLC only waiting for pending approval this coming Wednesday
7. 2 Students doing a conference projects relating to compost this summer other than me
8. Weighed food at Bates Dining Hall and reached out to numerous people in the college
9. Created several stickers which are now up on campus promoting environmentalism and our club
10. Have given tours of our composting site to more people this year than all of last year combined
11. Am doing an independent study to focus on the best type of full-scale composting facility at SLC
12. Admissions office at SLC now mentions our club in tours of the college and has raised a lot of interest in the club
13. Now have students helping compost on campus on a pilot scale, and am beginning to show students leadership skills in making composting happen on campus.

     We are getting profiled at SLC!! We had our first compost club meeting today. We gathered some awesome ideas about how to get composting plans on campus done and now, I will write up a proposal to pitch to the committee for student life with Ellie Mae. She will be writing a gardening portion of this. Ellie, the co-chair of the composting club, went on an awesome farming adventure this summer, and she misses it so much it's sad. Check out her blog for info about that great farm. Probably our next important talk will be about compost club t-shirts. I will negotiate a deal with some t-shirt vendor custom designer use organic cotton and fair-trade methods. There is a particular place in mind about that.... coming soon.
     Anyone interested in gardening should email me at ecolasante@gm.slc.edu. Ellie Mae is initiating a garden at SLC with 5X5 foot plots (or even persuade the college to allow us to use space in the green house). We would make a hoop house over these plots for the winter months, and students would likely maintain the garden every week. By paying a certain amount to start it, we will equip them with what they need, offer them guidance and a space, and funnel funds into composting and gardening at SLC.
      Recently we just got profiled at SLC Speaks

Tarsands Action-Compost

     Seeing a picture of my arrest may understandably be a little jaw-dropping. I was demonstrating in front of the White House in Washington, DC for Tarsands Action participating in an act of Civil Disobedience. Given the power oil has over the world, protesting the construction of an oil pipeline over 2,000 miles long across the US is no easy task.

     The proposed pipeline, extending from what’s now endless miles of deep forests occupied by several indigenous tribes to as far south as Texas would be what some scientists denote as the “Carbon Bomb.” In other words the world has burned so much fossil fuel already, and is already scheduled to release so much more fossil fuel emissions, a pipeline as bold as this would, according to Bill McKibben seriously jeapordize the environment. For obvious reasons, burning oil would add extra carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. However, the process of extracting oil from a mixture of sand, tar, and crude oil is also a much more energy-intensive process. Compounding, is the fact that Canada’s forests also lock carbon, not only into the trees, but also in the soil and peat moss below. That’s the carbon problem. Other reasons to oppose it include the displacement, once again of indigenous people from their land and way of life not just in Canada, but also in the US, seeing the proposed pipeline would cross Native American reservations in the US. Containing a long list of highly toxic chemicals, the extraction process would release these chemicals, contaminating the area around it for hundreds possibly even thousands of miles. While Transcanada touts its pipeline has the highest safety standards to date, several pipelines have gone leaking as recently as the past year, including one that leaked twelve times just 2010 alone.

    Barring all of these reasons, I also opposed it because Obama made a promise to address climate change in a serious way, yet his presidency has come to a near end and he has barely done anything to address climate change. Obama neglected to use his energy to help pass a carbon tax which failed to pass, neither have serious subsidies on renewable energy been considered or seriously pushed by him, and a higher fuel efficiency standard for cars might pass, but how likely? Who knows, and little has come of that bill as a result of Obama’s leadership. While Obama may blame Congress, and Congress may be blame-worthy, this is one situation for the environment in which Obama could act. The only way an oil pipeline could cross Canada to the US would be if the president signed for it. If he chooses to say no, the pipeline won’t get built. Given the pressure for jobs, the economy, and the oil lobbyists, whether he would refuse to sign it is so questionable many articles are bold enough to state that the demonstration I participated in would not be enough to pressure him to say no.

      How could several hundred peaceful demonstrators sitting in front of the White House over the span of 2 weeks get arrested? Good question. There is a law stating that no one is allowed to sit in front of the white house because they would destroy the post-card view for the tourists. People can walk across it, but they cannot stand or sit for longer than ten minutes or something like that. Thus when we decided to stand and sit in front of the White House, the police immediately cordoned off the area, and gave several warnings requesting demonstrators to leave. When they and I refused, showing our act of civil disobedience, they then proceeded to arrest us. Crowds of people chanted with us and cheered each time the police handcuffed someone. In my arrest picture I was leading the crowd in a chant, “When I say tarsands you say no Tarsands! No! Tarsands! No! When I say pipeline you say no! Pipeline! No! Pipeline! No!” I also chanted “Stop the tarsands stop the greed give the people what they need!” as they took my mug shot. I led chants for the crowd from the police caravan the entire hour I sat there waiting for the rest of my fellows to get arrested. The police arrested all the women first, but I was arrested with the women because I was taking such an active role in leading the chants. The police then gave me a personal chauffer to haul me off to prison. Since the crowd could still hear me from the car, I just kept leading the chants from the car too! Well, why not? Nothing like screaming your head off in handcuffs for a cause you believe in! Also, the government should be reminded that it is required to serve the people and respect their rights to protest.

     No court hearing was taken, the police ran out of space at the Anacostia prison so they just gave us a post and forfeit option, which means no charges on my permanent record, but I’ve better not interfere with the law for another 90 days. None of us saw a jail cell-the first protesters were kept for 3 days and had to show up to a court hearing, however, seeing civil disobedience is so routine in Washington DC and that there were just too many of us, I was released from my handcuffs within 3 hours. The activist group leaders gave us snacks and drinks outside the Anacostia Prison. 

      What does a demonstration against an oil pipeline have to do with composting though? Well, I would argue everything in the world is connected in one strange way or another; therefore, it is essential to throw in an article about something a little out of the box occasionally no matter how off-topic it may appear. Given the fact that production of ammonia for fertilizer requires 1-3 percent of the world’s energy production (it’s a very heat-intensive process), and that just one day of mining another vital plant nutrient for chemical fertilizers, phosphorus, uses enough energy to power over 150 American homes for a month, it may be worth arguing the composting is in at least in an indirect way, a source of renewable energy for the planet. For the biogas facility getting drawn up for SLC, it can provide a source of methane which can be burned for heat and electricity.