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.
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