Why is Portland light years ahead of New York City when it comes to just about every green initiative? With the population density that we have here it would make so much sense to have recycling cans on the street corners for all those darn water bottles, and to collect compost along with garbage. Not only don’t we have that, but now we don’t even have leaf pick up for all the fall leaves. But I digress…
This video was part of a Huffington Post article about Bijou restaurant in Portland and how they started composting all of their kitchen waste. Turns out Portland has a program called Portland Composts that connects businesses who want to compost, with haulers who specifically deal with compostables.
I live right by a huge restaurant row here in Brooklyn. With the restaurants came rodents, then hawks dining on the rodents and now raccoons dining on everything in sight, including attempts at eating my chickens. I’ve seen the amount of food that gets tossed by the restaurants and fantasize about opening a composting facility and stopping off at each restaurant to pick up the compost w/ a horse and cart. I doubt that fantasy will ever amount to anything, but it is nice to imagine.
Having lived in Portland for so long, it is very odd for me to go other places. It is as though I forget the rest of the nation doesn’t live like this. Every business I know has a separate bin for recycling cans, paper, even aluminum foil right next to the trash can. Most use Greenware (plastic which is made from corn products and degrades at 100 degrees) which isn’t recyclable but decomposes incredibly fast. When we visit my husband’s family in Georgia they are still using Styrofoam. Our five year old had never seen it. We explained, he asked why we didn’t use it, we explained, and then he came out with “What do you mean you don’t recycle?! I want a planet to live on too when I’m big!” to his grandparents. I’m sure Brooklyn will be there soon. Our compost program in most schools around here was all started by parents. Most of it is from the bottom up here and the city goes along with it once they see it works.
Novella Carpenter used the “wastestream” from restaurants to feed her pigs. Compared to that, composting seems pretty simple.