Fertile Roots Miami finally launches!
Posted Fri, Dec 25th 2009, 15:47
This past Monday, December 21, 2009, we finally began our food composting pilot with the City of Miami. We processed 150 gallons of food waste from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and two cubic yards of yard waste using a BW Organics Model 408 in-vessel composting machine. Bill, Morgan and Sonny of the SDSWCD trained the City of Miami Virginia Key Solid Waste manager, Monica Crowther, and her staff which consisted of Katrina, St Phard, Joseph and Devell, as well as FEF volunteers Dylan and Chris on how to operate the machinery. After a couple set backs and rough patches, things all turned out OK. The moisture content was in range, the feedstocks were beautiful, the machinery was fixed, and spirits for the most part were high. It looks like we're on track to have a successful project in the end!
Special thanks to our sponsors: the City of Miami (especially Robert Ruano, Glen Hawden, Sonia Succar and Alex Montalvo of the Office of Sustainable Initiatives; Mario Soldevilla, Barbara Pruitt & Monica Crowther of City of Miami Solid Waste), DERM (especially Hardeep Anand & Keith McIntosh); Miami Dade Solid Waste, the South Dade Soil & Water Conservation District's EPA Region 4 grant, and to those of you supporting FEF financially and giving us the strength to assume the $10,000 funding gap!
Special thanks to our participants: Marvin & Douglas Dunn of Roots In the City garden, Didier Pouzier and dedicated staff of Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Lynn Moulton & staff of Area 51 & Epic Hotel, Steven Perricone & staff of Perricone's Restaurant, all Fertile Earth volunteers (especially Susan Dean and Dylan Terry) and SDSWCD staff and board.
If you are interested in getting involved, please see the "About" section for ways to assist with your hands, pockets and/or mind. Next pickup, training and composting is scheduled for this coming Monday, December 28th in the morning.
And lest we forget, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
Update: City of Miami
Posted Mon, Dec 7th 2009, 14:10
FEF will be composting food waste with the City of Miami! It's something we have been working on for the past 15 months and should recieve a good deal of media attention.
"We will be diverting what was once food waste from our local landfills and instead composting it and sending it back to the urban gardens to grow food that the community and local businesses will want to buy and consume. Thus we will be creating a useful product out of what normally causes tremendous environmental degradation, as food residuals create methane gas (which is 23 times more powerful than CO2) and leachate (a highly toxic liquid) when they enter our landfills. At this moment, we in South Florida have no commercial option for composting as no one is permitted to carry on commercial composting operations with food waste. We as residents can compost, but high volume producers of food residuals, such as hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, food manufacturers and processors, have no alternative but to send their residuals to the landfills where the methane it produces creates havoc with our climate and the leachate degrades our water and soil quality. Ever year, Americans spend US$1.3 trillion to send organics to the landfills, where we could instead compost the organics and return badly needed nutrients to our soils. To read about the full story, please click here
Worms as environmental saviors?
Posted Mon, Dec 7th 2009, 13:57
Worms are nature's watse disposal units. Or rather, it is more accurate to call them waste renewal units as they don't simply consume the waste - they turn it into something far more usefull: nutriet-rich compost.
