compost | West Chester Green Team

Good sustainability news from West Chester Weekly News Roundup by hellowestchester , 9/17/21 (sign up there for weekly emails with the latest on West Chester)

Brace yourself. You ready? West Chester is moving forward with its long awaited community composting option.

“We’ve tried to do this a couple of different times,” said West Chester Sustainability Director William Williams at this month’s Borough Council working session. “We’ve gotten grant funds. We’ve built these programs. The grant goes away. The program goes away.” Well, not this time.

After reviewing four different options from purely educational to 100% Borough-run, Will and West Chester’s Sustainability Advisory Committee think they have come up with a solution that just may stick. One that puts a little bit of the onus on each of the stakeholders – Borough, resident, private sector.

The plan? partner with a private curbside collection service, in this case, WasteWell.

How it works

All members of the program get a big 5-gallon bucket at sign up. You fill it with fruit, vegetable scraps, eggshells, cut flowers, shredded newspaper, etc. (don’t worry, they’ll give you a list). Then every two weeks you put it outside and WasteWell comes to collect it, but that’s not it…

“I almost forgot the best part,” Will said. Every sprint you can get 40lbs of a compost delivered for free. The service normally costs $18/mo but will be offered to Borough residents at $15/mo or a 17 percent discount. WasteWell is also offering to collect from one low-income resident for only $1/mo for every ten West Chester residents that sign up.

The takeaway In terms of immediate savings, it won’t mean much for the Borough. Once they subsidize the savings, they are looking to net a whopping $3/year per participating customer. Should they hit their year-one goal, that would mean $300 in savings but this isn’t about the short game. It’s the long-term impact and the right thing to do environmentally, that make it compelling.

According to Will, the Chester County landfill currently has less than 15-year capacity. When it’s full we’ll have to start shipping our waste to distant locales at, of course, a cost. “We should do everything in our capacity to extend the capacity of the landfill,” said Will Williams and this would definitely be a step in the right direction.

*Soon West Chester alleys may be lined with grey WasteWell buckets.*

by Nathaniel Smith, June 8, 2020

I have never figured out how to build a compost heap that would heat up enough to kill weed seeds. The compost manuals make it sound simple, but it isn’t! (See lots of really good composting advice from the Chester County Solid Waste Authority, though.)

For me, patience is the key. I just make a big pile and turn it over every couple of months (more often is better, of course!). If it’s not turned over, pockets of wet leaves or dry branch parts can form and sit for years.

My heap is long, narrow, and tall. I leave a blank spot from which I remove usable compost, and then I move the next 4-foot segment into the gap….

Read more here.

Compostable packing on compost Of several photos in the original linked post, here is one showing compostable packaging materials, used by Bob’s Red Mill, well on its way to returning to nature on a bed of fresh cuttings in my compost heap.

Here’s an add-on as of July 17: one of the pleasures of gardening and composting, for me, is the surprise factor, the unpredictability, as when sparse echinacea suddenly fills in an entire bed, or a persimmon tree that has produced 3 fruits in 3 years seems on its way to dozens. My experience with the patient compost method was that the pile only really decomposed into usable product in the lowest 6 to 12 inches. Today, while moving one section onto Dirt layer in compost copy another to get to the bottom of it, I came across a good layer of compost perfect for loosening up the soil where I was about to plant potatoes. It was like doing archeology, finding a productive layer in the middle of the accumulation. It even had earthworms (look closely) in it! It was above a matted layer of leaves, which may have stopped moisture from permeating and made a wet area that decomposed faster than the rest.