WASTE SYNCHRONICITY

~beautiful food~

This past weekend my SO and I picked up Bea Johnson's book "Zero Waste Home" from our local library. We've enjoyed reading it so far. As the title indicates, the book is about reducing waste in one's home and life by following the 5R rule - Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot - and in that order. That last R interests my SO and I a lot, because we've been wanting to compost for a while now. This has been hard to do though, given that we live in an apartment and in a community that has yet to get recycling bins, let alone have sustainable waste management practices that include composting bins and pick-up. 

So after a few failed attempts, I finally just decided two weeks ago to start saving our food scraps and figure out ways to compost them somehow. Interestingly enough, without worrying about what we would do with the food scraps once our bins got full and the fruit flies started to amass, an easy solution has appeared at the end of each week. Last weekend we had planned to do a "collective errand run" on Saturday morning that also had us stopping at the MOM's organic market. They have a public composting bin, so in went our food scraps! 

While at MOM's, I discovered that to avoid fruit flies you can just put your food scraps in the freezer. So that's what we've been doing all this week, but there's only so much freezer space we have, so what to do? Again, a solution presented itself without me thinking much about it. I was going to go into the office (I work from home now) this week for something and there is a Whole Foods right across the street. I remembered that they had a public composting bin there, so all those bags of frozen food scraps came to work with me! 

What happened at Whole Foods that morning convinced me that there was synchronicity at play here... 

I went into Whole Foods to ask where the public composting bin was and this nice lady said I could bring in my food scraps and she'd take care of it. Before I started to go to my car she asked me if I had a composting bin, and I said no. She then said, ok we can give you one. I thought, alright fine, let's see how much it costs. I was curious to see what she would present to me, so I went along with it. She brought out a long, rectangular box and proceeded to hand it over to me. As she said bye and started to walk away, I asked her how much it was and she said nothing; that it was free from the county. Wow, I thought. How cool!

Granted, we can't really use this bin because it's meant for a yard (we'll give it to one of our relatives); and neither MOM's nor Whole Foods are within walking or biking distance for us, so none of these experiences present a sustainable solution. However, they did encourage me to continue down the composting path. Before embarking on this journey, I hadn't thought of everything nor figured out how exactly we would turn all our food scraps into compost, but I realize now it's totally ok. Even though we live in an area that's not consciously green, these experiences have shown me that there is so much energy around this cause from different places and people, and that gives me a lot of hope for what we're trying to do with our little bins of food scraps.

Happy composting!

~Modern Akhmatova