Cafeteria Composting at Whitefish Bay Middle School
As anyone who has ever worked in a school knows, there is a lot – an alarming amount – of waste at lunchtime. The reasons vary. Kids are picky; they may not eat all or anything of what their parents packed them. Fruits and veggies may be traded out for sweeter snacks or tossed altogether. Furthermore, these quick bursts of eating and chatter –
We’re Moving!
At long last, after many months of anticipation, we’ve secured a lease on a city-owned parcel of land in Bay View, where our new Demonstration Site will be built out in the course of the next few months. There’s a lot to do, but the site is rapidly transforming into a new, semi-permanent home for our organization, lending us the stability and space we
Celebrate Compost Awareness Week
Welcome to International Compost Awareness Week, a time to step back and ponder the many gifts we enjoy by facilitating the “law of return” of essential organic matter and valuable nutrients, rescued from wasteful sequestration and put into active service growing vegetables, beautifying landscapes, and improving water quality and erosion control. Opportunities to celebrate this important annual calendar marker abound, beginning with the quiet
Innovative Composting Scheme in Shorewood
The We Got Leaves Bucket Exchange is a community composting scheme offered free of charge to interested Shorewood residents. The program allows participants to deliver buckets of kitchen scraps to a single location, from which they are processed into finished compost by a master composter. We Got Leaves currently uses a large backyard compost operation and two community garden properties to compost the material
A Year in Review
A hearty Happy New Year from the Kompost Kids to all our devoted volunteers, committed sponsors, and community supporters. We couldn’t do our work without you. As we turn the corner on 2014, let us pause to share a few of our exciting benchmarks and accomplishments. Our community compost program diverted over 37,000 pounds (16 metric tons) of kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and other
Growing Power Conference Success
The Kompost Kids recently joined Growing Power staff in representing best practices in urban composting and soil improvement projects in Milwaukee and Chicago and offered advice to a diverse audience of conference attendees from all over the country. Growing Power’s third National-International Urban Agriculture & Small Farm Conference covered a vast amount of territory, ranging from lectures on local power production (literally empowering communities), food justice
A Year of Accomplishments
In May of 2014, we stopped picking up preconsumer restaurant waste for free, but we continue to collect kitchen scraps from five loyally supportive and paying Milwaukee restaurants. Even as we phased down our postconsumer pilot program by late spring, in the early part of the year, we picked up from more than 15 restaurants. Individual restaurant volumes vary widely from week to week
The Future of Composting is Residential
MIT has produced an excellent new study of the new frontier in municipal waste management: curbside compost collection. The study looks at every aspect of this growth area in composting and considers best practices from the perspectives of cost, compliance, and quality of results. The Kompost Kids are lobbying for compost adoption at every level: commercial, municipal, and residential. We’ve helped teach many Milwaukee
Growing Local Fertility – New Report
The Highfields Center for Composting and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently collaborated on an exhaustive new report on community composting that featured Kompost Kids and similar organizations in other cities that are spreading the gospel of local disposal and soil regeneration (see page 47). The report goes deeply into the whys, hows, and whats of community composting at a variety of scales, from “home hubs”
Tom’s of Maine, Our Continued Gratitude
Thanks again to Tom’s of Maine for its generous support to the Kompost Kids mission of organics diversion, compost education, and sustainable business practice.