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
Restaurant Policy Update
The Kompost Kids Inc. is dedicated to creating healthy living soil for community-based agriculture projects. We are a team of volunteers committed to the education of individuals and businesses regarding the diversion of potential landfill material into the building of soil in the most environmentally conscious way. The soil we make is donated to community gardens and nonprofit groups growing their own food in an urban environment. We offer
Seeking Bay View Bash Sustainability Intern
ABOUT US Kompost Kids Inc. is an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to educating the public, businesses, and institutions about the benefits of compost and to reclaim organic materials from landfills to create soil for community-based agriculture projects. DESCRIPTION Responsible for planning and implementing Kompost Kids Inc. composting program at the 2015 Bay View Bash, Milwaukee’s largest all-volunteer street festival. Help the event become a zero-waste
Home Site Maintenance
Through our network of community compost sites, the Kompost Kids offer a decentralized approach to community composting. We believe our model represents the future of municipal composting, or at least an important piece of the larger fabric of solutions that cities like Milwaukee will embrace to confront the significant economic, environmental, and logistical challenges of progressive waste management. And the Institute for Local Self
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
Compost Tourism
A few weeks ago, during our Saturday turning at River West’s Scooter Foundation Community Garden, we were gratified to receive our first authentic compost tourist, an energetic staffer from Wellspring Farm, who wanted to see how the Kompost Kids did compost in Milwaukee while visiting for the weekend. It was cold and snowy, so we worked quickly and got the job done. In the
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
Going Residential in 2015
The United Nations declared 2015 International Year of the Soils, and we are getting geared up for some exciting new initiatives in soil regeneration, bringing more black gold to the Milwaukee area. We’ve worked successfully with small businesses, we’ve partnered with schools and community gardens, and now we are taking the compost gospel to the neighborhoods we call home. We want to start by
Winter Composting in Milwaukee
Temperatures are dropping outside, and we’re doing our best to keep things warm in our piles. Consistent temperatures below freezing, as we experienced last winter, are very tough to fight off in your pile unless you are working at a very large scale. But for most people composting in backyards and community gardens, this time of year is all about season extension, or delaying
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