Composting food scraps and yard waste helps keep waste out of the landfill or incinerator. It’s good for the environment and good for municipal budgets!
Recycling Food Scraps
By now some of you have heard the good news: the Media Borough Food Compost Pilot Program is going Borough-wide!!!
Weekly curbside pickup starts on Wednesday, July 7. In the months leading up to that date, the Borough will be sending out loads of information on how to get your yellow bucket, what to put in it and how to set up a kitchen compost system.
This is terrifically exciting for all the Zero-Wasters in town (the perfect and the imperfect). Curbside composting means that more of our daily discards are pulled out of the trash stream and upcycled at a compost farm into “Black Gold”—high quality compost rich in nutrients that enriches our local soil and grows more food. Food to soil to food to soil, composting expands our recycling efforts by taking even more trash out of a one-way ride to the incinerator and into an endless “closed loop system” of use and reuse.
How is the Borough able to offer this to its residents? That question leads us to the next part of our Hometown composting equation:
Yard Waste is Composted Too!
You have already been composting for years, but may not know it. Residential yard waste collection is mandated by the state of Pennsylvania, and we are required to compost it. When the Borough found a local compost farm that accepted both food and yard waste, we realized that we could combine two pickups at once and offer them weekly at very little additional cost. Our compost farm, Kitchen Harvest, located at Linvilla Orchards, charges less than the trash incinerator for drop-off.
But key to the success of the program are two very important points:
- One’s a Bucket, One’s a Bag:
- Put your yard waste in a paper yard waste bag. Nothing will be picked up unless it is bagged. In paper. No plastic.
- Put your food scraps in the yellow bucket. Tightly lidded. You can line the bucket with a paper or other compostable bag. No plastic. [IMAGE of yellow compost bucket]
- Wednesday’s Only.
This key point pretty much speaks for itself. We can only afford to do this if residents observe the one-day-a-week (Wednesday) pickup schedule. Bags and buckets will not be picked up on any other day, and our streets could get pretty messy-looking if we slack off on this.
Stay tuned for additional information on Curbside Composting in the upcoming issues of the Media Borough Newsletter.
Until then, Compost On!
For more on Media’s Curbside Composting program (and all aspects of the Borough waste management system) go to the Public Works pages of our website.