1 One Woman’s Trash is Another Woman’s Treasure: Composting Organic Kitchen Waste at Smith College Emily Edmonds-Langham EVS 300 – Peckol & White May 8, 20082Abstract I began this project with the intention of exploring and further developing the relationship between Dining Services and the emerging Smith Community Garden (SCG hereafter) with specific attention to organic waste and composted material, in an effort to close the organic waste loop on the Smith Campus. The first step involved doing some research about both compost and community gardens: what makes good compost? Why compost? What is the value (both social and economic) of a community garden? I then conducted interviews with members of the staff and student body who were connected to the SCG in some capacity before ultimately visiting (and doing some work at) the Garden myself. I also arranged to visit the Hampshire College farm in order to compare their composting system with our own program. As a result of my work, I discovered that we produce an incredible amount of organic waste, both in the kitchens and on the grounds, and therefore are capable of creating far more compost than we will ever feasibly use. I was surprised to find so much composting already under way, as well as fairly well developed plans for expansion. Currently, our kitchen waste slated for compost is outsourced to a farm in Greenfield, but there are plans to bring the operation closer to home. I think it is important that the SCG be able to take advantage of this compost, which will provide different nutrients than the compost created by our yard waste and horse manure that they are currently using.3Introduction The fifteen dining rooms on campus, while wonderful for fostering a sense of community, are responsible for a hefty portion of Smith’s waste stream: the kitchens produce ⅓rd of our landfill waste every year, weighing in at 300 tons of material (Dombkowski 2008). Luckily, not all of the organic waste produced on campus is slated to sit in a landfill: the Grounds Department deposits our yard waste at a compound at the Fort Hill site, located just off of South Street. The massive piles of leaves, grass clippings, and horse manure (200-300 cubic yards’ worth every year) decompose and provide roughly 100 cubic yards of compost (Dombkowski 2008). In addition, Dining Services has spearheaded a composting program in the Cutter/Ziskind and Chase/Duckett dining halls. Compost is clearly alive and well at Smith College, and shows promise for future expansion. One of the fundamental questions all this composting poses is why compost at all? The simple answer is that this process diverts some of our waste from the landfill, giving materials a chance to decompose and provide beneficial nutrients to the soil. J. I. Rodale posits in his comprehensive Complete Book of Composting that, “In the soft, warm bosom of a decaying compost heap, a transformation from life to death and back again is taking place. Life is leaving the living plants of yesterday, but in their death these leaves and stalks pass on their vitality to the coming generations of future seasons. Here in a dank and mouldy pile the wheel of life is turning” (Rodale 1975). While Rodale perhaps romanticizes the process, he hits on something essential: by composting, we4“close the loop” between the produce we eat which draws nutrients from the soil, and replenishes the environment through the decay of parts of that same produce, thus renewing the soil’s ability to provide for a new crop. It is the health of these new crops that I am particularly interested in, as Smith gets its own Community Garden off, or rather into, the ground. Michael Pollan also provides a convincing argument for composting in his recent New York Times Magazine article urging us all to do our part, however small: “[I]n a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free” (Pollan 2008). Through our composting program, we have the potential to produce at least a few “free lunches” as we recycle and repurpose our own waste. The idea of eating as locally as possible is gaining traction in our petroleum-based society, and Smith certainly ascribes to the notion of buying local produce whenever possible. Barbara Kingsolver shares her family’s experience with eating locally for a year, pointing out their place in a larger trend in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Something positive is also happening under the surface of our nation’s food preference paradigm. It could be called a movement. It includes gardeners who grow some of their own produce—one-quarter of all U.S. households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Just as importantly, it’s the city dwellers who roll their kids out of bed on Saturday mornings and head down to the farmers’ markets (Kingsolver 2007). The desire for a community garden expressed by the students, faculty, and staff involved with the SCG project is not unique; the writers of the SCG proposal5recognize their place within a larger tradition: “We believe the tradition of the Victory garden needs reviving, as a patriotic and proactive avenue for current Smith students to ‘do their part’ in the fight against global climate change” (SCG 2008). In supplementing the College’s produce with some of the home-grown variety, we not only save money, but also reduce emissions of green house gases that would have been released in the transport of produce from far-flung locales. Community gardens provide a number of benefits: fresh produce is not the only end result. In the introduction to The Meaning of Gardens, Mark Francis and Randolph Hester, Jr. discuss the value of the community garden: Community gardens result in part from a growing reaction to the privatization of public life and the need for spaces that support social contact and publicness. They also spring from an increased interest in places that invite and inspire ongoing change and modifications through public stewardship and local involvement (Francis and Hester, Jr. 1990). They provide a balm for our increasingly isolating society, as well an opportunity to come together and generate results one can see. A functional garden