By Anonymous
The composting area at the Innovation Food Forest provides a prime opportunity for the sustainable reuse of organic waste. Students come to this area of the food forest to contribute their individual waste to the communal composting piles, providing an opportunity that is not present within normal dorm living. The compost produced here is utilized within the food forest to plant propagules and supplement plant beds, providing essential nutrients every year.
Communal composting provides healthy soil with minimal work required. Generally, when soil is degraded consumers will turn towards commercial solutions like fertilizers to provide nutrients to their plants, but these options are generally expensive and are reliant on global logistics, meaning there are fossil fuels being burnt to transport them. Local composting removes the reliance on commercial soil additives. Not only is the compost useful for nutrient supplementation, compost has been shown to reduce the populations of pathogenic fungi, allowing for reduced usage of fungicides on crops (Milinković et al., 2019). Composting is not only a sustainable method of reusing organic waste, but it also reduces the overall carbon footprint of the Innovation Food Forest.
The Innovation Food Forest is managed by the Office of Sustainability, with volunteer workers making up most staff working within the forest. The composting area itself is open to the public, allowing anyone to add their waste to the piles. Working the piles is done infrequently by volunteers, and involves turning the piles and removing any contaminants, like plastics. While there is signage throughout the composting area educating visitors on what is can and cannot be composted, the responsibility of putting in appropriate materials is entirely based upon the honor system. Signs of healthy compost is a close to neutral pH in the soil, and a balance of carbon and nitrogen (Zhang et al., 2019). This introduces a major difficulty with communal compost, managing what is added to the piles. Additions to the compost are completely unregulated, and there is potential for the quality of the compost to become skewed, and ineffective as a supplement. While previously there have not been many issues with contamination, there is a major risk of leeching plastics into the environment, as often compostable materials like cardboard have plastic aspects within them, like plastic strands for reinforcement.
Culture determines a lot on how people view composting. For many growing up, leftover food or food that has gone bad has always been trash, and nothing more. Composting offers an alternative to this organic waste going to landfills, but only if people choose to use it instead of traditional waste disposal. Urban applications of compost are also less researched and well known than more traditional applications like agriculture (Kranz et al., 2020). There are stereotypes of compost being stinky and essentially just trash, and many do not see the beneficial aspects directly. In addition, many students are not aware that there are public composting options available at Mason, leading to many continuing to throw their organic waste into trash bins that lead to the landfill.
The major action that mason can take is to increase the knowledge of this opportunity throughout campus. Advertising and promoting the option of composting is essential, as many students still utilize the standard waste bins for most of their trash, while many items could be composted instead. In addition to just advertising the space, educating users is just as important, as there are potentially damaging items that some might think are compostable. A common example of this are products that are industrially compostable, but do not biodegrade within a standard compost pile, but require specialized processes. At the core of all these issues is education, and the university can directly address them by increasing the advertisement of composting opportunity, along with educating volunteers on the correct processes.
References
Milinković, M., Lalević, B., Jovičić-Petrović, J., Golubović-Ćurguz, V., Kljujev, I., & Raičević, V. (2019). Biopotential of compost and compost products derived from horticultural waste—Effect on plant growth and plant pathogens’ suppression. Process Safety & Environmental Protection: Transactions of the Institution of Chemical Engineers Part B, 121, 299–306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psep.2018.09.024
Zhang, J., Yue, Y., & Yao, X. (2019). Effects of turning frequency on the nutrients of Camellia oleifera shell co-compost with goat dung and evaluation of co-compost maturity. PLoS One, 14(9), e0222841. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222841
Kranz, C. N., McLaughlin, R. A., Johnson, A., Miller, G., & Heitman, J. L. (2020). The effects of compost incorporation on soil physical properties in urban soils – A concise review. Journal of Environmental Management, 261, 110209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110209