Final Thoughts

At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester in Sustainable Communities, I chose to focus my attention, for my individual project, on learning about and beginning to compost.  That has had it's own interesting set backs and refinements throughout the semester and will no doubt continue to evolve.  However, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some final developments and thoughts on this project.


A Change In Scope

My initial plan was to build a composting system from scratch in order to process compostable waste that was generated by my roommate and me.  Originally this even included using red wigglers do develop a full blown vermicomposting system.  This was a nice and ambitious idea that proved to actually not be the best and most sustainable one for my situation, for the following reasons:

1. Living in a small apartment with another roommate where space is at a premium, there was really no good place within our apartments for a vermicomposting system to go, where it wouldn't be a huge inconvenience to live around while at the same time being convenient enough to remember to use all of the time.
2. I personally have no use for compost, being that I live in a third floor apartment and have no plants/gardens to speak of.  Thus if I were to start generating nice nutrient rich compost, it would still be necessary to take it somewhere where it could be useful to someone else.
3. Given the consideration of item 2 (above) and that it would require extra money and resources to do that in a manner that would be durable and last a long time, it made more sense to use containers I already have and store compostable items until such time as I have the time and inclination to transport them to a place with a more robust composting system already in place.  After careful consideration and thought, this seemed like the most sustainable option to me, and is what I ended up doing.

Hiccups Along the Way

So there were a couple issues I hadn't thought of when setting my revised plan into action, that make for interesting stories now, but weren't so much fun to deal with at the time:

1. The containers I originally planned on using for this and the location I stored them in did not lend themselves well to the job of storing organic matter in a way that would remain unmolested.  I know now that we have a squirrel who likes to make his rounds over the roof of our building and down onto our porch to check things out, such as our sliding glass door and what's on the other side of it, and exploration of "random" containers that are left on our porch.  (It's unfortunate that I wasn't more on the ball with my camera, when seeing it outside playing around, but the only picture I managed to take was just of my flash reflected off of the glass of the door; no squirrel to be seen.)  Anyway, said squirrel liked to help himself to the toy box of messy things that was now available for him.
2. The containers I used were not water-tight, and over the course of a few rains, filled up with water, creating an unpleasant "soup" of coffee grinds, banana peals, apple cores, and cardboard sludge that was not in the least bit funny or cute to have to deal with disposing off or trying to drain water off of without turning our porch into one big soggy compost heap.

So, in order to deal with both of these issues, I found a 5 gallon bucket (The kind that large quantities of paint come in) with an airtight lid and have begun re-storing appropriate materials in that.  This seems like a much more logical solution, which makes me feel kind of silly that I hadn't started out with that in the first place.  Live and learn, i suppose.

Adoption and Buy-In

The final hurdle that I was initially concerned with was gaining the participation of my roommate in this endeavor.  This actually turned out to be not such a big deal.  As long as I was responsible for removing the slow build-up of refuse, he seems more than happy to expend the tiny extra effort to separate recyclables and compostables into the appropriate places.

Final Thoughts

So while this had originally started out as an experiment in vermicomposting, it eventually evolved into a more general education excercise (teaching my roommate about how things should be done) and behavior experiment.  If I had to distill down what I've learned from this into just a couple sentences it would be something like this:

There are many solutions for most problems, in all different magnitudes.  The most sustainable ones aren't always those that are the most glorious, fun to look at, or ambitious (sometimes they are), but are sometimes the ones that are most efficient and easiest to incorporate into existing behavior patterns.