Social Compost - Liberate Your Peelings
By Rosie Sherry • Mar 12th, 2008 • Category: CommunityThere’s no doubt that the environmental impact we are having on the world is a concern. Whilst many of us really do want to create change, reality makes hard to actually do something significant about it. The good news is that the web is increasingly becoming the platform to help make the change.
Social Innovation Camp has been set up to help people create solutions to address social problems that we experience in the real world - through the web of course.
Brighton based Premasagar of Dharmafly faced a problem. He lives in a flat without a garden or compost bin (a situation only too familiar in a city life) and felt it was wrong that he has no ethical place to deposit his ‘compostable’ rubbish. Premasagar has put his idea forward for Social Innovation Camp:
A web-based initiative to reduce landfill waste, encouraging community action and empowering urban dwellers to compost their kitchen waste.
‘Social Compost’ [working title] would be a drop-dead simple website, based around an interactive map. There would be an option to add yourself to the map and to offer either kitchen peelings or mature compost. You could use the map to find others who are offering either peelings or compost.
A number of niceties could add to the experience: compost tips and tricks, an API to access the data from third-party applications, etc.
I personally love the idea and will be supporting it in whatever way I can.
What are your thoughts? You can help support it and help make it happen by leaving your thoughts on the idea.
Rosie Sherry is a social geek in beta.
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shouldn’t this be something for the local council recycling department deal with.
I’m still surprised that vegetable matter isn’t picked up by B&H recycling, only some plastics and paper.
Thanks for passing this on, Rosie.
John - you are right, of course. I phoned Brighton & Hove council last week and they acknowledged that a compost collection was a good idea, but they currently have no plans to implement one.
In a way, I am glad that the council are behind on this. They have left a gap for the community to fill, which gives us an opportunity to get together with our neighbours, to serve each other and the local environment.
This is our last vestige of rural living - the neighbourly sharing of one’s most intimate food scraps, to be put back into the earth for the next season’s food…
Hi Rosie
What a fantastic idea -what happened with this, did it take off?
What I would be wary of would be: people who don’t have anywhere to put kitchen peelings often live in the city centre (high level of flats). People who have gardens with room for compost bin(s) to take a lot of kitchen as well as garden waste tend to be in the “suburbs” so getting the peelings to them may be tricky, and may cause more car journeys (environmental impact). City centre gardens tend (generalisation) to be smaller so composters there fill up pretty quickly just from that household. People are also wary of what is in the kitchen waste - cooked food can sometimes attract vermin in a traditional compost bin, and if you don’t know what that person has put in their waste…
Saying that, I still think it’s a great idea, and people are grown up enough to deal with the latter issues themselves and be self functioning. This is especially good between smaller areas and communities.
Are you in contact with the community composting guys up at Stanmer?
Do let me know how this has progressed and if you would like any help with it - I work freelance helping businesses and communities improve their environmental impact so could help publicise it.