This week marks International Composting Awareness Week, a week meant to be celebrated in Canada and the US, but which as far as I’m concerned should be truly global in scope.
Though I’ve been in transit on the West Coast, I’ve commemorated the week by throwing my food scraps in the city issued scrap bins that sit in the kitchens of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland residents–which are then emptied into the green bins pictured above.
I’ve sifted through the newly harvested top soil from a compost of an Oakland Homesteader, and I’ve pined for such composting solutions in New York and the Middle East.
During my time in Israel I was constantly searching for simple composting solutions and was finding that it was very hard without land in Tel Aviv.
Friends with land in Jerusalem managed great compost heaps, most notably fellow Green Prophet, James. The best I could do was put those who were seeking compost bins or heaps in touch with those who maintained them. I was a matchmaker of sorts.
The Middle East needs an awareness week to consider its solid waste management options, to develop some new ideas.
While California’s Bay Area is ahead of the game, there are composting solutions sprouting up in other cities, like in North Brooklyn where a compost project developed to provide private composting services to residents, which will then sell the compost to city gardeners.
What new ideas will sprout from Tel Aviv and Dubai?
Author: Jeffery Yoskowitz
Jeff is a writer in Brooklyn, not far from his suburban childhood home where he first began his sustainable living crusade. As a child he collected his father’s discarded letterhead paper and used it in the printer. He has since accumulated various organic (as well as industrial) agricultural experiences, and is obsessed with the belief that how we eat affects our world as much as our bodies. Though he has moved from Tel Aviv, he still looks eastward in his writing and coverage of environmental and sustainable food issues. When he’s not writing he makes lacto-fermented foods and arts & crafts projects using recycled materials. Jeff can be reached at jeff (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match. I live in Ariel and work in Jerusalem and would love to donate to someone’s compost heap. Can you help me out?
Yael