Leftovers

I have a passion for compost. That’s not something I often admit in casual conversation but I’m not ashamed of it. I think compost could save the world and I don’t just mean by reducing waste and using it as a growing medium, it’s also a wonderful educational tool. There is something beautiful about waste breaking down naturally and then being used again to sustain life. Compost can get people back in touch with nature and can help them understand that life is actually sustainable and rewarding if we make the right choices and take some responsibility for our own impact on the environment. Is my passion so crazy?

One Brighton has a composter, a Big Hanna, a machine which mechanically breaks down food waste. It’s a pretty impressive piece of kit and although I don’t know the exact figure, I’m pretty sure it was very expensive to install. I suppose it was necessary if food composting was ever going to happen in a residential development such as this. After all, who is going to buy a brand new apartment situated next to a smelly and ugly compost heap? Any form of composting that could have happened here would have had to have been sanitised as much as possible if it was ever to be a selling point.

For the resident, composting food waste is a pretty simple process. They collect biodegradable bags from me, fill them with whatever organic material they fancy (the Big Hanna will even take meat and bones) and then dispose of them down a waste chute outside. From there, the bag falls into a bin below ground in a bin store where I fish them out and feed them to Big Hanna. It should be pretty straightforward but of course there have been a few challenges. Introducing technology to a natural process does seem to complicate things. The machine needs to be monitored daily and it needs a certain amount of tech savvy to keep it maintained but it does speed up the composting process dramatically and any odours are drawn away through an elaborate ventilation system. The real problems seem to stem from the disconnection from what happens above ground and what has to happen below ground.

From the point somebody drops a biodegradable bag full of discarded food down the waste chute, their job is done. Anything that happens beyond this point has been locked away from view. So in reality, composting at the moment has limited potential as an educational tool. However, currently this is the least of my worries. I wish it was only food I had to fish out of the bin! I won’t go into too much detail but I’ve found electrical equipment, pieces of furniture, cat litter and a wide variety of contraceptives in the bin. About 75% of the waste I take out of the bin is big refuse sacks full of non-compostable rubbish. The main focus of education at the moment purely seems to involve trying to get people to put the right waste down the right chute.

The first hurdle involved getting people to use the compostable bags because the Big Hanna needs a certain amount of organic material to run optimally, the poor thing was starving! So I put notices up, discussed it in the newsletter and tried to promote Hanna as if she was a valuable member of the community who just needed a bit of TLC and some scraps from the kitchen. Success has ebbed and flowed, unfortunately not everybody at One Brighton has understood the concept of waste segregation and often this is just down to cultural issues and language barriers (this is a topic I’ll bring up in a future blog). I have had to stop people trying to dump bags full of aluminium cans down the food waste chute but this does tend to be a genuinely innocent mistake, Coca-Cola is a food after all.

The art of composting (yes,it is an art) is a bit like baking a cake, the ingredients have to be just right. You need a good mix of browns (e.g. cardboard, newspaper, wood pellets) and greens (e.g. leaves, bananas, not coke cans), so that the mix of carbon and nitrogen is just right. The real fun begins when you reach the ‘Goldilocks’ mix. This is when the micro-organisms start to populate the mixture and the whole mess heats up and breaks down. Of course this is simplifying the science of composting but after a lot of temperature monitoring, weighing, some blown fuses and blockages (and developing a strong stomach), we’ve finally reached the stage of getting the right mix at One Brighton. The first batch of compost is in its maturation stage in a special bin i.e. a wheelie bin I found on the side of a road and some cooker grills I bought from a local skip. This compost is destined to be used in our planters and roof-top allotments, which is where the reward will come from all the hard work.

At the moment, I can’t see the One Brighton community being involved in the magic of composting any further than the point they drop their food bags down the chute. Perhaps in the future, curiosity will get the better of them and they will start enquiring but right now the goal is to get everybody understanding the process and what needs to happen before collecting food waste actually becomes worthwhile. We can then, maybe, hopefully, move to the next step where people actually become more hands on with Big Hanna, appreciating the challenge but also the value of making something useful out of waste.