A few years ago my subconscious thoughts on general household waste was that it all went in the bin. Nick, my housemate and I had a generously sized swing top bin we stored in the kitchen cupboard and whatever I needed to discard ended up in there.
My friend Carolyn came round for dinner one night, she visited often. Perched on the couch chatting away while I cooked she caught me up on life since I saw her last. Getting to the end of my dinner preparations I gathered the now empty jars and cans I had accumulated and routinely binned them. Now Carolyn and I have been friends for many years, and I know her really well, but one thing I obviously didn't know was that this girl is a passionate recycler. So with a cry of disgust she leapt off the couch, ran to the bin, retrieved the recyclables and started vigorously rinsing them. Setting them aside to drain she turned to me and asked "where does your recycling go?"... "oooh, ummm" - PAUSE, PONDER, PANIC! I had absolutely no idea! In the years I had lived at Scott Street I had become accustomed to where the pool, spa, sauna and gym were, but the recycling bins? Taking a quick mental tour of the common spaces in the complex I couldn't for the life of me see those yellow topped bins in my minds eye anywhere.
With a little help from Nick, who was now equally disappointed in me, we got the recycling to where it needed to go, but I look back on this moment with sweet amusement as I am now, not only just as passionate about recycling as Carolyn, but I've taken the issue of waste even further by composting our kitchen scraps. Foolishness to my former self that anyone would take the time to do this, but inexcusable to me now that anyone would think they can afford not to!
The fact that it's the norm in our society for these nutrient rich kitchen scraps to get stuffed into plastic bags and sent to a centralised location to become smelly, rotten rubbish, when they have the potential to rejuvenate and enrich our soil makes no sense to me. We really need to feed the soil that feeds us.
If like me you have no idea how to compost, you can learn. The journey of a thousand miles starts with google and there are a zillion websites that will explain the 'how to'. Don't be afraid of stuffing it up - just start.
By making this change we have more than halved what we send to landfill each week, and the transformation the compost has made to our Hydrangea's is all the encouragement I will ever need to continue.
Some Composting thoughts from Costa
