By Jo Buckle
Do you know that old joke about the woman who gets lost, driving through a small village? She spots an old man by the side of the road and pulls over to ask directions to where she’s going. “Well, it’s not hard,” he says after some consideration. “But I wouldn’t start from here.”
What does this have to do with community composting? Look on YouTube or Tiktok and you’ll find a thousand videos showing you how to make compost in ‘just x weeks’. All you do is start with an exactly perfect ratio of browns to greens, pre-cut into miniscule pieces, and layer them up into a perfectly sized, perfectly aerated pile which you or your staff or volunteers will turn multiple times with ease. Simple!
With community composting, you have to start from where you are. Where you are is probably being the proud recipient of half a ton of slightly smelly food waste from your neighbours, overly heavy on the citrus, generously seasoned with plastic food stickers and not-actually-compostable ‘eco’ bags, and some too-large branches that your fork will get stuck on and will make everything hard to mix. Your composting area is whatever you can spare out of your garden, and instead of staff you have some friends who’ll help ‘anytime’ but not ever this weekend, a bad back, and your poor husband who got sucked into this by your enthusiasm.
We started community composting when we moved into a house with a garden in Fitzroy. There happened to be a hole in our fence, and almost as a joke, I put a plastic compost bin behind the hole and a hand-written note saying “feel free to put your food waste through the hole and I’ll compost it”. I listed our location on Sharewaste and within weeks, one plastic bin wasn’t enough to keep up with supply. Over the next year or two we pestered several furniture-makers to feed our sawdust addiction, commissioned artwork for our fence to direct people to the hole, and paid a friend to construct five purpose-built wooden, modular compost bays, which soon expanded to seven, in addition to multiple bins and worm farms.
Community composting is about balance. Not so much about your green to brown ratio, but about the needs of your compost versus the needs of your community. Your compost would like perfect inputs; your community is imperfect. The stricter you set your rules about what is appropriate to drop off, the more people you will alienate. It’s important to educate people, but you don’t want to make it so hard that they can’t be bothered.
Fitzroy doesn’t (yet) have kerbside collection for food or garden waste, and, as a densely-populated inner-city suburb, most people don’t have space for their own compost. Community composting is currently the only alternative to landfill for most of Fitzroy’s food waste, so it’s really important to us to get as many people on board as possible. For a lot of young, urban locals, this is the first time they’ve ever thought about food waste at all, and hopefully we’ll nudge them towards a life-long habit of being mindful about it. For us this means letting people ‘have a go’ without an induction, accepting that some people will never read the instructions, and allowing them to drop off almost anything, as the hole in the fence is open to anyone, anytime. The balancing act here is being aware that we don’t have unlimited time or energy to fix any incoming disasters, so by necessity, our compost may not have ideal ratios, it might contain the odd food sticker, sometimes it smells, and it takes longer to create the finished product than YouTube would lead you to expect.
There are other community factors to put into the mix. We’re lucky that our local Council has been supportive; (aware that they haven’t yet provided any other solution for processing food waste, they awarded us community initiative of the year in 2022). We’re also lucky that our immediate neighbours have been tolerant of the occasional stinky compost-turning day, and the ever-present possibility of rodents. In return, we provide finished compost to our neighbours and to anyone else who drops off their food waste and wants to fill their empty bucket when there’s some to spare.
The gift of finished compost isn’t the only outcome from our community composting activities. When you’re in the right zone, turning the pile becomes a free work-out that’s better than the gym. We get excited when people come back to tell us about compost-led improvements to their potted plants, or when we meet someone who shares our excitement about worms. (We’re hopeful that one day we’ll meet someone as excited as we are about our soldier fly larvae, but it hasn’t happened yet). And so many of our current friendships started with a chat through the hole in the fence. All in all, we’ve tapped into a wonderful community, through compost.
Find out more
Listen to City Compost Network Podcast: Gore Street Compost Hub Interview with Jo
LOCCAL 