Vermont now requires everyone to compost their organic scraps. Diverting organics from the leaky land fills is one of the biggest ways to reduce the negative impacts of the chronic food wasting in the United States. Turning our community's organic scraps into laying hen feed and new soil is second only to reducing ones overall consumption.
Go to VT's online composting resources to learn more.
Rooted Gardens creates literally 'tons' our own compost from the food scraps of participating upper valley restaurants. Local businesses like Boloco, Juel, Skinny Pancake, Tucker Box, and Bloods Catering have all participated in our composting service before they were required to VT law. We salute them! Rooted Gardens's parent company, Tigertown Farm, has successfully diverted over one million pounds of waste destined for landfills and created eggs, pork, and compost instead!
The end game for our leaky landfill infrastructure does not look good. Traveling the world reveals the horrors of unregulated waste management. Our groundwater and dignity are at risk. Humans have already begun mining landfills, this trend is set to continue and it may not be as promising as it sounds. Often times these "mining" operations consist of impoverished communities living at the landfills and digging by hand through hazardous waste to reclaim recyclables, which are all too often dumped in the landfill.
CALL TO ACTION:
Do your part by composting, sorting your clean recyclables properly, ask your restaurants and grocers where their organic waste end up.
Follow up with big waste management companies, office buildings, schools, prisons and your elected representatives about their waste stream and plans to improve.
Lastly, ALL COMPOSTING IS NOT CREATED EQUAL. Compost should go back to the soil or become animal feed. All too often our compost is packed into big rigs, shipped out of state, processed into bio fuel, which is in turn combusted back into our atmosphere. This basically defeats the purpose of composting.
-Matt Stuart
Tigertown Farm
Rooted Gardens
The Electric Lawn
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