Background Information
Hopefully, you are one of many people who find composting to be a beneficial recycling effort. If so, you will no doubt find it easy to understand why the Nature Center has chosen to compost food scraps from local businesses. Put simply, it helps nature.
The vision for the project began back in 1997, although we didnt start composting food scraps until 1998. The Ithaca Wegmans store helped make the whole thing possible, since we couldnt have done it without their food scraps.
Of course it was not as simple as getting the scraps and putting them in a pile. We had to get a permit in order to compost on our site. Then we had to work out the hauling arrangements so that Wegmans would save money. And we had to develop a recipe for composting the food scraps that would produce high quality compost. Then there is the monitoring, the maturity tests, the contamination problems, turning the windrows, the screening, the bagging, the marketing, and the recruitment of more food scrap generators. They say compost happens, but, in order for it to happen effectively in a business model, it does take a lot of work.
Does this mean that composting at home would be difficult for the average family? No! Because, the average family is not trying to compost 15 tons of food scraps every week. For more information on composting check out the composting related links page.
Research and development of the techniques we currently use is ongoing. Details from our earlier efforts are also available on line.