By Rosie Saccardo
Starting to compost can be difficult whether at your own house or your business. Composting is the law; Act 146 defines that everyone in Vermont, businesses and residents, are required to compost food scraps. Even with this legislation, many people have questions on how to start composting and the possible benefits and challenges of the composting process. To clarify some questions, I interviewed Cara Tyrell, resident of Cavendish, and business owner, Mark Williams.
Cara Tyrell has been composting for seventeen years, she owned Little Village Farm and is now back to just composting for her household.
ROSIE: What does your composting routine look like at your home?
CARA: “As a household, we composted everything. We turned it a couple of times during the summer and we covered it with a black tarp so that the compost absorbs the heat and it breaks down faster. We transitioned into having multiple piles when we started farming commercially and when we had chickens. You can’t give chickens certain things and you don't want certain things in your compost that you’re putting back into the earth to grow again. Because ultimately, that’s the goal, that you take the homemade compost and you use it to enrich the soil to grow the next round of produce and fruit. Organic farming made us have to use multiple piles: our organic materials and our non organic materials like wasted food from a grocery store.”
ROSIE: In your experience, what are some benefits of composting at your home?
CARA: “Number one, and most obviously, it cuts down on your trash. Food waste... is pretty extensive. Food waste from leftovers left unattended can get to be a lot. We have a compost bucket in our kitchen that I use when I’m cooking or dumping things, grease for example. That bucket is pretty large and fills on a daily basis, we empty it every day. Imagine all of that in your trash. Number two, I truly feel like I am using every part of my food because I’m not just dumping it and it “disappears” to go stay somewhere. I’m dumping it and it goes through the degradation process. It becomes another usable tool to work with when we plant our garden in the spring.”
ROSIE: In your experience, what are some challenges of composting at your home?
CARA: “It is such a way of life for me that I don’t necessarily see composting as a challenge.” “The biggest challenge is keeping up with it because we produce so much of it, it's important to make sure that we manage it out there well. That we are paying attention to [which side of the compost pile we need to dump on, any activity happening, and where we need to use hay]... It's more about managing the compost pile itself”. “We don’t have animals, like a dog, that will get into it, but our neighbors do. So we have made sure to make them aware. If they choose to let their dog run free, it is possible that their dog might get into our compost pile. Because we live in town, we don’t have wild animals, so it is not a concern.”
ROSIE: What is some composting advice that you wish you would have known before you started?
CARA: “We are very blessed to live where we have the space and the land to compost in a fairly open way. The concerns [that some people might have could be] limited space or too many animals, especially here in rural Vermont, the majority of people live where the wild animals are gonna be an issue. So I would say start small and start contained. Whether you build your own little box, whether you get one of the commercialized plastic ones that you turn, start small and manageable until you get the hang of it, and then you can decide how your space allows you to get bigger.”
Mark Williams is the owner of Mr. Darcy’s and Sam’s Steakhouse and has been composting at his restaurants for about a year.
ROSIE: What does the composting routine look like at your restaurants?
MARK: “When the food comes back from the customers’ plates when they get done dining, we put it in a bucket. We take that bucket out at the end of every single night, and we put it in the compost. Every morning when we come in, we have to clean up the compost and the food that is on the ground, because of raccoons and bears and all sorts of other animals getting into it.” “Casella charges me $25 for every pickup. I think they come twice a week.”
ROSIE: In your experience, what are some challenges of composting at your restaurants?
MARK: “Environmentally, it's really good. For a business it's really bad, it's frustrating, it brings animals to the area, it smells, when people go to a restaurant they want to be lured by fresh food, not rotten food in your parking lot.” “The idea and the concept is not that difficult. What’s difficult is the cleanliness of it and the maggots that form on the food outside of your establishment. When you open up that bucket, there’s maggots. I’m sure there is some preventative stuff that we can do, but we were never trained either, on how to compost properly.”
ROSIE: What would make composting easier for your businesses?
MARK: “We can probably do our own research, but the state of Vermont and Casella are forcing it upon us, I feel that they should take responsibility and pass the correct information on how they would like us to compost correctly. There’s a bunch of forms online on how to do it, we don’t know the correct way, but if they tell us their way to make it easier and they have better guidelines on how to do that.” “I think the state could have had a better plan on how to go about it, plus Casella Waste charges us for composting too, it is not a bad thing, but if we knew how to do it properly, maybe that would cut down on the cost.”
ROSIE: In your experience, what are some benefits of composting at your restaurants?
MARK: “I think people are very wasteful in general, I think the idea of composting is very good. We just have to get a better plan for restaurants.”
