Tag: Compost

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News

Giving a second life to compostable foods

Megan Clarke, a Concordian Sustainability student, is trying to get Concordia to find alternative ways to deal with food-waste other than composting it, with the aim of becoming fully waste-free.

According to Clarke, Concordia would be the first university in Quebec to do so.

She is planning to create ways for food waste to be redistributed on campus instead of just composting it. This entails taking wasted food from Concordia events or on-campus stores and giving it to organizations, such as shelters.

Clarke has gathered over 1,500 signatures in the hopes that the Concordia Student Union (CSU) will make zero food waste a university-wide policy.

“Hey, if France can do this, we can too,” Clarke said. “The student body wants this, it is about time we do this.”

According to an article in the Guardian, in 2016, France passed a law banning supermarkets from throwing out unsold food, making them donate it to food charities instead.

Concordia Compost said in a statement that “Food and organic waste are the largest waste component generated at Concordia – yet we only compost 26% of organic waste. Half of what Concordia sends to landfill could be composted instead.”

“You can’t eat compost,” Clarke said, emphasizing that her project is not about composting food waste, but getting that food to people that need it.

Clarke admits that in 2008 to 2009 she struggled with finding affordable food, and knows people that are still having those issues.

“It’s a lot of work, I didn’t think I’d be this deep into it to be honest,” said Clarke. “I wanted to give back to a society that so desperately needs nutrition.”

She started the project alone in February and was shot down by every organization she contacted. It wasn’t until Clarke met Faisal Shennib from Zero Waste Concordia that she was able to start gaining traction.

According to Clarke, it was through this that the idea of a communal fridge was created. She invisions multiple communal fridges, which are maintained by volunteers, across the campus where anyone can take and leave food.

There are multiple communal fridges across the city, in Rosemont, Little Burgundy, and Saint-Henri.

“We already started redistributing food from events to organizations,” said Clarke. “But sometimes those organizations don’t want to come by for one or two slices of pizza. What do we do with that? Do we just throw it out? No, it’s zero waste, we have to go all the way.”

“Because it’s amongst the people, by the people, there is no liability,” Clarke said. “You trust the person you are getting this from.”

“It does work in other places, so let’s try it out here,” Clarke said. “Let’s try to reduce waste, try to eliminate waste across Concordia.”

Besides the fridges, Clarke has many other projects in the making.

She wants to collaborate with student food resources such as People’s Potato, who have a free lunch Monday to Friday, and Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, that has a two dollar lunch every Thursday. Clarke wants to create another free meal in the evening, Monday to Friday.

“I want leftover food to be distributed as well,” she said. “If we have those leftovers, and we have a space, then we would be able to feed 200-500 students on a daily basis.”

In addition, Clarke works with the Dish Project, which is a waste reduction organization, and together they try and reduce food waste at Concordia events.

Yet, because Clarke is doing this mostly alone, she doesn’t have much visibility and people do not know they can donate food waste to her initiative.

Organizations that Clarke works with like Zero-Waste Concordia and The Dish Project are always looking for help. The best way to reach Clarke is at Zerowaste@concordia.ca.

 

Photo by Laurence Brisson Dubreuil

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News

The science behind composting

We have all surely crossed paths with those orange-capped garbage cans that decorate Concordia’s campuses. Little hubs for our biodegradable waste, the list of things we can put in them is particular but easy!

If your trash is made from plants, like those brown paper bags greasy fries from a favorite burger joint are tossed in, plop it in! If your lunch was too big, the bins are perfect orphanages for leftovers you’ll abandon. It sucks that you cannot finish your grandmother’s pasta, but the compost will happily handle that for you. Napkins covered in mascara after crying over an assignment? A banana that got squashed at the bottom of your bag? Toenails? Yup, all of those organic-based items can go in, but it’s important to know exactly how composting works and why we bother with it.

It all comes down to microbes. Eons ago, before you, or I, or any of our ancestors stressed over school, there were tiny lifeforms on Earth that thrived without using oxygen. They are called anaerobes. Eventually, oxygen users like us, known as aerobes, joined the scene hundreds of millions of years later. We and anaerobes now strut across the same runway that is the planet, but humans have to be careful. No, you’re right, anaerobes won’t throw marbles under our feet while we pose, but they do dangerous things with our trash!

When you put that bite of your grandmother’s pasta in the general garbage, it all gets closed up in a plastic bag. This prevents airflow and creates a low oxygen environment that gives anaerobes a chance to grow. Contained in a perfect microcosm, they break down your food and produce methane as a byproduct. That’s bad because methane is a greenhouse gas; it absorbs the sun’s heat and consequently contributes to climate change.

Aerobes also biodegrade food, but make carbon dioxide instead of methane. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas as well, but soaks up way less solar radiation. In addition to that, aerobes manage to eliminate toxicity better and produce less of a rotten smell than anaerobes.

So, how do we get our food to be handled by aerobes instead of anaerobes? By composting!

Composts are set up to maintain airflow. Aerobes get the oxygen they need to live and this type of environment blocks anaerobic expansion. All it can take to sustain the right aerobic atmosphere is a simple stir of a container. With composts, we can make humus. Before you take your pita out, know that humus isn’t your favorite Middle Eastern spread (that’s actually hummus). Humus is a term used to reference dirt achieved from rotting organics. Those orange bins on campus are a way to take remaining glop and make beautiful, nutrient soil. Letting anaerobes process our leftovers goes the opposite way, tending to make waste more hazardous.

It’s worth noting that some compost processing sites actually embrace anaerobe disadvantages to harvest their methane. Humans burn the gas for heat and electricity. Despite not being clean energy, at least our species can use it and cause climate change instead of not using it and warming the globe anyway. If you think of all the landfills on our planet, there is a lot of food rotting without being exploited.

In a world piling up with trash, humans are faced with more and more complexities surrounding what to do with it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported, “Pound for pound, the comparative impact of [methane] is more than 25 times greater than [carbon dioxide] over a 100-year period.” Concordia’s orange bins are a game of anaerobes vs. aerobes. These days, the seemingly simple act of throwing away a teabag is actually an influential decision that’ll shape history.

 

Featured photo by Virginie Ann

Categories
Student Life

An update on Waste Not Want Not

Students reunite to support the Waste Not Want Not compost campaign. Photo by Kim Gagnon

Concordia campaign wants to make composting a university lifestyle by increasing compostable bins

Concordia’s first-ever compost campaign will be expanding their efforts this year, increasing both the number of bins available on campus and student awareness, announced one of the campaign’s founding members, Keroles Riad.

When Riad, a Ph.D student in the individualized program of engineering, started the “Waste Not, Want Not” compost campaign two years ago, there were only nine compost bins available at the University.

“This year, we are going to increase to about 60 compost bins around campus,” Riad said, adding that he’s also looking to show incoming Concordia students that making use of the compost bins is an established culture.

“We will have new students, and we don’t want it to be presented as something new that you need to make an extra effort, but more like, ‘This is the culture of Concordia,’” Riad said. “The most helpful thing students can do is to show that they are responding [to the campaign.] Riad said he was motivated to start the campaign two years ago after the university’s composter — which turns food waste into soil — malfunctioned. According to Riad, the machine, which had been purchased by Sustainable Concordia, was not properly maintained.

Now, Concordia has to ship most of its organic waste to a composting facility in Ontario. According to Riad, approximately 74 per cent of compostable waste from Concordia goes to a landfill.

Organic waste that ends up in landfills, Riad explained, can be harmful to the environment. “Organic waste in landfills [does] not become soil. It doesn’t decompose in a way that becomes soil again. It ends up emitting a lot of methane and pollutes water,” he said. “You can cut how much you have to send to landfills by half if you compost. The idea is not just to compost but to reduce waste, which is the ultimate goal.”

Seeking to improve Concordia’s composting situation, Riad contacted Peter Stoett, the director of the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, and Roger Côté, the university’s vice-president of services. He said the goal was to start a composting campaign to help Concordia students and faculty make a productive change to help reduce waste.

“I was hoping to reach towards a better way of composting,” Riad said, adding that the campaign’s name comes from an expression used during World War II that advocates minimalism. “It’s a message to encourage people to reduce their waste.”

Available on Concordia’s website is a list of the locations of compostable bins on campus on Concordia’s website. By the end of last semester, there was a total of 27 bins total at the downtown campus and at the Loyola campus. According to Riad, it’s also possible to request a compost bin for any events happening on campus. The bins can be spotted by their orange lids, and they are usually placed alongside garbage and recycling bins.

Also available on the university’s website is a list of acceptable compostable items, including leftover food, paper, tissues, apple cores, fruit peels and brown paper bags. There are also examples of non-compostable items, notably anything plastic, such as coffee cup lids.

In addition to its benefits for the environment, Riad explained, the campaign also aims to transform organic matter into soil and fertilizer for food production. “We will be merging with the sustainability ambassadors program to ensure the sustainability of the campaign. The soil created from Concordia’s organic waste is distributed to gardeners and farmers to be used on their crops. It’s a question of caring enough to do it and spending an extra second at the waste station to put the stuff where they belong,” said Riad.

For more information about the university’s composting projects, visit Sustainable Concordia’s website, at sustainableconcordia.ca. 

A call out for all interested volunteers to visit this website:

https://www.concordia.ca/campus-life/sustainability/sustainability-ambassador-program/student-sustainability-ambassador-program.html  

Photo by Kim Gagnon

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