Useful Scrapes With No Where to Go...

These two photos were taken at a house that I stayed in last weekend while on a ski trip with ORAP. The first photo is a picture of the remains of the vegetables that were used in a stir-fry that we cooked for dinner. I was extremely resentful when a housemate wanted to throw the scrapes in the garbage. First of all, one of the major problems with this would be that we had to take all of our garbage with us at the end of the weekend. Taking unnecessary garbage along with us didn't really appeal to anyone in the house, so this was one good convincing point. Also, we only had a limited number of bags in the house that we could use for garbage so we were forced to limit the amount of garbage that we produced anyways. I wanted everyone to realize that these food scrapes with truly unnecessary garbage and didn't need to take up space in the trash can, use up our precious bags and require us to carry even more garbage out with us. We also had unlimited natural space around us and one solution for the organic scrapes would be to bury them in the soil in the deep woods that surrounded us. This idea, however, did not fare well with the house because they believed that this would attract animals to the house and cause much bigger issues. In the end, a friend and I took as many scrapes as we could get and buried them in the woods behind the house. This is a good option for the organics because they will break down into the soil and not have to be wasted. The second photo depicts how much organics actually ended up in the trash due to the overwhelming unwillingness to bury them in the woods because of the threat of animal intrusion into our space. This instance shows that composting is still not an understood concept for many people, even for students at an environmentally conscious college. One of the factors that influences this problem is because composting is sometimes seen as a hippie, environmentalist thing to do, when it should be seen as something that is necessary and sensible. For widespread composting to become a reality the knowledge and mindset towards composting needs to be changed.