Brooklyn Feed

Earth Baby was founded by three California Bay Area families who saw the amount of disposable diapers they were sending to the landfill and wanted to do something about it. They launched Earth Baby, which is a service that delivers diapers and wipes. They come later to collect the used diapers and bring them to a composting facility. The composting process uses only .5 watt-hour of electricity per diaper (equivalent of running a 60 watt light bulb for 30 seconds), no water or chlorine bleach.

The diapers themselves are made of natural unbleached FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood pulp and a super-absorbent gel. They are 100% chlorine and fragrance free. The composted diapers are turned into a high-quality top-soil, which is used at local golf courses and sod farms.

I am a sucker for the stats that show how many trees have been saved by using recycled paper towels for a year, or how much energy I’ve saved over a year with just one compact fluorescent bulb. If you are like me, you will like to know that as of June 26, 2009, Earth Baby has composted 29,220 pounds of diapers to date.

They currently only service the Bay area, but their business is growing rapidly, so hopefully they will be available in other cities soon.

I love my backyard chickens for lots of different reasons. Here are a few:

1. They produce tasty eggs. Besides giving our chickens table scraps (lettuce, broccoli, fading fruit, etc.) we let them graze in our backyard. They eat a lot of grass and ivy (and just about anything that isn’t nailed down), which gives them added beta carotene. This in turn gives their yolks a rich, deep almost orange color. There is some debate as to whether pastured hens (those that eat a lot of grass instead of corn-based feed) lay eggs that are lower in cholesterol. All I know is that their eggs have a meaty taste that you don’t get with grocery store eggs.

2. They are funny and friendly. We raised our hens from chicks, so they are quite fond of us. Of course they are walking stomachs and I feed them, so I’m sure they love me for that too. When we sit out in our garden and they are roaming around, they often jump up into my lap for a little cuddle. Our silver-laced Polish Andie (with the big pom-pom hairdoo) has some trouble seeing because of the feathers in her face. She has to tilt her head to see things and sometimes she still bonks into furniture. It’s pretty funny to watch her.

3. They eat bugs. They dig and scratch in the dirt looking for bugs, but they are also hunters of mosquitoes and ticks. My girls don’t seem to be too interested in slugs, but I’ve heard that chickens like to eat slugs. That makes up for the garden nibbling they are prone to. My girls will grab a mosquito right off my leg for a snack. Love that!

4. They are educational. Lindsay has learned all about chickens. We also have lots of curious friends and neighbors come through with lots of questions. Probably the top two questions are: How can you get eggs without a rooster? (You can get eggs, but you can’t get fertilized eggs w/out a rooster) Do they smell? (They only smell if you don’t clean up after them. Much in the same way cats can smell if you don’t clean their litter box) We just had kids from Lindsay’s school come to meet the hens. Many had never touched a chicken before or seen a green or blue egg before.

5. They are a great ice breaker at parties. We live in Brooklyn and it is pretty unusual for people to keep chickens. People either think we’re cool or really weird. I can live with either of those.

6. They are great composters. As I mentioned above they eat all manner of kitchen scraps. We keep two tubs by our kitchen sink. One is the premier kitchen waste, which goes to the hens. The other goes into our compost bin. The chickens eat the scraps and poop out nitrogen-rich droppings. Their droppings go into the compost bin, which kick-starts the bin to really speed up the decomposition process. My garden is thriving with the added nitrogen.

Food scraps turn into compost and eggs. What a great system.

Here’s a product called the NatureMill that’s been getting a lot of publicity lately. The company says that it will turn your food scraps into garden-ready compost in 2 weeks.

I am a bit skeptical about this product for a few reasons. My first doubts are with their claim to speeding up the decomposing process to only take 2 weeks. I’ve generally found that compost happens on its own schedule. A good hot pile takes a couple of months.

My second issue with the product is the fact that it uses electricity. They say that the machine uses about $.50 of electricity a month. I just think it’s weird to take one of the most natural processes on Earth and make it use electricity. When most people start composting, it’s because they are concerned with the environment and want to reduce the amount of garbage that’s going into a landfill. The rich garden soil is a bonus.

However, if people begin to compost with this product who would never have composted before I think it’s a positive move. If the amount of electricity is offset by the reduction of waste hitting a landfill and all of the energy costs involved in that process, I will keep my mind open. Anybody use the NatureMill or know of anyone who does? I’m curious to hear feedback on it.

A few posts back, I wrote about the fact the NYC schools use styrofoam trays for their student’s breakfast and lunches. This is such an ecological horror. I can’t imagine where they are shipping all of this mess.

It was nice to see the following story about an alternative to the styrofoam.

A South Carolina middle school is experimenting with lunch trays made out of bamboo and sugar cane to see if they might be the answer to the millions of Styrofoam trays the state’s public schools send to the landfill each year. WFAE’s Julie Rose reports:

There’s been a trend in public schools over the last decade to trade washable plastic lunch trays for disposable ones made of Styrofoam. About half of South Carolina’s public schools use those trays, according to Education Department spokesman Pete Pillow. He says it’s because they’re cheaper and easier.

“Remember, you’ve got to heat that water to a certain temperature. You’ve got to have the suds and the soap,” says Pillow. “If you’re feeding a thousand students a day that’s an awful lot of dishes to be washing to be washing according to all the state health regulations.”

And that requires someone washing dishes pretty much full-time, says Pillow. But the cost savings come with environmental consequences.

Pillow says South Carolina schools dump about 40-million Styrofoam lunch trays in the landfill each year. Over the next six weeks, Hand Middle School in Columbia will try out disposable trays made from bamboo and sugar cane that will then be chipped into pieces for the city’s compost.

The bamboo trays cost about three times the Styrofoam ones, but will save the school landfill fees. If it proves cost effective enough, Pillow says the state will consider using the trays in more schools.

When I first mentioned to Neil that I wanted chickens, his initial response wasn’t very positive. He grew up in the Berkshires and sometimes the farm aesthetic was pretty awful. We have a small yard, so any chicken coop we got (I was working on him!) had to be attractive. We spent way too much money on the Eglu by Omlet. It’s a beautiful coop and very easy to clean, which was a big bonus for me.

So everything was going well in our beautiful backyard farm until I took a couple of composting classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The teacher was great and very inspiring as to how to scavenge materials in the city. Coffee grounds from your local coffee shop, bales of straw from neighbor’s Halloween displays, etc. It was armed with the information from this class that I purchased a Toro leaf blower and decided to vacuum and mulch my leaves. It actually took a lot of restraint not to become the crazy leaf lady and walk up and down my block vacuuming up the neighbor’s leaves. Hey, I only have a finite amount of “browns” for my compost bin!

Well then I happened upon an autumnal display (this was in October) that had bales of straw and quickly asked them if I could have the straw when they were done with it. I was able to cart off 2 bales. Those suckers are big and heavy and you definitely look like the crazy straw lady when you are wrestling them down the streets of Brooklyn on a cart. I generously spread a layer all over the backyard and piled the straw up in the plant beds. I was glowing with how the straw would break down by the springtime and help my crummy lifeless soil become rich with nutrients and life. Neil was skeptical, but has gotten used to my crazy schemes, so he didn’t grumble too much.

It is now spring and as you can see from the photos, I have plenty of straw on the ground and in the beds. It has shown very little signs of breaking down. The grumbling has gotten quite audible. I planted grass seeds and there are tiny little green hairs peeking up. Hasn’t shown any sign of covering up the straw.

Even I have to admit that my fabulous composting endeavor looks pretty awful. People who come over think that the straw is for the chickens and this is exactly what Neil wanted to avoid in the first place. Neil encouraged me to pull out the leaf blower to suck up some of the straw and grind it into smaller pieces. That seemed to work, but I didn’t put it all back. I think I will dig it into the beds over the summer and fall and add it to my compost bin. I think the grass will grow through what’s left and my backyard will look a little less like photos from the Dust bowl fairly soon. Cross your fingers!

March 26th, 2009

By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

These days it’s not just individual Hollywood A-listers who are going green in their personal lives; they’re taking the entire movie set in a sustainable direction. Some eco-driven insiders have even started up side businesses to complement their work in film. And who knows, with emerging companies like Film Biz Recycling in New York and EcoSet Consulting in Los Angeles, the industry may have just conjured up a new wave of green troops.

Shannon Schaefer, founder of the fledgling EcoSet Consulting (website still in progress), is on the front lines. During her stint as production secretary on the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man in Minneapolis last fall, she helped the Coens and FOCUS Features studio divert more than 11 tons of waste from the landfill.

From unused film to leftover food to set props, Schaefer and others recycled or composted the kinds of things that normally end up in a trash dump somewhere.

It started when Schaefer, who has worked in film production for several years (and who officially started her company in December), made it known that she would take charge of greening the set, if the film’s muckety-mucks were interested. As it turned out, FOCUS Features had already instituted a policy to make its operations as eco-friendly as possible, so Schaefer founder herself in charge of not just clean-up, but green-up.

During the 44-day shoot, she says, 80 percent of the 14 tons of trash was diverted. To start, organizers avoided the use of plastic water bottles whenever possible – instead, providing water stations and reusable bottles around the location, preventing an estimated 10,000 plastic water bottles from going to the city dump. Yet only 6 percent of the diverted waste was recycled cardboard, bottles or cans. Surprisingly, 74 percent of the refuse went to compost, including virtually everything from catering and craft services – fruits, vegetables, meat, bones, dairy, paper and corn eating utensils (plates, napkins, cups, forks, knives). “Basically anything that was once an animal or a plant is now compost,” Schaefer said.

The way it began was organic, Schaefer says. She didn’t approach the filmmakers or the set supervisors; she was already part of their crew.

“When I was hired on, I let my supervisors know that I was interested in doing this, and so I was kind of figuring out the logistics for it at the beginning of prep. I’d written up a little memo to the crew and production office, sort of a sustainability statement saying we wanted the film to be as un-wasteful as possible. And so I was already working with my direct supervisors when it came from the top. FOCUS Features had to be the ones to say, ‘Go ahead’ – because often there can be additional costs to recycling and diverting waste.”

Once given the go-ahead, the production office worked with Minneapolis’s Eureka Recycling and local hauler Boone Trucking. In doing so, they were not only able to set a tone within the industry; they were able to show ultimate respect for their host town – by not trashing it.

“I’ve seen a lot of waste,” Schaefer says, “and I’ve been in the position to where even though I care about it, I’m too exhausted to deal with it after filming. So, I’ve been there – I know how hard it can be. But if you have the prep time, if you know you’re doing it in advance and that you just have to implement some new systems, it’s not that difficult.

“It’s something I really care about, and the industry has to change. I want to be part of that change. You can sit and talk about it all you want, but if you don’t do something, then you’re part of the problem.”

Schaefer says she believes that more and more film production crews and studios are moving in the same direction – away from the city dump and toward a self-created (or pre-existing) compost site.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Here’s a great video from the environmentals about building a worm bin.

The Enviromentals (Episode 1) How to Make a Worm Composting Bin from Hal Brindley on Vimeo.

In an effort to offset some of the holiday excess, why not mulch your Christmas tree? In NYC they call it mulchfest and set up wood chippers in various parks across the city. You bring your tree there and they turn it into mulch. I usually drag a few trees I run across on my way to the park as well. I find the sight of abandoned Christmas trees to be very sad, especially if they have tinsel on them. If you are in NYC, you can look here to find out when and where to bring your tree. It’s this coming weekend near me. If you don’t live in NYC, there seem to be programs all over the place. I would start by contacting your department of sanitation to see what they are doing.

Here’s a site where you can take a simple and fun quiz to test your composting knowledge. It takes less than a minute and might give you some information you didn’t already know.

 

This photo is pretty much what a school lunch in New York City public schools looks like. Complete with styrofoam tray. An estimated number of 1.2 million schoolchildren in New York’s 1400 public schools eat their lunches using those trays. Some children bring their lunches, of course, but others also get breakfast at school on those trays. So that means that probably a million styrofoam trays are tossed into landfills each school day. It’s horrifying to keep going with the math  on that one.

I did see a shining beacon of hope that change might come to the schools. I toured The Brooklyn New School yesterday. It’s a magnet school started by some hippie parents in the 80s. Besides all of the hands-on programs they offer the students, they also organize a CSA (community supported agriculture) and they compost the student’s lunches. Yes, you heard that correctly. The students sort their food into compostable and non-compostable food. They have a big compost bin that generates a lot of heat, and they use the soil. I think they said that they have reduced the food waste by 80%. Isn’t that amazing??? Very inspiring. I’m not sure Lindsay will go to that school, but if she doesn’t, I think I will try and use their model to start a composting program at her school.