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A week or so ago, K and I, along with some friends of ours, made a vermiculture kit, or worm bin. Our apartment doesn’t come with any yard space, and we don’t know of any community composting available, so for us, vermiculture seemed the best option for returning our food and other organic waste to the earth rather than sending it to a landfill where it would not have the proper conditions to decompose. One of our friends had just been taught about setting up a vermiculture kit, and I checked out a book from the library called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Applehof. Setting up the worm bin was surprisingly cheap, easy and fun. I won’t go into the details here but will instead recommend interested persons to read Worms Eat My Garbage to get a concise and detailed guide on vermi-composting.
After almost two weeks, our worms seem to be thriving and have devoured beyond recognition the first couple days worth of food that we gave them; I’ve noticed that even with a plastic bin full of worms and food, our apartment smells decidedly better than when we were throwing our food scraps into a garbage bin; and since we know we need to gather food scraps for the worms, we keep an old yogurt container by us while we cook and put the scraps in there, making cleanup a breeze. When the yogurt container is full, we simply burry its contents under a bedding of damp, shredded newspaper and the worms have at it! As I understand, they’ll continue to digest the scraps for two to three months, at which point we’ll have a tub of worm castings rich in nutrients for our houseplants, or to dump in an empty lot to fertilize the plant-life there.
This past Saturday I attended Pitchfork Music Festival here in Chicago where I hung out with friends and heard some great new and favorite bands. The day got to a wet start, but the rain ended in the early afternoon and the overcast provided a welcome retreat from the exceedingly hot, muggy days we’d been having. Summer festivals are a great way to get outside and spend time enjoying the wonderful warm weather that can seem so fleeting come winter in the midwest. But at the same time as providing a backdrop for enjoying the outdoors and building community, these festivals often seem to walk a fine line between providing patrons with the commodities they expect and producing as little waste as possible.
The Pitchfork event planners seem to be a rather environmentally thoughtful bunch. The website includes a page outlining their commitment to taking their responsibility to the environment seriously, which included bio-diesel powered generators, visible single-stream recycling bins throughout Union Park, multiple vegetarian and vegan food options available from local vendors, encouragement for car-free transportation to the event, and Goose Island having provided corn-based, biodegradable cups that could be redeemed for festival-related goods.
As a festival-goer, I greatly appreciated seeing these strong attempts at waste-reduction, and was especially pleased to see the note on my Goose Island cup about it being compostable. After finishing my first beer, however, I found only large garbage bins next to each (much smaller) recycling bin, and no compost collection for my cup. It wasn’t until finishing my second beer while still holding onto the first cup that I caught wind of a recycling store where I could trade-in the used cups. While I continued holding the cups searching for the “store”, however, I was dismayed at how many cups I saw in recycling bins with “no cups” notes on them, and disappointedly watched as someone threw his cup into one of the garbage bins, explaining to his companions that it was compostable, so “okay” to put in the trash. Other cups littered the ground, perhaps out of carelessness, or perhaps out of ignorance that the corn-based plastic requires an industrial compost system that will reach higher temperatures than needed for other compostable materials. While I wasn’t able to find the recycling store that would take my cups, I did eventually hear that the drink-tents would take back the cups, and sure enough found stacks of used cups to which I added my own.
I fear that for some, the note on the Goose Island cups about them having been produced from corn-based, compostable plastic was enough to make it an environmentally-friendly solution to the waste problem that comes with single-use cups. This corn-based plastic, however, has problems of its own (see this comprehensive article from the Smithsonian Magazine), and does very little to reduce our negative impact on the earth when treated the same as the petroleum-based plastics it is supposed to replace instead of the cradle-to-cradle product it was designed to be. The production and use of these cups (as well as other corn-based plastic containers) can also be used as an excuse to side-step the question of how many of these single-use containers could instead be replaced with reusable items, reducing the need for energy-intensive production, shipping, collection, etc.
I have little doubt that a spirit of environmental stewardship was worked into the planning of Pitchfork Music Festival, but I do wonder what more might be done to insure the least degree of negative environmental impact caused through this and other events, and what might be done to insure that these thoughtful plans are executed and realized to their full extent.
