Los Angeles apartment dwellers could probably make use of a community composting initiative.
Successful apartment composting stories wanted
If you have a lawn or garden, you can easily transform food scraps into healthy, eco-friendly, compost. All you need to compost is basically a bin with holes at the bottom. But apartment-dwellers who don’t want to send fruit peels and veggie pieces to the landfill have a harder go of it. You need more involved equipment — and have to get more involved yourself.
This is why I haven’t started composting yet.
In fact, none of my local green, apartment-dwelling friends compost. And it’s not cuz we’re lazy!
…
It’s just tough to compost indoors. Jenn of Tiny Choices wrote a great post about the 4 ways to compost indoors. Guess what: Jenn doesn’t compost herself.Are you a successful apartment composter? Share your story [greenlagirl@gmail.com] to encourage us all, and I’ll include them in a future post. In the meantime, I’m going to figure out how I can push Santa Monica, the city I live in, to give us green bins we can put our food scraps in for city composting. Homeowners get these green bins, but not apartment dwellers.
Composting indoors is a challenge but if you have no outside compost bin, then a combination of using bokashi and a worm bin* may do the job.
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*client
Hey Al!
Thanks for the mention and for (indirectly) letting me know about the Green LA girl post.
Cheers
Bentley
Compost Guy — April 8th, 2008 at 8:35 amGreetings Al! I’ve been reading your blog. I feel that throwing the organics away is a waste. But I’m very busy to resort to composting. Can I just Chop em up and dig a pit and dump them? My apartment has a backyard so I think there’s plenty of space. Bury the organics and let nature do it’s thing. What do you think of this? Thanks for your time!!
Dennis A — April 21st, 2008 at 12:23 amDennis, Trench composting is the solution for you:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Trench-compost/
See also http://tinyurl.com/5nmdbm
Cheers,
Al
Al — April 22nd, 2008 at 7:40 amMany apartments have common areas with grass. If you get permission from the apartments you may be able to use it. However; how many apartments want that sort of thing visible to other tenants. It may upset some individuals. With trench composting you still may need a dirt hole and that may not work for apartments either.
Andrew - Apartment Man — July 23rd, 2008 at 6:47 pm