Here’s how you know you’re getting old:
Compost is suddenly … fascinating.
No, really. Stick with me here.
Russell Frank was too right when he wrote last week that life’s pleasures ‘become quieter, calmer, simpler’ as we age. And there can be few things more calm or quiet than a backyard composter, its heap of decaying stuff a tribute to nature’s efficiency, our human ability to live gently.
Living in the Philadelphia area the past couple years, I delighted in learning to cook, but was startled by just how much garbage the whole process creates. Peels, pits, rinds, shells, veggies past their prime — it all went into the trash, outside to the alley garbage cans, all bound to take up space in a landfill I would never see.
In fact, consider this: Well more than 40 percent of all the landfill-bound trash that an average neighborhood produces could be composted instead. Given a chance to break down in a relatively clean place, it can become rich fertilizer for gardens, fruit trees, vegetable patches, tall crops — just about anything that has leaves and grows.
Suddenly, the big black bin that graced the backyard when I was growing up in State College has become so much cooler.
Call me an eco-geek, but it’s a mesmerizing process. Take your banana peels, your egg shells, your past-due tomatoes and avocado skins out to the compost heap. Then check up on their progress every few days — at the least. Handled properly, they rot in relatively stink-less fashion, blacken, collapse in on themselves.
In time, it all turns into a nutrient-rich, dark blend that nourishes the next round of fruits and vegetables from the garden.
That means fewer trips to the store for fertilizers, fewer truck trips to deliver fertilizer from the factory, less fuel burned to support the food supply, less trash in the landfills.
I know: None of this is news to gardening devotees, but discovering and studying the opportunity to drive one’s own food source are oddly satisfying. Maybe not so odd, really, but it’s a happy and empowering find, particularly as the superficial priorities of youth make way for a more subtle appreciation of the world and our collective imprint.
After all, right here, literally in our hands, is a chance to take direct influence over our eco-impact, our food supply — the most core and basic physical need in our lives.
On this front, the Borough of State College gets it. A yearlong pilot program to test composting on the municipal level has already kept more than 16 tons of waste out of the landfill.
The effort, the first of its kind east of the Mississippi, has targeted nearly 600 households in the Greentree, Orchard Park and South Hills neighborhoods. Launched in January, the program allows participating households to put their compostable waste out for pick-up with their other garbage and recyclables.
Some commercial, government and nonprofit groups have joined in, too. They include the Weis on Westerly Parkway, the Autoport, State High and Our Lady of Victory.
The borough mixes their compostable waste with leaves or mulch to create a rich compost that, in time, will be made available to the community. Three months in, more than 33,200 pounds of food waste had been composted, according to the borough.
That’s nothing to sneeze at. Imagine the impact if the program were spread across the entire borough, or the entire Centre Region.
We’ll keep an eye on how the borough decides to proceed when the pilot program concludes. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to keep local homeowners from launching their own backyard composters.
It doesn’t take an eco-geek to enjoy the empowering simplicity.
