Community composting in Moreland

Joining one of very few similar projects in Australia, Moreland council embarked on a pilot program to set up seven community composting hubs in the inner north Melbourne municipality.

With an intention of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through saving food waste buried in landfills, costs of transporting waste and by recycling nutrients into the soil, the area is a perfect testing ground, being a good mix of denser housing and a fairly green-minded population.

The council conducted research into the best way of composting in a community setting and had planned to set up seven hubs, each provided with 2-3 400 litre aerobins, signage, 7.2 litre kitchen collectors for participating households and optional compost tea brewers. However, the project is on hold until financial year 2011/2012, as they didn’t get the funding hoped for (The government scrapped Climate Communities). Three sites instead of the seven trial sites planned will be tested out of an existing budget. They will also have just two bins per site to start with.

Several of the sites are community gardens and so the compost created will go straight onto those, for the others it will be distributed into neighboring gardens, other community gardens and potentially in the future, nature strips and municipal gardens.

Aside from the obvious waste and greenhouse gas savings, community composting schemes are generally seen as great vehicles for community education, building and engagement and overall the pilot hopes to increase the number of residents composting by 20%.

For those of you interested in finding out about other similar schemes, a community group in Port Phillip is setting up a similar scheme with the pilot site launching in Elwood in July 2011. Michael mobbs set up a scheme in Chippendale, Sydney and there is one in Rushall gardens in North Fitzroy, Melboure.