Hastings Compost Community are setting up a pilot scheme for local composting. It is inspired by the scheme in Brighton, run by Brighton & Hove Food Partnership which currently has nearly 40 sites. The idea is to provide an opportunity for people who do not have the use of a garden to be able to recycle their fruit and vegetable food waste, which would otherwise go to landfill.

According to Alan Shepherd in the Little Book of Composting:
“Most people assume compost is made in the garden, but actually the composting process starts on the chopping board in the kitchen, every time we peel a carrot or skin a mango. If the waste from our recipes goes into a normal bin and off to landfill, the nutrients are lost forever. Worse than that, they fester and give off methane, a global warming gas twenty times more powerful than CO2. If it goes back into the garden, the nutrients go straight back into making more food.” 

L to R, Sarah MacBeth, Rhiannon Flood and Rachel Holtom of Transition Towns with Tim Andrews and one of his bins

Composting has become particularly relevant to our lives as we begin to realise how “the health of our soils has degraded increasingly over the past decades” and how this has “affected wildlife, food production and human health”. In fact, as part of the Charleston Festival of the Garden earlier in July, there was a talk entitled Climate Compost: Healing our Soils, Ourselves and Our Planet – from which the quotation comes. Composting goes posh.

The first site that has been agreed is in the churchyard of St John’s church in Pevensey Road St Leonards. One of the Brighton team is building the compost bins out of recycled wooden pallets, and the official opening is on Saturday July 24th at 3pm. If you are interested to learn more, this is an opportunity to meet the people involved and enjoy tea and cakes.

For more information visit transitiontownhastings.org.uk/projects/community-composting

For information on Tim’s Bins click here


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