SCHOOL
University of Louisville, Louisville, KY University of Louisville composts material from more than 20 community partners, using a donation system, hand tools, and primarily unpaid volunteer labor.
START DATE: 2010
member (part time) and 3 to 5 core volunteers.
DRIVERS: Brian Barnes saw that food scraps were going to the landfill, and knew that they could be captured and transformed into soil by a simple process, using volunteer labor. Since University of Louisville was beginning a sustainability push university-wide, he thought this would be a great project to include. Brian contacted the university’s Special Assistant to the Provost for Sustainability Initiatives, Justin Mog. Justin supported the project and helped Brian make all of the necessary connections.
METHOD: Bin system, vermicomposting, repurposed dumpsters
PARTNERS: Partners are primarily coffee shops, small food businesses like grocery stores and breweries, landscaping services, and individual household donors. The program has one paid staff
VOLUME: 1000 - 2000 pounds per week SUMMARY: This project proves that a few dedicated people can reuse available materials and re-inhabit vacant spaces to salvage community and university compostables from a variety of sources with almost no conventional resources. They use nature’s composting processes in re-imagined dumpsters and barrels to create vermiculture, aquaponic, and composting products for food activists and community gardens at no cost. Their project is light in its environmental impacts, but it generates enough energy to bring otherwise unconnected community partners together in powerful ways. FUNDING: They are supported by the university. All of their equipment has been repurposed, donated, or purchased out of an annual $5000 stipend to the project, which also pays for any labor. They are funded by an annual stipend from The Sustainability Council for the Project Manager position. 2014 is their second full year of funding. WEBSITE: https://louisville.edu/sustainability/operations/ composting.html RESOURCES: http://louisville.edu/sustainability/operations/ecoreps/eco-reps.html HOW DO YOU DEFINE COMMUNITY- BASED COMPOSTING? “Community-based composting” means that a local, bottom-up process is being driven by members of the community to save compostables from the landfill and transform them into plantable, sharable soil, thereby closing the loop on numerous individual sustainable agriculture projects. To qualify as “community-based,” the effort should strive for minimal carbon pollution from the transportation of compostables. CONTACT: Brian Barnes
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GUIDE TO COMMUNITY COMPOSTING