Me and My Green Bin: New York greenmarkets

Showing posts with label New York greenmarkets. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2022

LOMI vs. MY GREEN BIN

Here's the new Lomi Kitchen Composter

Finally another blog on composting, but instead of my green bin I'm featuring a new, high-tech kitchen composter. An impressive Canadian company called Pela, known for their bio-degradable phone cases, has recently introduced a countertop machine that actually "minimizes food waste at the press of a button." Pela's goal is to create a waste-free future, so for a start they've created this futuristic, high-tech version of a green bin with many fewer steps. You simply fill it with food scraps, press the button and in a few hours you've turned your leftovers into nutrient-rich dirt. If you don't have your own compost pile and garden, or you live in a place that doesn't have a city-wide recycling program, this sounds like a great solution (all you need is $499.)

Here's my green bin 10 years ago . It still stands in the same place on my kitchen counter

Though Lomi's kitchen composter is awesome, I'm not planning on retiring my green bin any time soon. I praised it ten years ago when I started this blog and I'm still as enamored as ever. In the first "Me and My Green Bin" post on May 7th 2012, I described "MONDAY MORNING"--- the time when Berkeley recycle trucks pick up green waste in our neighborhood.

Exactly10 years later I still collect veggie and meat scraps in my green bin...

...then dump them into the large curbside receptacle provided by the city, which gets COLLECTED early Monday morning. The previous link describes what happens to the contents of the bins after they are collected.

There are also other solutions: Every week or so my sister takes her food scraps from the freezer in her apartment in Manhattan to her home in CT where she composts it for her garden. Strangely enough, New York City does not have city wide curbside pickups. Instead they have bins near some community gardens and green markets where locals can take their compostable items. I took the photo below in 2015 when I visited the 92nd street greenmarket near my sister's apartment.

92nd Street Greenmarket vegetation collection

More recently, the city has instituted voluntary green waste collection in selected neighborhoods and the NYC Dept. of Sanitation has issued brown bins like the one below. Despite these minor improvements, my sister Lucia continues to schlep her kitchen scraps to the country for her garden compost pile.

New York CIty's handsome brown bins

With Lomi, the transformation from food waste to compost happens in your kitchen; and it happens lickety split. Pela has a great Website with all the details and their weekly newsletter contains fascinating information about their zero waste philosophy. Lomi News is so useful that I've started saving the emails in a file on my desktop for future reference. Why delete info on topics like the garbage problem or 15 steps to a zero-waste kitchen or can you cook with compost?

I admit I'm impressed with Lomi, but not enough to abandon my green bin and all the low-tech steps that involves. Never fear, "Me and My Green Bin" will continue!

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Green Bins Near and Far

photograph in the New York Times

When I saw this woman tenderly clutching her kitchen compost bin I got excited. What's the occasion? She turns out to be Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist who runs the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University, nicknamed the Smell Lab and lives on the upper West side of New York. At work and at home she celebrates all smells. "Some people divide the world into disgusting or nice," she said, "I think all smells are great."

Like my sister Lucia, Leslie stows her compost in the freezer when the bin is overflowing. Lucia then takes the frozen waste to the country on weekends, to add to her garden compost pile. Her daughter Hannah contributes her family's compost as well. Leslie takes hers to the nearby 79th street greenmarket, at the Museum of Natural History. where they accept residents' compost.

This proud fellow is overseeing the compost collection at the greenmarket on West 97th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam in Manhattan. I attended the market on a Friday morning last September and it was lovely.

At the same 97th Street market I spotted this photographer shooting close-ups of the collected compost, just like me.

I noticed this compost bin in Calabria, Italy during my travels there last September. In the foreground is a tray of figs drying in the hot afternoon sun.