reincarnating my carrot peels

Since I live in Tel Aviv (in an apartment that's smaller than my parent's living room), I don't really have access to a garden or any type of planted area and so there's not really any space for me to compost my organic kitchen scraps. Sure, there's public gardens around, but I'm not sure how the Tel Aviv Municipality would react to my construction of a compost heap in the middle of a playground. Actually, I can pretty much imagine.

That's why I was so excited when someone posted an invitation to use their compost heap in the center of Tel Aviv last week on Freecycle (Freecycle is an amazing network, better than Craigslist, to be explained in a later post). Not many people get excited about composting their onion peels and lemon rinds. I do.

After reading that invitation I immediately starting separating my organic scraps (food waste, food gone bad, dust, hair, cloth, torn up paper) from my other garbage and this morning I headed over to the compost heap, which is located in the back garden of an apartment building on 8 Ha'Avoda Street (near the corner of King George and Ha'Avoda). To add my scraps I cleared a small space in the center of the pile on the right (the compost heap), placed the scraps inside that area, and then covered all of the scraps with dry leaves (located to the left of the compost heap). Easy.

Easy, and important. Organic waste usually constitutes 30-40% of household trash, meaning 30-40% of the waste in landfills could be composted and used to foster the growth of additional plants. Meaning, our landfills could be 30-40% smaller if everyone composted their food scraps. Sounds good to me. Plus, the nutrients go back into the earth which is pretty great too.