get composting with Bootstrap Compost, get two months free!
We’ve teamed up with our pals at Bootstrap Compost to offer cleenland visitors TWO MONTHS FREE compost pick-up when you sign up with code CLEENLAND. Been meaning to start composting? Now is your moment! Curious about composting? Read on!
Composting is collecting food scraps and other materials grown from the earth (e.g. wood scraps, lawn clippings, paper towels, etc.) and facilitating their breakdown in a way that creates a nutrient rich fertilizer at the end of the process, in short.
Here's why we compost with Bootstrap:
Composting is an existing example of the kind of regenerative cycle we need to build for all the resources we use. Nothing is wasted — in compost, the resources that went into food scraps or other materials grown from the earth are repurposed to make soil healthy and fertilize the next plants!
Reduce climate-change-causing emissions! When earth-grown material breaks down in a landfill, there’s no oxygen because of all the other stuff around it/on top of it in the landfill and this creates methane emissions, the most potent greenhouse gas. In composting, the material is turned over and mixed up so oxygen can get in — with oxygen, the breakdown does not cause nearly as many, if any, methane emissions.
Bootstrap is a super sweet local business that treats their people well, is accountable to the community, and keeps $$ circulating in the area! On top of all that, they provide a stellar service and are super reliable.
For Cambridge peeps, you may be wondering, what's the difference between this and the city program? Cambridge is doing something called anaerobic digestion which means they are collecting the food scraps and letting them breakdown in an environment without oxygen (that’s what anaerobic means) but instead of like a landfill where the gasses are released into the atmosphere, the scraps are in special giant tanks (digesters) that capture the gasses and combust them to make heat and light. Specifically for Cambridge’s food scraps, they power the heat and light for a waste water treatment facility in the Merrimack Valley. This is definitely better than a landfill because the gasses generated are at least being used and we’re not burning fossil fuels to power the waste water treatment facility. Cambridge pursued this path instead of true compost for logistical reasons — the emissions generated + cost of trucking the scraps to a place big enough to accommodate the volume of food scraps which is far away vs. the benefits of true compost, etc. Our take is: what Cambridge is doing is 1000% better than doing nothing. Our current systems are not set up to facilitate efficient resource use so I understand why Cambridge has chosen this path (e.g. if electricity was clean and we had electric trucks it would matter less how far away the compost facility was; if cities were designed to re-process resources locally, we could compost closer to home; if we had different food systems, we’d have less food scraps, etc.) If you want to and can afford to do Bootstrap, it is worth it. If you want to use the Cambridge curbside bins, highly excellent!!