Composting
Kingston: Tea Room eliminates consumer waste
Queen's University News Centre / 13 December 2011
Staff at the Tea Room recently celebrated a major milestone: the café is now 100 per cent consumer-waste free, meaning all of the products customers use can be recycled or composted.
“It’s been pretty much one of the goals of the Tea Room since it opened in 2006,” head manager Andrew Dean (Sc'12) says of eliminating consumer waste. “It was a pretty cool moment to just actually get rid of the garbage bin we had. You can’t really find any other businesses around where you’d walk in and not see a garbage.”
The Tea Room is a student-run initiative of the Queen’s Engineering Society. Since it opened in 2006, its staff has focused on the three pillars that are the driving force behind the business: environmental responsibility; education; and fiscal sustainability.
Guide to Composting in the Winter
Earth911.com / Hailey Paul / 06 December 2010
Just as you started to get into a solid groove with your compost pile this past summer and fall, churning over plentiful amounts of that beautiful garden gold, BAM! Winter hits.
But don't throw in the shovel just because a white blanket of snow or a hardened sheet of ice now sits atop your compost pile. To help you get through the winter and ready to go once spring returns, learn some of the ins-and-outs of winter composting.
Working paper: Redesigning Food Growing and Distribution in the Ottawa Bioregion
Transition Ottawa / Kaia Nightingale / 01 November 2010
One of the goals of Transition Towns is to become more locally resilient. A large part of this resilience is about food sourcing and distribution. Our basic food needs could be sourced within a short distance of this city. Our food would be fresher and less oil dependent. We would have more connection with the farms that grow our food, create more local employment, and build more sense of community.
This paper is the draft of a paper created by TTO member Kaia for the Canadian Biodiversity Institute. This paper will eventually form part of a larger document called A Citizen's Action Plan on Climate Change and Oil Uncertainty, and their effects on Food, Water and Energy Security for Ottawa.
Ottawa: Composting plant passes smell factor
Ottawa Citizen / Kate Jaimet / 11 June 2010
The expected stench from a composting plant in south Ottawa was a major concern when Dutch company Orgaworld built its composting plant on Hawthorne Road last year.
Now that the plant is running, how bad is it?
The answer comes from a valve to the duct carrying air — and its smells — out of the otherwise sealed facility.
This is the “odour sampling port.”
Ottawa: Compost collection ... and plastics
Ottawa Citizen / Kate Jaimet / 04 May 2010
When it first applied for approval to operate its composting plant in Ottawa, Orgaworld argued that a green bin program that didn’t take plastic bags and diapers would be cleaner, less smelly, and produce a better quality compost.
Peak phosphorus ... peak soil
Inside Waste Weekly / 19 January 2010
The greed of the global economy has forgotten that you can’t have a labourer in China make cheap clothes for the world market without food. And you can’t feed that labourer without soil. The global economy has forgotten that it is nothing without soil.
Every cheap shirt, every cheap car, every cheap tool, represents some part of a nation’s soil. We are nothing without soil. We don’t exist without soil.
Ontario: Cracking down on compost
Toronto Star / Moira Welsh / 28 November 2009
Ontario has revamped recycling rules to ensure cities turn your Green Bin food waste and other organics into as much compost as possible.
The move follows a Star investigation that discovered major problems in the system, including thousands of tonnes of Toronto's organic food waste in various stages of the composting process dumped in a gravel pit, tossed into landfills or stockpiled.
"It is major change, and it is high time we did it," Environment Minister John Gerretsen said in an interview.
The 134-page ministry document Gerretsen released this week for public consultation includes specific rules on what makes good compost, with three different grades from "AA" (the best, for use in gardens) to "A" (which needs to be mixed with soil) to "B" (suitable only for landfill or roadside cover).
