Hi, my name is Melody and I am a student at the University of Washington. I just started a couple of box planters and I'm hoping to start making my own compost at home. If you have any tips for me, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, my friends and I are trying to decrease waste in the Seattle area. Many coffee shops here still throw their coffee grounds in the garbage. In one of my classes, we are starting a business to make our own compost from local coffeeshops and restaurants. We are going to sell small rotating compost bins for at home use. If you don't mind, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a few minutes to take this survey: Moderator's note: Sorry no surveys allowed I'm looking forward to hear what you all have to say!
Hi Melody! Welcome to Gardenstew from southern Ontario! I think coffee composting sounds like a great idea!
I am using bokashi composting, which might work well for small household composting combined with worm farming. There would be challenges if you are using only window boxes. Lots of things going on in the Seattle area. The Beacon Food Forest http://beaconfoodforest.org is a great project that may have information for some of your questions. Any local community gardens close to you? Great informational sources. The city of Seattle has city wide composting (organics) bins that are part of the weekly pick-ups as well as regular recycling (glass, paper, plastics, etc). They have compost available. http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/garbage-recycling/food-collection.asp Seems to me you should have a vast amount of knowledge in your community to resource. You might want to Google some of resources readily available for your local gardening. Seattle is a very green city with lots of information. Start with the U of W gardens. They hold lots of classes and have very knowledgable people and pamphlets.
Thank you for the warm welcome everyone! Jewell: Thank you very much for the great information! In our research, we never came across bokashi composting. Sounds like a great process to consider. If I'm correct, yes composting is a law now in apartments and homes, but if they compost at home, they can bypass the charge for the city to pick it up. Businesses don't seem to be forced to compost though. So we want to help them compost without needing to pay for someone else to pick it up. Am I right on this? I'm assuming since only 1/2 of restaurants in Seattle compost, it must be optional. Currently, all of the compost in Seattle is sent to Cedar Grove Composting. They are doing a great thing and composting 750 tons of raw material a day, but there is a small amount of contaminates in the soil(glass bottles and plastic); so we want to create a business around high quality compost where we know what is going into the mix from landscaping material at the UW and the materials from coffee houses in the area. We want to help these places reduce costs. I'm curious to hear if this sounds like a feasible business model?
I have no idea about feasibility. There are so many things to consider. Pickup, transportation costs, storage costs and labor costs I would think are just the beginning. Then there is packaging, marketing and advertising. Don't let that slow you down if this is your dream. I know there are some high quality composted products out there only because I got them for presents. If you follow what you love to do, you learn along the way. Life is full of chances and don't hesitate to do what you are passionate about. Start small, give yourself time and work through the learning curves. Heck, look what the founder of Starbucks has accomplished. Maybe you can do the same thing with compost
