Many visitors that come to Governors Island (GI) have never source separated food scraps in their lives. They haven’t had any experience or given any thought to how their sandwich leftovers escape it’s tin foil wrapper or how uneaten salad escapes it’s plastic clam shell. Plastic bags and clam shells will not turn into ‘black gold,’ and will remain tin foil or plastic. We want visitors on Governors Island to leave with the ‘Aha!’ moment; to realize that they can compost their food scraps (correctly) and by composting, green the planet.
At the Compost Outpost, visitors observe food scraps being processed (eaten) by our animals and by compost devices. Food scraps are collected at 12 source separation stations on GI (provided by DSNY NYC Compost Project Local Organics Recovery Program).
We try to service these stations two times each weekend day at the height of station use and at major events held on the Island. Servicing means going around to the stations and observing what is in the bins and demonstrating what is and is not considered food scraps by using litter pickers uppers to sort the bins out. It may be obvious to you that a tin foil wrapper does not go into the food scrap bin ..but we see that many more people will take the wrapper off once they see our interns, staff and volunteers, (wearing gloves) pull off the food from the wrapper. We also demonstrate by emptying out the collected food scraps onto a bed of wood chips for our animals to munch on and have visitors help us separate out plastic straws, plastic bags, etc. Many people readily understand and connect that what animals eat should not be mingled with non food items.
Recently while visiting Italy, we noticed their slogan on their organics bin -” easier to keep it clean then to clean it”. We hope that this message gets into the minds and hands of all GI visitors, and people everywhere – take a moment to get your source separation right; being mindful along with your actions do make a difference in our world.
Examples of composting in Cugnoli, Florence, at the Coliseum (Rome), where we observed a wrapper on the discarded sandwich and a water bottle in the organics bin.