Like many New York women, I have this favorite hand-bag that is a perfect size to carry when I travel abroad, and this hand-bag has traveled with me everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia in the last several years.
It’s leather and is becoming dirty, so I decided to get it professionally cleaned. But, I was surprised to find out this week that cleaning my hand-bag costs over $140! I thought, how easy to replace old things by new ones, and how often we throw away the perfectly functioning things in our lives.
Something is fundamentally wrong with this picture.
To put this in perspective, there was recently an article in the New York Times introducing the “Repair Cafe” in Amsterdam. The Repair Cafe provides a place where people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.
The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 so far, and it’s spreading across the Netherlands. As part of a counter-movement against the “throwaway culture” that we have blindly enjoyed for a long time, the Repair Cafe has taken off as a way to help people reduce waste.
A founder of the Repair Cafe said, “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.”
Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see no life or value in things once they serve us their primary purpose. But, I believe that there is still life and meaning in a thing after it serves its initial purpose.
Obviously, I am not the only one who believes in that.
I met a unique group of people this week who believe that things, food in particular, will take different forms and continue serving a purpose. The group of people are a part of Earth Matter, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art, science, and application of composting in and around NYC. Earth Matter runs the Compost Learning Center on Governors Island, a military base turned public park in New York harbor just off the southern tip of Manhattan, open every summer weekend.
What is composting? Composting is the process of creating the ideal conditions for the rapid decomposition of organic materials. You can imagine composting as the speeding up of the way nature recycles food.
Under the strong summer sun, several volunteers were working diligently when I visited the center. Earth Matter volunteers and employees take food waste from food vendors and resource recovery stations throughout the island, to the Compost Learning Center, where it is processed.
I had the fortune to speak to Charlie Bayrer, the co -founder and, the Operations Manager and Director of Earth Matter. He explained that food scraps being gathered at over 30 locations across NYC’s green markets come to the center, and they also sort out the food scraps.
Later I learned that Bayrer is the driver behind a growing grassroots composting program that diverts 1,500 pounds of food waste from landfills each week.
Bayrer, a longtime community gardener and composter in Brooklyn, was instrumental in founding
Bayrer obviously cares about more than composting and enriching soil — one article about him said that “he wants people to see the big picture of how what we eat (and what we don’t) affects the environment around us.” Through his openness to talk to us about the Learning Center’s mission and operation, I felt his genuine concern about how we handle food and, perhaps, ourselves.
Do you compost? What do you think of our throwaway culture?
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