Composting takes off

This afternoon we took the boys to the annual BBQ at Northern Michigan College here in Traverse City. It was a simple buffet style meal of veggies, potato salad, cole slaw, and either a Buffalo meat burger or hot dog. The remarkable thing about the meal was that we composted almost everything - the paper plates and cups, plastic forks (the compostable kind), napkins, and all the food scraps. To make sure these things did not end up in the garbage, a student volunteer was stationed at each trash area telling people what to compost. I was so intrigued I started asking the volunteer about who was doing this, was this a NMC program? She didn't know the answers. Hmm...

As we were leaving, we took a short-cut that took us right by the garbage truck. We lingered briefly because we have a three-year-old boy and, well, garbage trucks are fascinating. There was a man working, and I casually asked him about the composting that day. He said that all of the scraps are going to his farm, Food for Thought, where he has an industrial composting facility. He also said that usually the BBQ generates hundreds of trash cans full of trash, but this day they had only brought back trash about a dozen times. The rest was compost.

It turns out that I had just read about this man, Timothy Young, and his farm in the latest Traverse Magazine. They are doing a lot more than compost, but the composting blew me away. Northern Michigan is such a fertile place for green innovation. It's exciting to be here.