Hillsborough Community Composting Alliance works to ensure the future by raising awareness about food waste and and composting solutions for returning that waste to soil.
Hillsborough Community Composting Alliance works to ensure the future by raising awareness about food waste and composting solutions for returning that waste to soil. We assist individuals and organizations hosting free public sites in Hillsborough County.
Why Compost
Who doesn’t feel a bit of guilt when throwing out leftovers? Or when it’s time to clean out the fridge to throw out food that is edible but no longer appealing? Composting is about recovering that food and turning it back into food. By taking those scraps - and all the energy it still possesses - you are using it to create soil to grow new food instead of letting it go to the landfill. It’s a small way you can do your part to care for the environment by helping to limit methane emissions and to replenish the food supply. Join us so that together we take all that energy and give it new life instead of sending it to the landfill. When you keep food out of the landfill you do right by the environment by limiting methane emission. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by our responsibility to the earth, but by reconnecting the energy of left-over “waste” to the food cycle, you can make a difference.
Natural cycles
Let’s reimagine food waste as the valuable resource that it is and reconnect it to the natural food cycle. Food waste can support the microscopic life that are the building blocks of healthy soil needed to grow food. The problem is huge - Tampa Bay residents throw away an estimated 1.2 million pounds of food waste each day. Most of the food we throw away ends up in the landfill - creating a major source of methane gas contributing to global warming.
Small actions, big impact
If each of us makes the effort to compost our food waste, together we can help reconnect that food to the nutrient cycle, create healthier soil and help reduce global warming. There are many ways to compost. Start your own home compost, join a community compost, or join a community garden. Join the many others who are composting - and feel great about doing your small part for a healthy community.
Artist: Anastasia Skachko. A self-taught freelance digital artist from Kaliningrad, Russia
The winner of the 2021 International Compost Awareness Week Poster Contest is Anastasia Skachko. A self-taught freelance digital artist from Kaliningrad, Russia, Anastasia’s poster won out of hundreds and hundreds of entries from around the world. This is how she described what she was thinking about when she did her poster design, “I imagined compost as cute little creatures who share their love with plants and vegetables which help them grow.” - International Compost Awareness Week
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Hillsborough Community Composting Alliance works to ensure the future by raising awareness about food waste and composting solutions for returning that waste to soil. We assist however possible individuals and organizations hosting free public sites in Hillsborough County.
We promote a variety of ideas and tools to make composting practical for individuals, schools, organizations, and businesses. Our goal is to increase general public participation in the regenerative act of making soil. The Composting Council provides great resources for home and community composters here. Also, there is a free website platform designed to make it easy to manage a public or private site for a neighborhood or business called MakeSoil.org.
If we don’t have the answer to your question, we know who to ask! You can help now simply by sharing this page with your friends. Inquiries: hillsboroughcomposting@gmail.com.
Resources
Growing Local Fertility: A Guide to Community Composting
Compost and Climate Change webinar series
Pumpkin Compost Campaign 2020
It is estimated that a billion pounds of pumpkin get dumped into landfills each year after Halloween. These Tampa Bay businesses and community organizations worked together to raise awareness about the need to compost pumpkins. 12 local farms and community gardens accepted pumpkins for composting this year - see the list below complied by Shells Feed & Garden Supply. If you’d like to participate in this annual event, please get in touch by emailing Elizabeth Leib, ttfarm2school@gmail.com.
Pinellas Community Compost - Hillsborough Community Compost - Shells Feed & Garden Supply
Sustainable Urban Agriculture Coalition - Tampa Bay Farm 2 School
Opening May 4
Tampa Bay Farm 2 School is the host of the Community Compost site opening Saturday, May 4, 2019 at Greco Middle School in Temple Terrace, Florida.
Food waste is rich in the nutrients the earth needs to create healthy living soils. And this same food waste when sent off to the landfill rots and turns into methane. Methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas, and a major contributor to our current climate crisis.”
If instead, we take our leftover kitchen scraps and create a soil site in our backyard with our children and neighbors, we can quite easily and joyfully create healthy living soil together in which to plant a blueberry bush, an almond tree, or grow lettuce and carrots. We need parents and teachers that care about the future of our planet’s health, to stand up to help lead these shifts in their local community for the next generation of humans.