The compost post

Hi everybody from Portland (Oregon)!!

This place is so beautiful and interesting, and has so much to offer, and to teach. I’m so glad that I came.

Portland is known to be a “rare city”, in the good way. People attitude is more relaxed and greener than in other parts of the USA, such as Texas or the Northeast. People don’t really care about the way they dress, or they look, and are more focused in other stuff such as being creative and not conventional, or how to live their life without causing troubles to Mother Earth. They try to eat healthy organic food, ride bicycles or use public transportation. Is the most sustainable city I’ve ever been to, and the city unofficial motto is “Keep Portland weird”.

The fascinating thing is their attitude and their way of thinking. They are really committed with the environment. They choose to do things in the right way, and almost everybody does it, without having to insist on them. They think in a way were you must ride a bicycle, and recycle, and there is no other option. Is not optional but mandatory. In very restaurant and shop, and in the university’s cafeteria, you have a lot of trash bins prepared for recycling, organic wastes, plastics, aluminum, etc

They are very creative also. They have this natural tendency of searching for new ways of reduce their carbon footprint.

This post is about compost. This is one of the things that had really got my attention here in the States. And is also some kind of symbol about our differences.

To be honest, I didn’t know very well what compost was before coming here. I knew that it existed, but it seemed like something distant, that was done in large production facilities in Germany and such places.

The official explanation, courtesy of Wikipedia, is that “compost is plant matter that has been decomposed and recycled as fertilizer and soil amendment”. Is a natural fertilizer, very important in organic farming. There are industrial plants that create compost even from plastics, but the fascinating thing about Portland is that everybody seems to make their own compost.

How do they do that? They have a big wooden box in their gardens (that is the only thing that you really need). They separate the organic wastes, and then mix them with ordinary soil in those boxes. Then you have to wait some months… and there you go! Your own homemade compost, from your organic home wastes, ready to feed the plants, flowers and vegetables from your garden.

Is absolutely amazing the amount of people in Portland who do this, pretty much everybody with a garden, and I think is a good indicator of Portland’s commitment with sustainability and a better world.

An amateur compost box, filled with organic wastes and soil

Comentarios desactivados en The compost post / 29 Mar 2011 por Javier Gomez de la Vega Jimenez
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