landfill

Want to Compost in Chicago?

It’s hard to believe we have been using a composting service in the city for almost 5 years now. And I have a lot of content on it!

I have been using Healthy Soil Compost since 2016 at home and even had them compost at my wedding in 2018.

For those of you who are interested in starting a compost journey, I wanted to pull together a little guide on all the options for composting services in Chicago I am familiar with. Each provides you with a 5-gallon bucket for you to fill up that can be picked up at different intervals (besides Block Bins, see below).

Healthy Soil Compost

  • Services:
    • Commercial
    • Residential
    • Events & Seasonal (yard waste, pumpkins, Christmas trees)
  • Service Area:
    • Most Chicago neighborhoods from North Lakeview to Logan Square/Hermosa. West to Garfield Park, East to the lake, and South to Hyde Park/Woodlawn.
    • Beverly and Mt. Greenwood
  • Residential Pricing:
    • Monthly: $20 (When I signed up, it was $15 a month and I still get charged that rate!)
    • Bi-Monthly: $30
    • Weekly: $40
  • Extra Benefits:
    • Finished compost
  • Restaurants that Compost:
  • Farmers Market Compost Collection:

The Urban Canopy

I have had experience with Urban Canopy composting at some events for a non-profit board I used to serve on. They also have a CSA, which is awesome!

  • Services:
    • Residential
    • Commercial
    • Events
  • Service Area:
  • Residential Pricing:
    • Monthly: $15
    • Bi-Weekly: $25
    • Weekly: $35
  • Extra Benefits: 
    • Finished compost
    • $5 voucher to a local farmers market or a $5 voucher to one of the restaurants that also compost with Urban Canopy
  • Where Does it Go?
    • Their farm in Englewood and local compost-processing facility
  • Farmers Markets

WasteNot Compost

Chicago’s first and only zero-emission compost collection service.

  • Services
    • Residential
    • Multi-Unit
    • Commercial
  • Service Area
  • Residential Pricing
    • Weekly: $10 per service ($40)
    • Bi-Weekly: $12 per service ($24)

Collective Resource

  • Services
    • Events
  • Service Area
  • Residential Pricing
    • Weekly: $10.50 per week ($42)
    • Bi-weekly: $15.50 per week ($31)
    • Monthly: $20.50
  • Restaurants that Compost:
  • See a full list of organizations that compost with Collective Resource here

Block Bins

  • Services:
    • Neighborhood composting (set up a bit differently than the others, Block Bins allows you to compost with your neighbors using a large 35-gallon, locked bin placed in the alley)
  • Service Area:
  • Residential Pricing:
    • $10/month: 5 gallons of waste per month (~1-2 person household)
    • $15/month: 10-15 gallons per month (~3-4 person household)
    • $20/month: 15-20 gallons per month (~5-6 person household)
  • Where Does it Go?
    • An industrial composting facility in Harborview

So there you have it! Do you want to start composting?

A Tiny Baby’s Big Impact: Part 1

Our little bundle of joy is almost 3 months old now and we have been deep in the trenches of survival mode.

When in survival mode, sleep-deprived, still self-isolating, and all you want is your kiddo to fall asleep, caring about the waste created from this new human unfortunately gets kinda pushed to the side.

I hate it, but I have to accept it because I currently don’t have the energy not to.

Birth and Recovery

I gave birth in a hospital setting, meaning my kiddo’s arrival was wasteful from the get-go and I have no regrets about that.

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As for recovery, I had to use a lot of single-use items such as pads for post-partum bleeding and adult diapers. Speaking of diapers…

Diapers

Obviously, our biggest landfill contributor here is diapers. We are not cloth diapering and using regular old disposables, SHOCKER! I did some research on this before the baby came and there were a lot of factors involved that lead me to go with disposables for the time being:

  1. We don’t have a laundry room. While we do have in-unit laundry, we don’t have a good space to keep a bunch of diapers until I do a load of laundry.
  2. While there are diaper pick up services in the city, they are quite expensive.
  3. Cloth diapers use a large amount of water and electricity in the cleaning process, almost negating the benefit of staying out of the landfill. Learn more.

For about two months, we actually didn’t use any wipes because of a diaper rash issue and instead used little washcloths. It did end up with me having to do a load of laundry a day though, which was not ideal.

Clothing and Toys

As our babe is getting bigger, she is growing out of her clothes quickly! She mostly has been dressed in generously gifted clothes and some hand-me-downs, but soon she will need more as she moves out of the smaller sizes.

I have wanted to focus her wardrobe on secondhand options, but with COVID going on, I haven’t felt safe to go browse secondhand stores like Once Upon a Child. Facebook Marketplace is an option and most people are doing contact-less pickup. I have been browsing for a few items and keeping my eye out for them. There are so many bouncers and swings available. People want them out of their house!

There are some secondhand stores here in Chicago that I cannot wait to frequent when it is OK again like Velveteen Rabbit and the Second Child. And there is also a rental option that I am intrigued by.

Breastfeeding

While breastfeeding may seem like the perfect zero-waste way to feed, it is not so cut and dry zero waste. Yes, in a perfect world, you don’t need bottles, but there are a lot of things you still need even if you are feeding straight from the tap.

For instance, breastfeeding kinda hurts in the beginning, so I bought some soothing gel pads that can go in the freezer or the microwave. You’ll also need nipple cream, nursing pads (I have washable ones, but there are disposable ones), nursing bras, nursing tank tops, nursing shirts.

Sure you can go around this and use some natural methods, or cut up a bra or wear your old shirts and just have your stomach exposed, but right now, for me, the easiest method is best.

Now if you’re a mom who is eventually going back to work, or would like someone else to feed the baby for once, you are going to have to get a breast pump and its not hygienic to share these, so secondhand is not recommended. Pumps have a bunch of parts that need to be replaced and then this is where bottles and bottle parts come in. So we do have bottles, just not as many as if we were exclusively bottle feeding.

Any milk that doesn’t go straight to the baby gets frozen for later and in a single-use plastic bag, which breaks my heart. You can freeze in sterilized glass containers, but we do not have the freezer space for that.

That’s it for now!

 

 

I Paid Money To Properly Dispose of My Mattress

That old saggy, squeaky mattress.

Everyone has one or will encounter one eventually.

Ours came from a friend in college. My husband used it for a while post-graduation, then it was our bed when we moved in together, and then it was finally relegated to the guest room when we moved two summers ago.

It has to be at least 10 years old and we tried to cover up the body divets we created with a mattress topper, but this baby is done.

We also don’t have any space for a queen-sized bed anymore because an actual baby is about to take over the guest room.

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Bye-bye mattress! 

As we purge the items in the guest room to make room for its new inhabitant, I am trying to be very cognizant of where everything is ending up. I could have definitely posted the mattress, box spring, topper, and metal frame on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for an extremely low price or even for free. I also could have put it in the alley and hope someone picked it up before the garbagemen did. It is important to note that most charities do not accept used mattress donations.

All in all, I figured both those options will eventually end with our mattress in a landfill. Sure, handing our old mattress off to someone else will extend its life for a little longer, but what are the chances the person who takes it is going to properly dispose of it when they are done with it?

Probably zero.

So we decided to delay the inevitable and recycle our mattress.

The most annoying part of being a responsible person is that I have to pay for this to occur, but keeping our sad mattress out of the landfill is important to me, so here we are.

The first thing I did was get a handful of quotes from mattress recycling and removal services:

I ended up going with JunkRelief for obvious reasons. It was wonderful for movers to come in and just take all of it away in under 10 minutes. There was no way I was going to be helping anyone get a box spring down a set of winding stairs while pregnant. No way.

All in all, while I am out $145, I don’t feel too bad about it. I am happy it is gone and I am happy it is properly taken care of it.

Why Use Towels That Go In The Trash When You Can Use Towels That Can Go In The Washer?

How many rolls of paper towels do you use a year?

We probably only buy 3-4 rolls of paper towels and reserve them for particularly messy situations. I usually forget they are even under the sink.

Otherwise, I have been using a legitimate, real towel for cleanups.

To get to this point, I have stocked our kitchen with lots of actual towels that get washed in the washer instead of tossed in the trash can.

In our small kitchen closet, we have one drawer devoted to “rags” or clean up towels and we keep one hanging underneath the sink. These are basically just old towels, be they old bath hand towels or old dish towels. Certain towels are used specifically for the bathroom and ones for the kitchen.

The second drawer holds cloth napkins and dishcloths. The third has hand and dish towels.

towel laundry.jpg

Having plenty of towels on hand keeps us from having to reach for the paper version, which we keep around for emergency back up.

After the towels are used, I let them dry on the washer door and toss them in the hamper.

A huge pro of using real towels in the kitchen is that it doesn’t necessarily mean more laundry. At the end of the week, usually on Friday or Saturday morning, I collect all the towels from around the house, wash them on hot, and replace them with clean ones.

That’s it.

The bath towels and sheets needed to be washed anyway, so it’s no more work for me, and no additional load of laundry.

We save money and landfill space. Win-win!

 

A Place for Personal Care Products

Unlike some people in the zero waste world, I have not rid my life of all store-bought personal care products. I do still like to use toothpaste…

So does my husband, so anyway here we are.

A while back I heard that clean beauty store, Credo has partnered with TerraCycle to take back personal care and beauty items for recycling.

I have been buying makeup from Credo for a while, long before they opened a physical store here in Chicago. While their products are free of a bunch of nasty chemicals, they don’t do so well on the packaging front.

So when I learned you could bring in your empties (and earn rewards points will doing so!) I started to hoard our floss containers under the bathroom sink. Not going to lie, I have also dug stuff out of the bathroom trash!

credo dropoff1

The bag slowly accumulated deodorant, toothpaste, floss, old makeup, hair gel containers, a lotion bottle and much more.

credo dropoff2

Over the weekend I took my haul into Credo on Damen and asked what they do and do not accept. Turns out basically anything except nail polish, perfume bottles, and hair spray.

So I did have to take my hair spray back home with me and I am still trying to figure out what to do with it. Did you know aerosol cans can explode if crushed when they are not completely empty?! Mine must not be empty because it still makes noise when I press the nozzle.

All in all, I am happy to have a little more space under the bathroom sink and for my old toothpaste tubes to be properly disposed of.

What Will Happen to Chicago’s Worm Farm?

For the past three or so years, almost every banana peel, eggshell or orange rind that came out of our household has made its way to one urban worm breeding farm to become compost via our composting service Healthy Soil Compost.

compost bin

The remnants of tonight’s dinner end up in our bucket.

That worm farm is Nature’s Little Recyclers. They take my food waste and turn it into worm castings to be added back to the soil as a rich growing medium, they create local jobs, and save quite literally tons of food waste from landfills.

I owe them a lot.

Unfortunately, as with anyone trying to save the world, a few barriers are standing in their way.

Right now that barrier is the City of Chicago, who is shutting down Nature’s Little Recyclers last location due to lack of a permit and cease-and-desist orders. The laws in this city are not made for small business composters.

So Nature’s Little Recyclers started a petition to tell the Chicago City Council and the mayor to make it easy to compost in the city. Since the petition started 2 weeks ago, it has received over 4,400 signatures.

So if you compost in the city or support updating our laws to accommodate urban composting please sign the petition here.

Learn more about the situation with recent news coverage:

ICYMI: Nothing Really Decomposes in a Landfill

Have you been greenwashed into thinking that a compostable bowl is a better choice because once you toss it, it will decompose in a landfill?

Or have you patted yourself on the back for buying those biodegradable/compostable trash bags?

Or have you shrugged it off that it’s fine to throw a banana peel into the garbage because its organic material and will break down?

I hate to break it to you, but that is

not really how landfills work.

In graduate school, our class had the opportunity to tour a nearby landfill and recycling center and let me tell you, it was very depressing.

I will never forget seeing all the things the people of southern Indiana tossed into their garbage cans, being pushed and packed by bulldozers.

And the smell! Phew! Unbelievable!

Anyway, that stuff Hoosiers tossed that day about 6 years ago is still probably sitting around, just as the day it was tightly packed into the Earth.

I am not going to get into all the undesirable aspects of landfills, such as methane production and groundwater leaching, but the best non-super jargony explanation I could find came from this article on livescience.com:

“Landfills are not designed to break down waste, only to store it, according to the National Solid Wastes Management Association. But garbage in a landfill does decompose, albeit slowly and in a sealed, oxygen-free environment. Because of the lack of oxygen, bacteria in the waste produce methane gas, which is highly flammable and dangerous if allowed to collect underground. It is also a potent greenhouse gas and contributes to global warming.”

-Molika Ashford, “What Happens Inside a Landfill“

Organic materials need oxygen to biodegrade and landfills lack oxygen when they are tightly packed and sealed. In this same graduate class, we discussed instances of landfill “archeologists” who have found hot dogs and guacamole still intact and years old newspapers completely legible. See more here, here, and here.

It all goes back to the notion that this is no “away.”

Throwing something away, be it a piece of plastic from Amazon packaging, your jeans with a hole in them, a banana peel, a piece of junk mail, an extra metal thing from your IKEA furniture assembly, to that piece of IKEA furniture itself, they will all live on in the depths of landfills scattered across the country. 

And those landfills are getting full.

For instance, Chicago’s garbage is trucked 100 miles outside of the city to 2 landfills in Illinois and 2 landfills in Indiana. Watch this video from WTTW for a comprehensive look as to what happens to Chicago’s garbage once it is put out in the alley. According to the Illinois EPA, at the state’s current rate of garbage collection, Illinois will run out of space for garbage in the next 20 years.

So let’s keep stuff out of the landfill that doesn’t belong. 

Recycle that plastic Amazon packaging in the proper place, or better yet, ask Amazon and other companies to reduce their packaging. You can email Amazon customer service and request that orders for your account come with less packaging. The environmental impacts of Amazon could be a whole blog post in itself.

Fix your jeans with a hole in them or find textile recycling in your area.

Compost that banana.

Recycle that junk mail and call the company to have your address removed.

Don’t buy cheap particle board furniture from IKEA, instead, quality pieces are abundantly available secondhand.

So next time you go to the garbage can just take a second to think before you toss.

 

 

 

Oh Hey There 2019

And just like that, it is 2019.

I am kind of pretending that time has not moved so fast and have not made any resolutions for the new year.

Honestly, I do not need another to-do list.

Last year, I hoped to accomplish the following resolutions.

2018 goals

Here is how I did based on the following scale:

Neah= didn’t even happen

Meh= kind of did it

Yay= accomplished!

1.) Buy in bulk: neah

This just didn’t happen. Will work on this for 2019.

2.) Reduce clothing purchases: yay!

I did make a real conscious effort to reduce my clothing purchases. For instance, I went to a clothing swap, borrowed white dresses for wedding-related events, and only bought a pair of pants and socks for my honeymoon.

3.) Be conscious of what goes in the trash: yay!

I am overcome with legitimate sadness whenever I see things being thrown out that shouldn’t be. It has even rubbed off on K, which is amazing. To bring my lifestyle into our wedding, we had composting and used less wasteful wedding vendors. We collected 227 pounds of food waste in 2018 and I finally worked up the courage to approach the subject of having a compost pick up service in our office. Also when we moved over the summer, I made sure that boxes, bubble wrap, and plastic went to the right places.

4.) Bike to work: meh

So I did bike to work once. I was a little terrified, especially because after I got to work, I found out a cyclist had died the day prior after gotten hit by a truck. Needless to say, I didn’t do it again and now its a bit cold…

5.) CSA Round 2: meh

While we did get another CSA share for the summer, I cannot say that we did a better job of trying to get through all of our produce before it went bad. I did go through a phase of freezing a lot of the veggies, so that was a plus!

6. Remember to say no to straws: meh

Sometimes I remember, but most of the time I don’t. Our biggest win in this category was asking the bartenders at our wedding to not provide straws unless our guests asked for one.

Overall, I am pretty content with how we did in 2018.

2019 will be some more of the same.

What are your plans for 2019?

Compost 2018

2018 has been a good year for us and bringing our food scraps back to the soil in the form of compost. Last year, in 2017, we collected over 215 pounds.

This year, we collected 227 pounds! And that was just from our home 5-gallon bucket!

Not only did we continue using Healthy Soil Compost for our monthly pick up service, but we also used them to compost at our wedding in June.

Our wedding and our 145 guests kept 139 pounds of organic material out of the landfill, which produced 10 pounds of finished compost and 100 pounds of greenhouse gas carbon emissions.

Also, just recently, I finally asked my place of employment why we had compostable plates/cups/bowls, but nowhere to compost to them. They are currently reaching out to compost pick up services around the city.

work compost

So that’s it for 2018!

Since we have started collecting in July of 2016, we have kept over 504 pounds of organic materials from the fate of the landfill. Which is really amazing when you think about it.

Ending the year on a high note!

I Finally Asked

I have been at my current job for almost a year and a half and work in a large office building in downtown Chicago.

Since then, I have always wondered why my office had compostable plates, bowls, and cups, but nowhere to compost them.

I never used those things while at work. I have my own cup and plate that I reuse, but there are PLENTY of people that use those compostable materials and I don’t doubt that they think its fine because they are compostable.

But they aren’t.

Because they are being tossed into the trash can.

Which goes to the landfill.

Where nothing decomposes.

I had originally tried to work up the courage to shake up the wasteful office culture like 11 months ago and unfortunately never followed through.

Now many months later, I finally worked up the courage to ask the facilities department why they provided these materials to their employees, but not the proper way to dispose of them. I also offered to provide any assistance in picking a composting service. After reviewing my email a million times, I took a deep breath and clicked send.

Later that day, I ran into our facilities manager in the hallway and he excitedly told me how glad he was that I had emailed him. Apparently, the original plan was for the office to get the compostable materials and then set up composting, but it fell to the wayside. There wasn’t someone to champion it! Hey, hey, that’s me! I told him I have used two different composting services in Chicago and he urged me to send over their details and contact information. I expertly pulled together the resources and sent them over.

So the ball is rolling! And I am proud of myself for finally doing it.

I plan to follow up soon to see if the contact ever occurred. I will keep you updated!