It’s week ten, the last week of the 2023 Backyard Compost Challenge. Pretty soon we will have our final food scraps data and we will know exactly how much food we managed to keep from rotting in the landfill and adding methane to our atmosphere. For this week’s blog we wanted to let you know just how big of an impact you have already made.
After just nine weeks we have kept 3,632.6 pounds of food out of the landfill. That’s a big number! That’s the equivalent of 1.8 tons. By the time we have data for all ten weeks we will likely have tipped the scales over 2 tons. Two tons is equivalent to the weight of . . .
- 146 bullion bars of gold, or
- 2 American Percheron Draft Horses, or
- 40 yards of track in the New York City subway system, or
- 2 wild Asian water buffalo!
Keeping two tons of food waste out of the Rockbridge County landfill also means keeping one ton of greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to keep our planet hospitable for all living creatures.
The two previous Challenges of similar scope also yielded about 2 tons of diverted waste each. Thanks to enthusiastic earth stewards and citizen scientists such as yourselves we can now start noticing notice trends and patterns in the data. This data helps Boxerwood draw conclusions about the positive changes that motivated communities can make. It will enable us to make informed recommendations to those working in sustainability and waste management, based on the evidence we have gathered about the community’s ability to reduce food waste in the landfill.
If the 2023 Backyard Compost Challenge cohort managed to divert 4,000 pounds of food from the landfill in ten weeks, how much could be diverted over the course of a year? By our calculations more than 10 tons! Multiply that amount by years and years of new composting habits (and future compost Challenge cohorts) and you can see the rippling and ever-increasing impact.
We’ll be back next week with the final blog post. Finish strong, earth stewards!
