Here's My Great Green Idea!

I have been collecting food scraps from two of the six kitchens on the campus of Montclair State University and composting them with an aerobic in-vessel system. To date, I have diverted nearly 20,000 pounds of food scraps from landfills and turned them into high-quality compost. This translates into appproximately 10 tons of CO2 emission reductions thereby helping address the global concern about climate change. The compost is used on campus for its landscaping projects. As a result less top soil, fertilizer, and mulch is used. The success of my project has attracted the interest of other colleges, universities, and schools from around the country. If every college or university in America were to compost just 5 tons of food scraps annually, the resultant reduction in CO2 emissions would be equivalent to taking nearly 12,000 cars of the road. If every grocery store, restaurant, food court, and resort were to compost food scraps instead of transporting them to landfills, the contribution to a positive response to potential climate change would be enormous. Sustainable development would become a more realistic opportunity as well since this type of environmentally responsible behavior is so consistent with living in harmony with the life support systems of Earth.