Freeze on food scrap intake due to cold temps
It's been so cold, we haven't been able to compost all the scraps that come in over the course of a week. Therefore the Composting Committee has decided to suspend taking in food waste for now. We'll give it a month and see where we stand. Not an easy call, and the compost team is still as committed as ever to the program and as willing to work, despite the weather. We should all feel grateful to this dedicated team.
But the reality is that we have no place to put any new scraps. The compost bins are full or close to it, and the compost in them is frozen. So (a) the compost isn't breaking down, and (b) it's much harder to turn. Weekends, when a lot of the work gets done, have also been bitter cold lately.
Composting work is not suspended, only the intake of food scraps. The Committee's goal for the next few weeks, whenever the weather makes it practical, is to process the scraps that came in before the freeze (or were left in bags for us to deal with) and to turn what's in the bins so as to speed up the curing process. When we get to where we can empty some bins, we can think about taking in more scraps. We may want to limit intake in some way, but that's something we can talk about at our next meeting on Saturday, Feb. 3.
Here is a list of other locations that are still accepting food scraps.
