When my children were at primary school I persuaded the headmaster to let me set up a composting system for all the food waste which he rather reluctantly finally allowed me to do. At the time I was involved with a project collecting food waste from about fifty households and had evolved a safe way of composting this material using old chest freezers and mixing the material with woodchips. So we set up two specially adapted chest freezers on blocks and the kitchen staff started putting their food waste into the freezers. The first freezer was designated as a ‘first stage hot composter’ and the second one a slower maturation composter, the second one had worms in it. I had impressed upon the staff the need to contact me if they were not happy with any aspect of the set up and I tried to monitor it myself as best as I could.
At first all went pretty much
according to plan. Actually, when I very first started I was surprised to see
that the material, instead of composting, just seemed to grow ‘fur’. This puzzled me until I realised that
the school did not do any fresh preparation on site – all the food was brought
to the school ready prepared as part of the ‘chill chain’ system. There were
very few bacteria in the freezers and so composting was not happening. A quick dollop of compost from my
actively composting home system soon got the process moving.
Unfortunately towards the end of the summer term, when I had stopped checking up on the process so often, materials started to be put directly into the wormery system which wasn’t designed as a ‘hot composting’ container and as a result odours started to be very noticeable and the kitchen staff became very upset. Instead of contacting me they just wanted to stop the whole thing and write it off as a failure. This experience in the late 90’s certainly impressed on me a number of ways not to do things! And the world has changed since then, people are so much more aware of the urgent need to stop being so wasteful and to lessen our carbon footprint as much as possible. Also, now there are compost containers now on the market, which are capable of composting food waste without having to have rather unsightly chest freezers in the school grounds.
