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Got my neighborhood to do a bulk compost pickup, 40 bins in one day
Last Saturday I set up a community compost drop-off in my cul-de-sac after the city cut our green waste program for the season. I posted on the Nextdoor app Tuesday, got maybe 8 people interested, but by Friday it blew up to 37 households. We filled the back of my buddy's 16-foot trailer with old veggie scraps, coffee grounds, and lawn clippings, then hauled it to the county facility in Modesto. The best part was watching my neighbor Karen actually sort her citrus peels out because she read they slow down decomposition. I expected maybe 15 bins to show up, but we hit 40 and had to make a second run. Anyone else ever organize a block-wide compost haul, and how do you keep the momentum going for a monthly pickup?
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mitchell.thomas1d ago
Honestly, watching Karen sort those citrus peels is the best part of this whole thing, right? It reminds me of how people actually step up when they realize their small choices matter. I see it at my own spot where we started a little free seed swap, three people showed up at first, now we got like twenty regulars who bring their own envelopes. The trick is to make it stupid easy and give folks a tiny job, like Karen's citrus thing, that makes them feel part of the machine. Once they see their scraps turning into something useful, they're hooked, they'll start policing their neighbors about banana peels. Just keep the date on the same Sunday every month and post one photo of the pile before and after, that visual does more than any flyer.
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park.aaron1d ago
Figure out what happens when the pile stops shrinking. That's my question. You got twenty regulars now, but what about the person who shows up once with a grocery bag of moldy stuff and never comes back? Did they get any feedback, any sign their stuff actually helped? Because I've seen these things die when the core group gets comfortable and new people feel like they're just dropping off garbage for the same three folks to deal with. Posting a before and after photo is good, but only if it actually names what those scraps became. Otherwise it's just a picture of trash.
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