COLUMBIA, S.C. — A local urban garden center is launching a new program to help people compost.
Inside Gardener’s Outpost, you can find plants, flowers, and garden supplies. Now, you can also find help with composting.
"We don’t have a solution in Columbia for our food scraps to not go into the landfill," Gardener's Outpost co-owner Carol Isherwood explains.
It’s why she's is helping launch the Waste Warrior Community Compost Program.
"From the moment that we announced it, we have had such amazing feedback about, ‘We’ve been looking for something like this,' 'I’m an apartment dweller,' 'I have nowhere to put my compost,' 'I like in a condo,' 'I don’t want a compost in my backyard,' 'I don’t have the space.' We’re in downtown. A lot of us don’t have large yards," Isherwood shares.
The program aims to keep food out of the landfill, which Isherwood says is important for the environment because when food scraps sit there, they emit harmful methane gases.
"It’s important because when you’re putting your scraps into the trash and they’re heading off with all the other trash to the landfill, when they get there they actually emit more gases," Isherwood details. "It takes them longer to break down and they don’t break down as readily as when you compost them and then they put off actually more methane gases than the other trash that you’re sending into the landfill."
Instead, she’s hoping people will bring their scraps to Gardener's Outpost.
"When you bring a bucket, you’re making about that much compost," Isherwood pinches her fingers together, indicating how many food scraps are needed to turn into a small amount of compost.
The outpost is providing that bucket along with compostable liners, information on what to compost and a punch card to give people a discount after 10 drop offs.
"It’s really a community-based outcome. Your personal gain is that you get to get 20% off an item, you get to divert from the landfill, but then it’s more of a community way at looking at a program," Isherwood says.
The community is a key part of the initiative since it takes a large collection of scraps to make compost, Isherwood says. Gardeners can then use this compost in their own gardens.
"I think it goes right along with that neighborhood feel," Isherwood tells me. "The downtown community is very tightknit."
Gardener's Outpost is working with ReSoil Compost on this initiative. If you participate in the program, you can drop off your food scraps at the Franklin Street location as often as you’d like. Then, the garden center will collect it and pass it off to ReSoil to get turned into compost.
"It’s a program that has cost associated with it. That’s the point blank of it. You get materials, we’ve got labor that we’re putting into it, we’ve got pickup fees, I mean there’s a lot of fees," Isherwood explains about the $28 monthly program cost. "It just doesn’t happen. It is a natural process but it takes a lot…to make a good compost product, there's screening involved, there’s movement of the product which involves people and materials. So there’s a lot that goes into it and there’s a specific skillset. You need to know how to create a product that you can use in your vegetable garden."