First, we learn, then we teach
Or a boost of inspiration to share your love for our planet by making more eco-friendly choices and composting.
The fall season holds such promise. As it starts to cool down outside, we’re energized. Maybe your kids are going back to school, maybe you are. It’s said that we are all teachers and all students. What are you inspired to learn more about this fall?
In Judaism, the holiday of Rosh Hashanah takes place in the fall and is the beginning of the Jewish New Year. In some ways, it feels more like the New Year than the official one in frozen January, when we’re hibernating. If this is your faith, maybe this year you could be the teacher.
You don’t have to be the host of a holiday gathering to propose that you collectively lower the carbon footprint of your event. The host might be too busy hosting to add another new effort. A good guest, who already has experience composting at home, could just handle it. Is this the year that you fully embrace the concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—in a very real, physical way? If you need an extra bucket to lend this helping hand, just contact us at customerservice@collectiveresourcecompost.coop and we'll bring one to you.
Leaves into compost
If you are able, this is the season to get out there and rake your own leaves. If you have a backyard compost bin, save those fallen leaves and keep them next to your compost bin, so that you can give your food scraps a nice blanket of carbon-rich browns every time you add your nitrogen-rich greens.
We love all things green—especially the lovely mint green color of compostable bags—but we’re learning that lining our compost bins with newspaper or paper bags is better for the planet. But what to do with those extra green bags? Use them as produce bags until they fall apart, then toss them in your compost bucket. It’s a small change, but that is the easiest kind.
Change is inevitable to keep growing. To that end, we have changed our name to Collective Resource Compost. We’re hoping that adding compost to our name will be like adding compost to your soil—give us superpowers! At the very least, it should help people to understand what our service is, more easily.
Do you know the story of our original name? Back in 2008, our founder Erlene Howard, who was working as a bookkeeper, envisioned a communal working space, in which different independent businesses would share resources like fax machines, printers, and conference rooms. That idea did not come to fruition, but when the light bulb went off in her head to create a composting service that made it easy, she already had a name that worked for it.
Our compost pickup service area map
Another positive change: we’ve expanded our compost pickup service area to incorporate more of the northwest suburbs. We’d appreciate if you could let the people you know who live or work in that area that our service is now available to them. Here is our new, improved, and current compost pick up service area map.
We hope that you have the opportunity to learn or teach something meaningful this fall.
