Posts Tagged ‘compost’

At Bishop O’Dowd High School in the Oakland hills, gardener Ned Lange is making small-batch vermicompost from the school’s food scraps. He takes scraps like leafy greens, peels, and stems that won’t make it into the cooked lunch, and blends them into a smoothie that he feeds into an 8-by-4-foot corrugated steel bin that is…

It’s chock full of collard greens. And figs. And chickens. On Saturday, visitors meandered through the bushy rows of produce in the community garden at the corner of 33rd and West Streets, in the expansive lot belonging to Hoover Elementary School. Between the vegetation, visitors could see pops of color from mosaics and decorative wooden…

Oakland’s highly controversial composting collection rates have now dropped thanks to a city council vote Tuesday night to amend the $1 billion waste collection contract signed earlier this summer with Waste Management and California Waste Solutions.

The rates rose this summer after the city council granted the national company Waste Management (WM) the city’s sole contract for the collection of organic waste and trash.

Right now, somewhere on your block, a pumpkin is rotting. If you’re lucky, that somewhere is in a Waste Management-sanctioned green bin, where it can safely decay with other compostable trash, and not on your front porch. It is mid-November, after all. This time of year, pumpkins become a major player in the composting program…

At Lincoln Elementary School and nearly 50 other Oakland schools, the custodians, nutrition staff and faculty have banded together to use lunchtime as an opportunity to teach students how to compost.

Five days a week, a long chrome truck pulls up to EBMUD’s wastewater treatment plant. It lifts its hydraulic-powered trailer bed and proceeds to dump 40,000 pounds of what looks like thick sewage into a giant underground mixer. Strangely, it smells … good. Not what you’d typically imagine for a sewage plant.