Providence Hospital Kitchen Composting
On August 15, 2022, Yarducopia picked up the first load of pre-consumer food waste from Providence Hospital - one 96 gallon pink cart just like the ones uses for SWS' curbside pickup. The cart contained a 150 pound 'salad', full of off cuts of lettuce, broccoli, kale, tomato, zucchini, peppers, and carrot, along with some bits of pineapple, melon, and berries.
There is about 1/2 cart's worth (75 pounds) of veggie and fruit waste coming out of the hospital's kitchen each day, and our goal is divert this from the landfill towards compost piles, garden beds, and as worm and chicken feed around Anchorage. In our first week of pickups we moved about 450 pounds. It adds up quickly, with our total food haul in the first 6 months exceeding 10,000 pounds. That makes a lot of compost!
There's a lot of room for more participants in this project, so if you'd like to help pickup food scraps, would like some of the scraps, or want to talk details - reach out. During the summer, a good time to meet is during out weekly composting workshops from 1:30 - 3:30 PM on Wednesdays at the Midtown Community Garden (2930 Cheechako Street).
[Above] Darcy Moxon and Nick taking the first full pink cart to be weighed at the hospital scale. We use that weight to help estimate how much food waste we're moving each week.
[Above] The 'Salad' from Providence Hospital being dumped into a new compost pile in the making at the Midtown Garden Depot.
[Above] We worked hard to keep the food waste diversion program going through the winter.
[Above] In the summer, food scraps are mixed with leaves (and sometimes manure) to hot compost at the Midtown Garden Depot and backyards in Anchorage
[Above] A lot of the winter food scraps were fed to chickens. The compost pile may be frozen, but these birds are still hungry. This spring, the chickens even started turning the food scraps into eggs [Below]
