I’m reading a book called Divorce Your Car. I didn’t seek it out or find it in a free library. I found it on my boyfriend’s bookshelf. The idea of driving less appeals to both of us. I skipped over the first half of the book that describes how we became so dependent on automobiles. I was more interested in reading stories about how people had downsized their driving. There are separate chapters on walking, biking and transit riding. All of it is very interesting to me. The book has me thinking about the 15-minute city, a residential urban […]
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We started this blog back in December of 2018 with some helpful tips on how to wrap your holiday gifts in a more ecologically minded way. At first it was just content added to the reminder emails. After a few months, we realized that a lot of people didn’t open and read their reminder emails. For many, just seeing the subject line is reminder enough. Then we decided that perhaps the information should live on our website, so we began linking the reminder email to our website. After months of sending them this way, we still had many customers […]
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What comes to mind when you think of water? Do you think about being at the beach and gazing at the water? Or do you think about being in the water, either swimming in it or bathing or showering in it? Maybe you think of water in terms of precipitation. Does rain really affect you because you depend upon it? Do you grow food, either on a large or small scale? I probably gave it away by the image I chose to go with this blogpost, but I think about drinking water. I recently used the program Noom to […]
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Education has always been a part of our business. This was surprising to us at first, but it became clear that if we were going to persuade anyone to use our service, we needed to educate them on why our planet needs us to compost. These days we do a lot of educating through our monthly blog on the topics of composting, zero waste and other areas of sustainability. After the George Floyd uprisings, many book groups popped up focused on reading and discussing books on racism/anti-racism and reading books by authors of color, but we were not aware […]
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April has become Earth Month and the week that includes Earth Day, April 22nd, has become Earth Week. We are heading into this week as I sit down to write. Very soon thereafter, May 2nd–8th, 2021, is a week that does not get quite as much attention around the world: International Compost Awareness Week (ICAW). This year, an organization in which Collective Resource Compost is deeply involved, Illinois Food Scrap Coalition (IFSC), is creating an online Lunch & Learn Series to celebrate it.
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Every spring, Collective Resource offers free finished compost to the customers who helped make it! We’re able to do this with the help of Healthy Soil Compost transporting the finished compost to The Talking Farm, who graciously hosts our gift-back event at their Howard Street Farm. The finished compost has been processed by Organix Recycling, a state-certified, US Composting Council-certified processor, located on the far south side of Chicago. This compost, packed with microorganisms and fungi, is ready for any type of crop, your victory garden or soil rehabilitation project! Mix it with 30–50% of another soil blend or […]
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I’m reading a midlife memoir written by musician Ben Folds called A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons. I love his explanation of the title that is about an actual dream he had when he was little, wherein he was catching lightning bugs in a jar and showing them to others. In the dream, he was the only one who could see them to catch them. He felt that the dream was a pretty accurate depiction of his life as an artist. Showing others what he finds luminous. That’s how I feel about this […]
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I thought I was going to write about the circular economy but it’s going to have to wait until next month. There is one particular part of a circular economy that I do want to write about: extended producer responsibility. It’s when the producer is responsible for disposing of the waste created by their product instead of the end-user being responsible. Our composting customer Village Farmstand has begun taking back their packaging, reusing what can be reused, composting what is compostable, and recycling. Do you know of any other businesses that do this? You might also recognize their name […]
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I’m so jazzed about all of the things we have going on and I don’t think it’s the coffee talking. Restaurant Raffle 2021 Inspired by the Village of Winnetka’s Take Out Challenge we created our own Restaurant Raffle to support the restaurants and other food-related businesses that have made sustainability a priority by continuing to use our composting service through the COVID crisis. We hope that you will peruse the list, give them your business and enter the raffle! Environmental Justice Discussion Group We’ve officially launched our Environmental Justice Discussion Group. We introduced the idea in our blogpost Addressing […]
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Education has always been a part of our business. This was surprising to us at first, but it became clear that if we were going to persuade anyone to use our service, we needed to educate them on why our planet needs us to compost. These days we do a lot of educating through our monthly blog on the topics of composting, zero waste and other areas of sustainability. After the George Floyd uprisings, many book groups popped up focused on reading and discussing books on racism/anti-racism and reading books by authors of color, but we were not aware […]
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