These blogposts always relate to some area of sustainability, not just composting. I debated whether or not I should write about my dog dying. Honestly, it happened so recently that it’s all I can think about and I think writing about it could be therapeutic. Here is another thing that has been surprisingly therapeutic: mindfully rehoming all of her food, treats and supplements. I have to back up and tell you this story. We used to have a lovely cleaning person named Chrystyna. She had a dog named Fluffy. Actually, she had a series of dogs named Fluffy, which […]
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We’re delighted to announce that we have reached another diversion milestone: 8000 tons! It’s a little hard to imagine that amount of food scraps, isn’t it? In the first six months that Erlene was hauling buckets of food scraps in her Toyota Camry, she averaged about 77 pounds a week. This week our crew hauled 50,000 pounds! Because tons are kind of hard to visualize, we used this nifty calculator to try to help you understand how very much that is. It’s about 3/10ths as heavy as the Statue of Liberty, and equivalent in weight to 70 blue whales, […]
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Events have been the theme of the late summer and fall for us here at Collective Resource Compost. In August, we helped to manage the waste streams for the Village of Skokie at their annual Backlot Bash. In September, we helped out at Emerge, the event formerly known as Winnetka Music Fest and at the Taste of Evanston, a lovely fundraiser put on by Evanston Lighthouse Rotary Club. Each of these events had food vendors and I made this joke that we should create an award for the greenest food vendor, like the awards they have at art fairs. […]
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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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Collective Resource did okay through the first wave of this pandemic. The government loans helped. Our residential customer list actually grew as more people were working and schooling at home. But now, we could use some help. With our focus on education and advocacy, we are falling a little short on marketing and sales and there are few opportunities for us to be out in public talking about our service. Have you heard about the Rule of Seven in marketing? That customers need to hear your message seven times before they’ll buy? If that is really true, it’s remarkable […]
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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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