Ecocentricity Blog: Failing Upward

This is hard for me. I won’t make excuses mind you, but it’s still hard. No one likes to own up like this. I mean………I tried. I really did. And now, I guess it’s just time to finally say this. Okay, here it goes……

[Deep breath, and another, head up, looking straight into the camera]

I failed.

I admit it, and I’m sorry. I have officially given up on composting food waste in the tumbler in my backyard. I couldn’t make it anything other than a soupy mess of partially decomposed kitchen scraps, yard litter, hopes, and dreams. My ratios were constantly off between nitrogen and carbon, and I needed to add a lot more dry material that could absorb some of the excess moisture in the composter. I neglected to give it a good spin every couple of days as well. Please forgive me! And please don’t take my environmentalist card away from me!

In all seriousness, I wish I’d done a better job with at-home composting, but I’m not beating myself up over it. One reason why is explained by my favorite cliché – I’m not letting perfect be the enemy of good. We don’t all have to stop flying on airplanes, become vegan, grow food in a home garden, never use plastic straws, trade in a car for a bike, plant a tree once a month, attend climate marches, live in a tiny home, slap solar panels on our roof, AND charitably support nonprofits to be good stewards of the Earth. I mean, if you do all of that, then you’re my hero. That can’t and shouldn’t be the universal environmentalist standard though.

Another reason I’m not beating myself up is that this failure paved the way for Chantel and I to find another solution for our organic household waste. It’s not as cost-effective as our backyard tumbler, but it is more effective-effective. We decided to sign up for CompostNow.

We’re about a month in now, and we are loving the service. We pay a monthly subscription and they give us a bin for organic waste. We fill it up with compostables and they pick them up, refreshing the bin, once a week. They compost everything in a central facility and track how much compost each person’s contributions have created. We can then request a delivery of our share of the compost or donate the compost to a community garden. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If you live in the Atlanta area, I urge you to check them out. If you don’t, their website points you to similar services that might be in your area.

Lastly, the reason I say this is more effective-effective compared to home composting is because their centralized composter is capable of composting much more than our backyard tumbler. Previously, we had to separate out meat products and “compostable” single-use products and throw them away. Now, we can toss those right in our bin. As a result, we have further reduced our household waste to landfill, while simultaneously creating more compost than before.

So yes, I failed. But in this case, I failed upward. So I guess I’m sorry, but not sorry?