General
New partnership promotes composting
By Maura Bobbitt
The Cibolo Center for Conservation’s new partnership with the Composting Queens hopes to reduce food waste and return your food to the soil. The Composting Queens is a family-run business based in San Antonio that makes it easy for people to compost.
How is food waste harmful to our environment?
When food ends up in the landfill, it doesn’t just decompose. It releases methane into the atmosphere, which is a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term. At least 25% of today’s warming is driven by methane from human actions.
How does this relate to the Cibolo’s mission?
This is mission-aligned because we are promoting the conservation of natural resources through education and stewardship. Composting food scraps is a way to reduce trash and return some of what we take back to the soil. The Composting Queens service is an easy way for the community to live more in harmony with the earth and to help reduce our carbon footprint as a community.
The Cibolo Nature Center now serves as a drop-off location for food scrap buckets and helps you help the planet. You can collect their special compost buckets and materials for a monthly fee, fill them up with food scraps, and then return it to one of their drop-off locations.
By making it so easy for people to compost, we’re helping to reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. Even better, Compost Queens is turning it into nutrient-dense soil that will help grow healthy organic food locally. The Nature Center is the only drop-off location for Compost Queens in Boerne, so we made it possible to help them expand their reach and offer this service to our community.
A composting workshop will be held on Saturday, August 7th, where you can meet the Composting Queens at Herff Farm. This session will teach people about what composting is and how to do it. A demonstration will be done on how to use food scraps in gardening. We’ll do a demo garden bed prep using Compost Queens food scraps to show people how easy it is to turn your food scraps into healthy soil! You can register for this workshop at www.cibolo.org.
Additionally, Boerne residents living in the Esperanza or Cordillera Developments (Cibolo’s housing development partners) will receive a unique promotion that gives them $10 off and a free two-week trial of the service as a way of encouraging others to use this service. Make sure you follow Compost Queens on social media for more tips.