Community Compost Solutions

Who are we?

I'm a long time community activist and sustainability champion with a passion for creating compost. I recently registered Community Compost Solutions CIC as a  social enterprise company with the mission of diverting food waste and organic matter from landfills and creating nutrient rich soil. With the help of some very talented and experienced board members we plan to increase our communal composting facilities and organise many more educational activities in schools and at community events to raise composting awareness. 

Along with other volunteers I've just completed an 18 month pilot program successfully engaging twenty or more community organisations and business in the creation of 22 compost facilities while diverting 19 tons of waste away from landfills. I've also taught workshops at the Rye Community Garden, Rye Scouts and at St. Mary's School. 

Compost produced from our sites is used for local growing projects and to enhance community green spaces. This is a circular economy where local organic matter gets converted into compost and then used to grow more food and make our gardens bloom. Educating people to compost and making it practical and feasible to accomplish can only benefit our long-term sustainable future.

Impact

Small businesses, community organisations, schools and residents will be offered training and assistance in the establishment of a composting system at their location. If this is not possible they will be offered a collection service to take their organic matter to another composting location.

The whole world will benefit from reduced carbon emissions as each participant practises methods to productively utilise their organic waste while avoiding the costs involved in having it transported away. 

Our local community will also benefit from the availability of live soil enrichment encouraging and enabling the growth of more local food. 

There are many businesses with unused organic materials we can easily recruit to participate in this program. This will be an alternative to letting materials (manure/leaves/grass cuttings) simply decompose on the land or having materials (food waste/coffee grinds/newspaper and cardboard be transported to land fill or distant recycling centres.

We are constantly experimenting and researching best practises for small scale composting  and will be sharing this with our community through education classes, hands on workshops and social media.

We'll be recruiting more volunteers and partnering with more organisations to participate in collection and delivery services and also to manage specific composting sites. The intention is to create a devolved organisational structure where local participants are empowered to manage their organic materials more ecologically.

Why are we crowdfunding?

We want to educate and inspire people throughout East Sussex to support more composting. We can save over 600kg of CO2e emissions per tonne by doing this vs landfill. The byproduct is a super rich biology-packed soil amendment  Healthy soil creates healthy plants which then creates healthy humans.

How we’ll spend the money raised

During the 18 month pilot project, thanks to the support of my wife and children, I've been using our family car to transport tonnes of compost inputs including coffee grinds, horse manure, duck bedding, cardboard, paper, grass cuttings and leaves. This is obviously unsustainable and limits our growth and my family deserve to have their car back. Community Compost Solutions needs a van and we propose to purchase an electric van like the one in the picture if we raise sufficient funds.

£10,000 will get us a four year old version while £16,000 will get us a new version.