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Community Composting Workshops

A short workshop giving groups of individuals the basic information required to get the best from home composting equipment and in addition giving a little background information to individuals about benefits of home recycling and waste management.

Session Length 30-40 minutes

Content

Why Compost? Bin location, what to put in the bin, what not to put in the bin, the composting process, hot heap - cold heap, how long will it take, and finally the end product.

General Information

“As part of the Middlesbrough Environment City Home Composting Project we delivered three 30 minute workshops to over 150 residents at one Saturday morning session alone ”

A compost workshop is typically presented as part of a local authority compost bin promotion. The workshops have been undertaken in a wide range of local venues and have been particularly successful in situations where a specific community had to be targeted. A good facilitator should be able to present up to 5 workshops in one day with the size of the audience only limited by the size of the venue.

The workshops can be adapted to suit any prospective audience and available venue.

 

Rotter Training

Home compost training has been undertaken by a number of local authorities and has been traditionally facilitated by a compost trainer.

Compost advocacy or ‘Rotter Training’ was born out of a simple need for more trainers. What if there were a load of individuals who could undertake compost training within their own communities? Rather than train 100 householders why not train 10 compost trainers who could then train 1000 householders.

A number of schemes have been set up to support this concept and there are now a growing band of compost advocates or as they are more commonly known ‘Rotters’

Session length: 2 – 4 hours

Content

Why Compost? Bin location; what to put in the bin; what not to put in the bin; the composting process; hot heap - cold heap; how long will it take?; the end product.

The session will then focus on presentation techniques and take a quick look at appropriate communication techniques and safe working practices.

General Information

The sessions are intended to train new Rotters and give them the skills required to advise local residents on how to get the best from their home composting equipment. Once established it should be possible for one of the established Rotters to take over this initial training role.

 

School Composting Workshop

A Primary school in Darlington was a location for an interesting evolution of community compost training within schools. Children attending the school were encouraged to collect compostable material at home for the week running up to the compost workshop. Having bought the material to school the children placed their green waste and compostables into the school compost bin and took part in a short compost workshop.

The power of the sessions lay with each child’s realisation that their little pile of vegetable peelings when added to their classmates suddenly amounted to quite a hefty pile of scraps. Eight classes later and you have a very strong message about little issues becoming big problems.

Session Length: ½ - 1 day

Possible Workshop Content

An optional school assembly, followed by a number of twenty-minute sessions introducing individual classes to home composting. The sessions can be built around pre existing school compost bins or undertaken in individual classrooms.

General Information

A regular programme of schools workshops has been undertaken with schools in North Yorkshire and Teesside with the result that well over 1600 school children have now undertaken the training. In future it would be excellent to develop a junior Rotters programme, imagine having hundreds and hundreds of little Rotters everywhere! A final observation regarding school based composting is the necessity to provide caddies in classrooms and staff rooms. When the caddy is full it very quickly becomes somebody’s job to empty it, but if the caddy isn’t there the tea bags and banana skins very quickly find there way back into the rubbish bin.